Athens welcomed us with a funny weather, but come Day 1 of the meeting everything was back to the beautiful normal of a Southern capital.
The temptation to go over memories of a walk up to the Acropolys afterhours or the lovely dinner that followed is strong, but the working part was excellent too!
The AUEB team welcomed us in their brand new, very comfortable premises, where the Region Attika (also a partner organization) was also waiting for us.
Presentations by prof. Eleni Apospori and Christos Tsanos from AUEB focused on the steps to complete the good practice collection with further desk research, stakeholder consultation and interviews with local enterprises. They also illustrated a sound methodology to assess gaps in the collection, by assessing it’s content against some indicators within the MoRRI set.
A lively discussion followed: it was great to see how MARIE partner can get passionate about indicators!
Besides the intense methodological part, we started working on exchange of good practices. But we did it differently: we has a poster session, with MARIE partners walking around the room, stopping by for further information, moving on and coming back as questions popped up in our minds. This was also very useful to improve the GP description with details corresponding to the question everyone received on the cases they presented.
Last but not least, we had local stakeholder coming over: Apostolos Papalexiou, Founder and Executive Director of Solidarity Mission, a social entrepreneurship academy; Dimitrios Kokkinakis, Co-Founder of Athens Impact Hub, a social entrepreneurship community; Andreas Stefanidis, Director of Aephoria.net, a social enterprise incubator/accelerator.
Their inspiring experience triggered a discussion on how MARIE can be relevant to them. As for us, we learned once again how responsible innovation has different ways to unfold within the society: it’s our job to provide some framework to enhance cooperation!
