Making Time for Social Innovation: How to Interweave Clock Time and Event Time in Open Social Innovation to Nurture Idea Generation and Social Impact.

The article focuses on how OpenIDEO, an open social innovation platform created by the design consultancy IDEO, intentionally interwove two temporal perspectives—clock time (objective, linear, measurable) and event time (subjective, emergent, open-ended)—to foster idea generation and support the implementation of social innovations. Drawing on a 40-month ethnographic study, the research identifies three temporal practices employed by OpenIDEO: mapping time (structuring challenges into visible phases with deadlines), squeezing time (adding an extra refinement phase within the fixed challenge duration to enable deeper idea development), and stretching time (introducing an open-ended realization phase after the official challenge to encourage ongoing implementation and impact). These practices illustrate how organizations can deliberately manipulate time to engage diverse stakeholders, sustain participation, and address the long-term, uncertain nature of social impact beyond the compressed timelines typical of hackathons and innovation challenges.