Experimenting a digital collaborative platform for supporting social innovation in multiple settings ⋆ Thomas Vilarinho 1 , Ilias O. Pappas 3 , Simone Mora 3 , In` es Dinant 2 , Jacqueline Floch 1 , Manuel Oliveira 1 , and Letizia Jaccheri 3 1 SINTEF, Trondheim, Norway, {thomas.vilarinho | jacqueline.floch | manuel.oliveira}@sintef.no 2 Farapi, San Sebastian, Spain ines@farapi.com 3 Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway { ilpappas | simone.mora | letizia.jaccheri}@ntnu.no Abstract. Social Innovation is gaining popularity as an approach to address societal challenges. Governments, charities, NGOS and organi- zations are taking up the role of facilitating citizens participation into social innovation initiatives. Digital collaborative platforms have a great potential for enabling and supporting the social innovation process as it facilitates knowledge sharing, cooperative work and networking. In this work, we experimented using a digital social innovation platform and as- sociated methodology for supporting citizens to do social innovation in three different pilots settings: an university course, a contest/hackathon and an ”in the wild” scenario. We reflect on the participants usage and experience with the platform for understanding its added value and un- covering important considerations for designing and implementing this type of platform. The analysis of the experiments highlights 1) the value of facilitating collaboration with beneficiaries and across different back- grounds, 2) the importance of actively engaging participants on process and 3) the needs of adapting the platform for handling complexities risen from the social innovation process on real settings. Keywords: social innovation, collaborative platforms, crowdsourcing 1 Introduction Social innovation refers to the development and implementation of innovations (new products, services and/or models) creating value primarily to society, mak- ing social impact and solving a societal challenge. It does so in an inclusive way, having the society, represented by citizens and beneficiaries, playing the role of ⋆ This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Innova- tions for Community Services. I4CS 2018. Communications in Computer and In- formation Science, vol 863. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93408-211