Technological tools for social innovation: the digital voluntary ecosystem

This study aims to better understand how social technologies contribute to the societal transformation by boosting the development of new social innovation practices. To this end, it adopts a qualitative in-depth case study and specifically focuses on the analysis of RomAltruista: an Intalian volunteer organization that makes volunteering opportunities more flexible and easier. This paper contributes to scientific and practice debates on social innovation with implications for scholars, managers and policy makers. It provides some evidences of how new technologies foster the development of scalable and recursive social innovation practices to inspire people to take action in their communities. Furthermore, it extends the scope and the concept of the digital volunteering to the broad perspective of service ecosystem and frames flexible volunteering as a new social innovation practice that is specifically designed to address common societal challenges.