Design for Social Enterprises: How Design Thinking Can Support Social Innovation within Social Enterprises

AbstractThis paper investigates the contribution of design thinking to sustaining social innovation within the field of social enterprise.The first part frames the knowledge that forms the background of the paper, by interconnecting the concepts of social innovation, social enterprise, and design thinking and by introducing the field of ‘design for social enterprises’ as a combination of different design methods and tools.Next, an action research project is described: the programme entitled ‘Service Design: change to innovate’, in which the authors worked with two social enterprises to co-design a new generation of collaborative services.Building upon this experimentation, the paper concludes by reflecting on the possible contribution of the designer in triggering an organizational and cultural change within social enterprises, and consequently becoming a sort of ‘Cultural operator’, thus opening up room for further research.