On April 20th, the SI-DRIVE team organised an International Policy Round Table (IRT) in Brussels. This Round Table followed less than 10 days after the shocking bombings in Brussels. The context for the discussion was therefore quite difficult for ‘just’ another meeting. But the SI-DRIVE team was very happy to have 12 participants at the meeting, with half of them coming from the European Commission and half of them coming from different parts of Europe. The IRT was very motivated to bring in their ideas, needing to wait for hours at the damaged airport of Zaventem. We are glad to have had the input of a nice mix of policy specialists and social innovation experts to help discuss with the SI-DRIVE team the results of the work.
Aim of the IRT
The IRT is an important step in assessing and evaluating the project results collected during the SI-DRIVE project and therefore in supporting these activities. The IRT leads to three kinds of results:
- A validation of our first round of policy and foresight workshop results. This means that the IRT looked at the results (in the form of central questions) and gives an expert judgement on these results.
- The IRT helped to identify cross-policy field and cross-country/continent issues and trends in these results.
- The IRT helped to identify which other kind of policy action is needed to create an ecosystem that allows social innovation, unlocking the potential of social innovation, empowering citizen engagement; or an evaluation where upscaling is possible and where Social Innovation is not useful.
Participants
From the European Commission, we had contributions from DG R&I (Theodoros Vavikis, Jesus Alquezar), DG Education and Culture (Maria Podlasek-Ziegler), DG GROW (Xavier le Mounier). The other participants were Chiara Davalli (EBN), Vincent de Coninck (iPropellor), Günther Szogs, Arjan Widlak (Kafka Brigade), Siward Zomer (Rescoop), Samantha Jones (Feantsa), Gwendolyn Carpenter (DTI) and Rafael de Andrés Medina (Eulac).
Five questions
To structure the discussion with the participants, the SI-DRIVE team presented five questions. These questions contained a summary of our results and our analysis of these results. The topics were presented: the aim of social innovation, the required policy approach for social innovation support, the impact of social innovation, other supporting structures for social innovation, and the importance of regional and international differences. The discussions were lively and to-the-point. The Policy Brief contains an overview of the main results of these discussions. But we can already point to the following main conclusion.
The message from the IRT
The IRT developed nuanced views on each of these questions and stressed the multidimensional and complicated nature of social innovation, and support for social innovation. Simple solutions are not possible. Social innovators are wary of top-down support measures, but they are at the same time quite dependent on financial and other institutional support. The separate discussion brought several suggestions to the forefront that need to be investigated in the 70 in-depth case studies. Social innovations are an unclear and sometimes ambiguous phenomenon, and this should stand out in the case studies. The interplay between the activities of social innovators, the use of technology, the role of financial and other support should be central in the case studies. Also, the global differences should appear when looking at the cases: the cases should show how social innovators act differently in different contexts. The broad support systems are needed to help SI become sustainable and up-scaled, requiring an ecosystem approach from policy. Maintaining successful SI needs considerable support (infra)structures and ecosystems, the right knowledge, capacity building and appropriate and specific funding possibilities.
The recommendations coming out of the International Round Table, together with all the other results of the project, will eventually be fed into the next seven policy field workshops and IRT in 2017. We look forward to the final discussions next year!
Author: Prof. Dr. Steven Dhondt, Senior Research Scientist at TNO, The Netherlands Organisation of Applied Research