Our mission

To enhance the possibilities of social innovative ideas to become sustainable solutions for our societal challenges and thus build a more democratic, sustainable and inclusive society where all humans can thrive

Our mission is to bring back human creativity and potential in the accommodation of society, ownership to communities and civilians. A creativity and potential that is not bound to organizational or disciplinary boundaries, but cuts across them.

We think we can do that by supporting those that make a difference because of their solutions of societies big questions we are facing today. Like our prolonged age and need of intensive care, energy consumption, our bursting cities, the lack of sufficient jobs, the inequality between people, regions, nations, the lack of proper primary goods like healthy food, fresh water or a house for shelter.

This brings new relations in how we organized our society:  Social innovation is commonly defined as new ideas and solutions (products, services and models) that simultaneously meet social needs and create new social relationships or collaborations (Grisolia and Ferragina, 2015). These innovations are considered both good for society and capable of enacting greater societal involvement. (Murray, Caulier-Griece and Mulgan, 2010).

So in our assumption, Social Innovation always includes a transformative element, something a lot of us tend to forget. The phrase ‘new social relationships’ in the definition doesn’t mean you meet some new neighbours and that’s it, but a structural new way of organizing something or other involvement and roles of relevant parties in the way things are realized (compared to the way things went so far). So, working on social innovation means not only supporting the innovators, but in the mean time to build new local partnerships, to create a shift in mentality and new pathways together.

Our vision

All participants work jointly, by:

• identifying crucial factors for SI accelerators, with the insights of the Social Innovation Factory as a starting point, to be structural and dynamically developed by a transnational working group;

• creating a number of these accelerators laboring in different cultural and societal systems on the ground throughout Europe, developing, applying and experiencing with these factors/insights;

• combinations with a scientific (longitudinal and multi-disciplinary) research, done by various universities or European programs like TRANSIT, in order to do local, national and transnational research;

• enable this knowledge -exchange between practitioners, policymakers and scientists by using the same CMS-standards in every SI accelerator that is part of the SIAC network;

• by being receptive and actively searching for new ventures and partners for co-creation on problem solving;

• by actively spreading found knowledge and insights inside and outside the SIAC network and thus work on an culture of social innovations and with that contribute to a social innovation friendly eco-system.

For more information about the participants, please click here.

For more information on how to join us, please click here.