Growing a Transnational Smart Community of Social Innovators for the Inclusive Development of Central Europe
The sustainability of Central Europe (CE) is challenged by the structural transformations of its civic communities as well as by the social implications of the changes affecting their context. Social innovation (SI) initiatives able to implement products, services and models to govern such transformations while creating new social relationships are then more and more necessary. In fact, they are still fragile and unevenly diffused in the area as the ecosystem called to boost them is still in its infancy.
The project will then help Central Europe to improve its SI capacities by tackling the problem the other way round: it will teach financiers, entrepreneurs, policy makers and citizens how to actually play the game as Social (i)nnovation Makers generating the ecosystem as a bottom-up result of their inter-actions.
To this end, the project will establish the transnational 2-phase educational programme &#39;Social(i)Makers Launchpad&#39; in Austria, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. The programme will train them in collaboratively designing and launching effective and sustainable SI initiatives. Within its Social Innovation Design Academy, the trainees will learn how to leverage impact investing, social business, SI policy and active citizenship, to exploit useful technology and impact assessment and to engage the right stakeholders and shareholders, by exploiting a pocket Social Innovation Design Toolbox. Subsequently, they will put the acquired skills into practice through the Social Innovation Skyrocket Lab which will coordinate them in the organization of local and transnational pilot SI initiatives for Central Europe through the co-working On-line Social Innovation Skyrocket Platform.
In doing so, the project will trigger the emergence of a transnational Social(i)Makers Community in CE which will be further developed by a long-term SI capacity-building strategy defined ad hoc.