- the growing attention to challenge-led and mission-driven approaches to solve big societal challenges (Mazzucato approach and the Agenda 2030 goals);
- the idea of an anticipatory innovation governance system (OECD): meaning structures and mechanisms are put in place that allow and promote anticipatory innovation to occur alongside other types of innovation. Anticipatory innovation means acting upon knowledge about the future by creating something new that has the potential to impact public value. It helps to explore complex and uncertain policy challenges and takes a proactive stance towards the future;
- the recognition of a the important role that Social Economy (SE) entities play in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG);
- the definition of place-based and community-led policy-mix mechanisms, such as the CLLD, co-design and co-creation of innovation and other approaches;
- the opportunity to work on impact-driven innovation rather than on tech-driven innovation only, and therefore the need to develop data-driven impact measurement and monitoring systems.
The idea at the basis of these approaches is to enable territories to be testbeds, or living labs, for innovation and enact citizens to be innovators themselves. In an open social innovation ecosystem model, these considerations must be contemplated in designing a policy-mix of measures to support prototyping, testing of innovative solutions and scaling-up of the most promising ones. This means, for example, mixing industrial and social policies at local and regional level, or using Smart Specialization Strategies that define transversal and socially oriented areas of intervention instead of sectoral ones.
Innovation agencies are in a strategic position to set up and implement open social innovation models. The need to reframe local social challenges through an open social innovation lense is more and more interesting for BICs and incubators aimed at achieving social impact within their business support strategies. Open social innovation models are seen as potential new ways to test and develop new products and services collaborating with:
- well established social enterprises and social cooperatives (potential users and testers),
- local governments (which can define needs and rules to reframe local policies), and
- big associations or organizations (capable of finding new solutions and opportunities to address the needs of their donors).
The objective of the project IMPACT AGENCIES was to improve and enhance the innovation support strategies of regional agencies whose activities and services are addressed to SMEs achieving social impact. The specific objective were:
- to design and implement collaborative services based on open social innovation models aimed at improving the social impact of SMEs working with local BICs and incubators.
- to design a methodology of Open Social Innovation related to the services that Innovation Agencies provide to those companies who are committed to having a strong social impact in their territory.
Results, key aspects and methodology are described in the attached Design Option Paper (DOP) whose focus is to design, implement and scale-up local collaborative open social innovation services based on specific challenges. The DOP analyses different scenarios in terms of background, soft and hard infrastructures, sector and stage of development in which the service could be implemented. It also defines implementation options, guidelines and alternatives experienced by the involved agencies in order to facilitate its transfer and mainstreaming in the different EU contexts.
The DOP contains the outline of the four regional contexts involved, with a view to strengthening social innovation, taking inspiration from their different approaches. The DOP can be useful to suggest to Regional governments new approaches that can be included in their innovation support programmes and services. It can be even used as a practical handbook by other regional development agencies to implement social innovation support strategies. Click here to read more about the project.
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