Chapter 07 of the book "Social Innovation Projects for Climate Neutral Cities" edited by Sabrina Bresciani (see full book here https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-87726-1_1 )

Social Innovation Design Pathways and Methods Toward Net Zero

Tamami Komatsu & Morgan Ricard

Link to book chapter: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-87726-1_7#Abs1

Design pathways allow cities to successfully implement social innovation (SI) within a system of stakeholders committed to achieving climate neutrality. This chapter describes tools and methods that cities and scholars can utilize to develop and enhance social innovation projects. Such methods are based on the Social Innovation Pathway and Toolkit developed in the NetZeroCities project and derived from a design-based learning framework. The approach prioritises human-centred principles of co-design and co-production, and reduces risk by building buy-in, flexibility, non-linearity, and innovation. Two user pathways are outlined: tailoring the SI process for bottom-up and top-down support for city Transition Teams, public administration, and local stakeholder working on a city’s climate agenda. The lifecycle of the SI pathway is divided into five progressive phases to analyse the context for understanding of the system, reframe problems while co-designing a portfolio of tools and methods that meet the cities’ challenge(s), envision alternatives as they take action with iterative ideation, prototype and experiment by testing prototypes to gain insight on their impact before full implementation, and evaluate and scale to integrate the innovation within the larger ecosystem

Citation: Komatsu, T., Ricard, M. (2025). Social Innovation Design Pathways and Methods Toward Net Zero. In: Bresciani, S. (eds) Social Innovation Projects for Climate Neutral Cities. SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-87726-1_7