Barriers along the Digital Social Innovation Process: A Structured Literature Review

Digital social innovation (DSI) is an emerging phenomenon drawing knowledge from digital innovation (DI) and social innovation (SI), offering opportunities to contribute to societal change by leveraging the potential of digital technologies. Although DSI has evoked increasing interest, research and practice are far from realising its full potential as many barriers arise along the DSI process. Thus, holistic insights into DSI process and its barriers are essential. Therefore, we identify barriers along the DSI process through a structured literature review considering DI, SI, and DSI literature. As a result, we identified 28 barriers and classified them into the DSI barrier framework. The DSI barrier framework builds on the DI framework of Kohli and Melville (2019) and extends it by including the societal environment. We thus shed light on the DSI process and provide holistic insights into the barriers along the DSI process.