Europe is confronted with many complex and interrelated socio-economic challenges such as: youth unemployment, migration, ageing population, povertu an gender inequalities, among others. Welfare services struggle to cope with these challenges and growing segments of the population experience increasing difficulty in accessing support.
Consequently, new solutions leading to improved capabilities, new forms of collaboration, and a better use of social resources are required. In this context, emerging social innovations in Europe and around the world offer a promising avenue to sustainability address the problems at hand. Gaining a better understanding of the components, objectives and principles of social innovation, as well as underlying proccesses and contexts of social innovation was at the core of the EU funded FP7 project SIMPACT “Boosting the Impact of Social Innovation across Europe through Economic Underpinnings”.
Linking theorical research with the collection, analysis and modelling of empirical evidence and continuous stakeholder dialogue Simpact project, building on three years (2013-2016) of theorical research, stakeholder engagement and innovative thinking, a rich set of tools and mechanisms has developed tools and mechanisms for social innovators, intermediaries and policy-makers.
In the SIMPACT project website, you can find three different toolboxes:
Social Innovation Business Toolbox. This toolbox was created to help support the main players of the social innovation (SI) space. If you are actively creating solutions to today’s greatest societal challenges or supporting these solutions through intermediary services, then this toolbox is for you. The toolbox provides tools that all actors can use to create, develop, measure and assess SIs.
Social Innovation Evaluation Toolbox. This is a toolbox for the Ex-Ante Impact Assessment of social innovations, based upon SIMPACT’s framework. It proposes a series of convenient and useful tools to apply in an ex-ante assessment of social innovation.
Social Innovation Policy Toolbox. SIMPACT is strongly focused on the enhancement of evidence-based policy in relation to social innovation. This work package provides the focal point through which evidence of what works and what inhibits social innovation in practice is analysed in terms of the policy enablers and constraints. It will articulate the strategic choices available to policy makers and deliver generalisable recommendations designed to maximise economic and social outcomes of S
Consortium:
• Westphalian University, Institute for Work & Technology, DE (co-ordinator)
• Technical University Dortmund, Centre for Social Research, DE
• Euskampus Fundaziona, Sinnergiak Social Innovation Centre, ES
• University of Economics and Management Prague, Centre for Innovation Studies, CZ
• TNO – Netherlands Organisation of Applied Scientific Research, NL
• University Maastricht, Maastricht Economic & Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology, NL
• Politecnico di Milano, Department of Design, IT
• Association Neoma Business School, FR
• University of Bath, UK
• Centre for European Policy Studies, BE
• Nordregio, Nordic Centre for Spatial Development, SE