Digital Social Money Implementation by Grassroots Organizations : Combining Bottom-Up and Top-Down Strategies for Social Innovations

The purpose of this paper is to explain the dynamics entailed in the implementation of digital social money by Instituto Palmas - a social technological endeavor created by a grassroots organization located in a poor neighborhood in the Northeast of Brazil. We conjecture that the capacity to promote social change in this particular project, and thus producing conditions to generate social innovation, is related to the combination between bottom-up and top-down strategies taken. With this study we expect to contribute for a better understanding of the processes involved in the emergence, institutionalization and replication of innovative social organizations focused on the diffusion of financial services to fight poverty