Fifteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

One of the most important challenges we face in academic entities is to foster collaborative projects that attempt to solve community problems. In the past five years, we have developed a methodology that promotes multidisciplinary collaboration while maintaining the focus on the problem at hand. We have created a Social Technology Readiness Level methodology that allows scholars from different areas of knowledge to communicate effectively and understand the maturity process that a social innovation project needs to develop in order to achieve sustainable results in a community. We have defined social innovation as the collaborative knowledge management needed to develop projects, programs of public policies that aim to better the level and quality of life of individuals and communities, taking into consideration that an effective project will promote, as Amartya Sen proposes, freedom of choice. We present several practical cases of the application of this methodology in solar energy projects that have been designed and put in practice in the past three years.