Building a Social Innovation Ecosystem including R&D actors
On the 6th and 7th of February 2020, an interesting event was held in Navarre, Spain as part of the Action Plan of the Knowledge Exchange Platform, created to facilitate collaboration between the European Committee of the Regions (CoR) and the European Commission’s Directorate General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD).
Organised by the regional Government of Navarre, the purpose of the workshop was to promote the sharing of expertise, outcomes, and achievements regarding the development of “a regional comprehensive ecosystem for social innovation”. In this case, the focus was not only on the actors or the challenges within a social innovation ecosystem, but also on the relationship between them and the way they face these obstacles.
This workshop was focused on how a social innovation ecosystem is built, its configuration, actors, determinant factors, problems, and solutions to overcome them. Having gathered more than 60 experts, various activities were carried out with the purpose of making it as dynamic as possible. The sessions were mainly explanatory and participative in nature, trying to delve deeply into all the stages and elements of a social innovation ecosystem, such as: mapping, stakeholders, key factors, barriers, solutions, and values; as well as the mappings analysis.
The organisation of this event shows the level of compromise the European Commission and the Committee of the Regions have adopted towards Social Economy. The purpose of these actions, as well as the strategy to follow, are well explained in the aforementioned Action Plan: “Social innovation being a cross-sector competency, synergies and collaborations must be explored between DG RTD and the CoR services in order to stimulate R&I based social innovation and bring together stakeholders from thematic local – regional – national – European social innovation ecosystems for better social outcomes.”
If you would like to know more about the Action Plan, please click here.
If you are interested in finding out more about Social Innovation Ecosystems, click here.
