A ‘Tripadvisor’ for disability? Social enterprise and ‘digital disruption’ in Australia

ABSTRACT

We explore how social enterprises can use platform technologies to plug ‘informational gaps’ in the provision of disability services. Such gaps are made more apparent by policies promoting self-directed care as a means of giving service users more choice and control. We use a case study of a start-up social enterprise seeking to provide a TripAdvisor style service to examine the potential for social innovation to ‘disrupt’ current models of service. The case study suggests that any disruptive effects of such changes are not due to new digital technology per se, nor to novel platform business models, but rather rest in the manner in which the moral orders which justify current patterns of social disablement can be challenged by social innovation.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital social innovation
• disability
• digital disruption
• social innovation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ian McLoughlin is Professor of Management at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He is lead author of The Digitalisation of Healthcare (2017) and Digital Government at Work (2013), both published by Oxford University Press [email: [email protected]].

Yolande McNicoll is a Research Fellow in Accounting at the Monash Business School, working on the project Mutual Value Measurement [email: [email protected]].

Aviva Beecher Kelk is a social worker, social entrepreneur, and PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne [email: [email protected]].

James Cornford is Senior Lecturer at Norwich Business School, University of East Anglia, working with the ESRC Business and Local Government Data Research Centre [email: [email protected]].

Kelly Hutchinson is a PhD candidate at the Melbourne Social Equity Institute and Melbourne School of Government, The University of Melbourne, Australia [email: [email protected]].

Additional information

Funding

This article is based on research funded by the Australian and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG) and conducted under ethics clearance provided by ANZSOG ethics committee.