Table 2.

Examples of contemporary Rapid Social Innovation Breakthroughs (RSBs)

Categories of RSBs	Examples
Collaborative innovation spaces	Makerspaces, hackerspaces or innovation labs, communal workshops, where people can share ideas and tools
Gamification	The application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts to improve user engagement, organisational productivity, flow, learning, crowdsourcing, employee recruitment and evaluation, ease of use, usefulness of systems, physical exercise, traffic Violations, voter apathy and more; data generation combined with participation via gaming; citizen science; gaming for physical education and health
Access/commons-based economy	Sharing economy, access economy; new forms of organising access to good and services; online sharing e.g. TripAdvisor; non-profit tool libraries and freecycling; commons, e.g., resources shared by a restricted group of people following shared rules like for example a lake that is jointly managed by a community of villagers; commons-based peer production like Wikipedia, Linux and TripAdvisor; goods and services are traded based on access rather than ownership, e.g., ZipCar and Airbnb
Read/write culture: diversifying information gatekeepers	Through “social media,” people become “active audiences” with the ability to not only share but also generate, manipulate and transform digital content, e.g., vloggers
Reinventing education	A huge diversification of education providers, apps and of training partnerships; new knowledge providers; MOOCS; flexible learning, peer to peer platforms
Body 2.0 and the quantified self	The permanent monitoring of the human body and the almost medical monitoring of one’s bodily functions, via wearables, Smartphone Apps or separate sensors. This new social movement encourages users to better understand themselves by collecting data on every aspect of their daily life: from food consumption, air quality, blood oxygen levels, arousal, to bowel movements and so on. It has also become present in some companies monitoring their workers
Car-free city	Car-free cities greatly reduce petroleum dependency, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, automobile crashes, noise pollution and traffic congestion. The innovation is to transform highly car-dependent cities or construct new car-free cities from scratch; 15-min city
New journalist networks	Journalists work together on specific targets to reveal news and find evidence for big or small but global stories. They co-operate globally — with newspaper journalists or freelancers
Local food circles	A new way of conceiving of and organising our agricultural and food systems. It links the many people involved in food production together in interdependent, holistic ways; promoting the consumption of safe, regionally grown food that will encourage sustainable agriculture and help to maintain farmers, who will sustain rural areas; slow food, organic food, indoor (hydroponic) gardening, community gardening, permanent agriculture
Owning and sharing health data	There are movements to create spaces, in which the persons who are the subjects of the data know that their data are safe and can be used, e.g., for research, and in which individuals benefit directly from providing their data. This is a counter-initiative against companies exploiting personal health data generated in different situations, intentionally and unintentionally
Alternative currencies	Crypto-currencies (digital) and non-digital; cashless society
Basic income	Guaranteed minimum income (GMI) or “basic income” is a system of social welfare provision that guarantees all citizens or families to have an income sufficient to live on
Life catching	Means collecting, storing and displaying one’s entire life for private use, or for friends, family, even the entire world to peruse, e.g., scrapbooks. Millions of people are digitally indexing their thoughts, rants, pictures, video clips; most of them with new means online, disclosing the virtual caches of their daily lives, exciting or boring. The purpose of life caching is mainly keeping the memory

Sources: Authors on the basis of European Commission (Foresight) (Warnke et al., 2019)