Social innovation and employment in the digital age : the case of the connect employment shuttles in Spain

The digital revolution has shaped the modern world in unprecedented ways. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the value of digital technologies. As the health crisis’ effect rippled through economic, political, and social structures worldwide, it also accelerated the adoption of digital tools to pool expertise, ideas, and capacities for generating solutions to the pandemic’s short- and long-term implications. One of the areas where major challenges have arisen is employment. In the whole panorama of digital social innovation in Spain, we find an experience that can be described as outstanding and that links employment and digitalization. However, despite being highly successful, there is hardly any academic literature on this experience. The Connect Employment Shuttles will be the subject of specific in-depth analysis in this article. This is a socially innovative program that has been developed since 2020 in collaboration with the Santa María la Real Foundation. The Connect Employment Shuttles are an existing model specialization, the Employment Shuttles, but applied in the field of digitalization. In this article, we present the origin of the Employment Shuttles and the differences between them and other labor market integration initiatives, their constituent elements, and the social impact they exert. The research question of our study is whether this innovative mechanism combining employment and digitalization is valid and reliable. The answer is particularly relevant for private and public entities interested in implementing effective measures against unemployment, especially in vulnerable groups. The main contribution of this study is the systematized presentation of the experience of the Connect Employment Shuttles and its results so far, being the major limitation is the scarcity and dispersion of information sources.