Disruptive Social Innovation Lab for Society, Entreprises and Territories – DESTINS

DESTINS is a joint laboratory between the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société (MSHS) (Social and Human Sciences Center) of Poitiers and the social innovation cooperative agency Ellyx. DESTINS analyses social innovation approaches characterized by their capacity to create social transformation. It aims at generating a new set of tools, methods and supporting measures or policies to encourage strongly impacting social innovations, targeting a variety of organizations such as businesses, local and state authorities, or civil society.

DESTINS’ scientific program occurs in a context where the concept of social innovation has rapidly emerged. This concept was developed through national and territorial policies, along with a large number of initiatives carried out by businesses or the civil society. The DESTINS’ program aims at identifying and characterizing the different factors that may encourage the creation, structuration and development of disruptive approaches characterized by the contribution to common goods matters, and by their ability to change representations, social practices, laws, social norms, public policies, goods, services, tools and methods. This program will have at stake to identify in what extent social innovations are able to initiate major transformations with regards to environmental, social and economic matters.

This program favors an interdisciplinary approach that relies on Ellyx’s own resources, on the MSHS and its research teams specialized on:
- Economic sciences (CRIEF, Research center on economic and financial integration)
- Human geography (RURALITES, Research center on links and mutations of rural and urban territories)
- Management (CEREGE, Management research center)
- Legal sciences (CECOJI, research center on international legal cooperation)

This program will develop the following research topics:
- Research topic 1: Analysis of emergence and consolidation paths of disruptive social innovations and depiction of their specificities
- Research topic 2: Analysis of institutional and financial environments mecanisms of adaptation regarding disruptive social innovation. Analyses of new cooperation forms between socio economic stakeholders and research organizations focusing on societal issues.
- Research topic 3: Study on how to share values and intellectual property of social innovations.
- Research topic 4: Identification of the indicators to measure the impact of disruptive social innovations

DESTINS aims at developing knowledge, methods and tools that are to be transferred to socioeconomic stakeholders in order to encourage the emergence of a new generation of project, public policies and services able to address in a more impacting way social, economic and environmental issues. These results will lead to the development of trainings that strongly take these matters into account and that can be disseminated at the European and international scales. It will also result in the development of a new measure to incubate strongly impacting projects’, and of an expertise center on disruptive social innovation that aims at improving current experimentation frameworks for businesses and public authorities.