Evaluating the public value of social innovation

Services that were traditionally delivered by the public sector are now proving difficult for the state to afford due to economic and socio-political challenges faced by society. In this context, social innovation plays an important role as it encourages civil society, private, public and third sector organisations to work together to find alternative ways of delivering services. This paper evaluates the influence of social innovation in creating public value through services offered to the community at both local and national levels in the UK. Three diverse cases are used from the UK context and analysed through a public value lens to examine the role of community, private, public and third sector organisations in driving social innovation. The findings highlight how social innovation contributes to addressing civil society needs while simultaneously contributing to the political and economic agendas of a country and the exploitation of science for the benefit of communities

Phantom cascades: The effect of hidden nodes on information diffusion

Research on information diffusion generally assumes complete knowledge of the underlying network. However, in the presence of factors such as increasing privacy awareness, restrictions on application programming interfaces (APIs) and sampling strategies, this assumption rarely holds in the real world which in turn leads to an underestimation of the size of information cascades. In this work we study the effect of hidden network structure on information diffusion processes. We characterise information cascades through activation paths traversing visible and hidden parts of the network. We quantify diffusion estimation error while varying the amount of hidden structure in five empirical and synthetic network datasets and demonstrate the effect of topological properties on this error. Finally, we suggest practical recommendations for practitioners and propose a model to predict the cascade size with minimal information regarding the underlying network.Comment: Preprint submitted to Elsevier Computer Communication