Scottish Enterprise Social Enterprise activity

Our Scottish partner, Scottish Enterprise, shares with us the latest activities on the field of social enterprises

Innovation Workshops for Social Enterprises:

We have ran 2 of our 6 Social Enterprise Innovation workshops this year and both sessions were extremely well received. We are running these workshops with a number of third sector and regional partners to provide innovation and business support to social enterprises.

The workshops are being seen very much as partnership events between Scottish Enterprise and each regional representative to align national support with local engagement and networking.

Each workshop will have its own theme relevant to the social enterprises in that specific region. The first 2 focused on tourism and more specifically conference tourism.

Aims of the workshops:

Raise awareness of the opportunities to grow the offering in the destination and why this is needed.
Using a set of agreed tools, stimulate businesses to think innovatively about how this could be achieved.
Develop a pool of clearly defined ideas and engage a filtering process.
Encourage networking between the businesses.
Clearly lead into appropriate follow-on implementation support.

Scottish Enterprise will avail itself of the services of a Wider Innovation Specialist to engage with the businesses and schedule 121 surgeries post-workshop (but to be marketed in conjunction) in order to realise the desired outcomes of the workshops which will be:

The engagement of businesses in the creative thinking process.
Assisting businesses to articulate opportunities for product and service development.
The identification of potential collaborative local projects.
The identification of businesses with growth ideas and growth potential that could be supported 121.