Digital social innovation (DSI) offers underserved individuals diverse opportunities to develop bottom-up ICT-enhanced solutions to help address local societal issues, such as inequality, marginality, and social exclusion. With a focus on the Global South as an arena for innovation, this roundtable will discuss how multi-stakeholder communities — including businesses, governmental departments, and non-governmental organizations — can work together to foster sustainable and socially-embedded solutions. As essential prerequisites for digital social innovation, this roundtable will evaluate contingent factors that challenge access to ICT infrastructure and the capacity to develop skills for innovation in the Global South. Access to sufficient battery power or high-speed Internet, for example, remain challenges for innovation. Access to sufficient knowledge with actionable components that bring innovation to the market constitutes a challenge as well. The participants will present examples of how digital social innovation can help overcome and address these concerns in the Global South, identifying key areas for future intervention. In addition, this session will explore best practices surrounding local-language innovation, particularly on global and predominantly English-speaking platforms, to render the potential of digital social innovation more encompassing. Local-language apps, for instance, can provide great value to reducing inequalities while encouraging a decentralization of the Internet. The intervention of ‘First World’ companies, predominantly based in Silicon Valley, in developing countries for social innovation can act as corporate value signaling but can also result in co-opting such emerging markets as long-growth. Since public-private partnerships offer an expedited route towards digital social innovation among underprivileged individuals, it is imperative that issues of innovation copyright and profit-sharing are addressed to ensure that social innovation does not transition into exploitation. As such, this roundtable will explicitly examine the ethical and commercial issues surrounding private intervention in social innovation. The roundtable approach is suggested as a way to shift the focus to a Global South perspective in an attempt to broaden the conversation and include the perspectives and challenges of developing countries. We, therefore, propose a 90-minute, strongly moderated roundtable discussion focused on digital social innovation in the Global South.
