PMI-GUEST for social innovation Adapting the GUEST methodology for application on social innovation projects

Coordination, progress tracking, and communication are issues inherently linked with pursuing an objective collaboratively, and exponentially increase with the number of involved stakeholders. These challenges are shared between the well-studied and known field of economic value creation and the lesser considered, wide, and unexplored field of social innovation projects. This thesis explores the possibility of offering a universal methodology to ease the cooperation between stakeholders in any social innovation project. The primary aim is adapting the existing GUEST methodology, developed to foster innovation in startups and small-medium enterprises, to allow it to be universally available to be applied to any social innovation project. To achieve this, the application of GUEST to the project SINFONICA through the creation of SI-GUEST will be analysed. Then, the core characteristics of social innovation projects will be studied, and the benefits and possible mistakes in generalizing the methodology will be listed. Considering the concept of pluriversality and the paradigm of complexity, the newly developed methodology will not be a set of pre-determined tools but will transfer part of the power in the design process to the user. Instead, a set of tools commonly adopted by managers, designers, and communicators will be analysed and categorised based on several characteristics of social innovation projects: formal or informal contexts, number of members of the consortium, time span of the project. These tools will then be presented to the users divided by the step of the GUEST methodology (or of the design thinking process) to which they may be applied. The user will thus be given power in the design process by allowing the choice of the most appropriate tools for the project they are considering, building their own, customized, and adaptable Pluriversal, Modular and Innovative GUEST methodology, from now on named PMI-GUEST.