Social Entrepreneurship Network in the Baltic Sea Region
Some time ago EU funded project partners led by the NGO from the Republic of North Macedonia – Center for Intercultural Dialogue, amongst other project outputs have produced a training manual and curriculum on social entrepreneurship that is publicly available here.
The Institute of Entrepreneurship Development presents the handbook created for trainers regarding the training courses in Social Economy and Entrepreneurship.
The educational material was created in the framework of the European project ERASMUS+ entitled “Open Mind – gamified platform and open online course in Social Entrepreneurship for female learners and students from diverse fields of study”.
Open Mind project focus on the lack of entrepreneurship skills, especially seeing the differences in skills between genders, attempting to boost entrepreneurship and creativity through an innovative gamified social entrepreneurship course.
The training material which developed for social entrepreneurship, concerns a lot of individuals across Europe, trying to map the skills that are needed to start a business as well as it pursues to enhance employment in this sector.
This special educational material has created with the participation of all partners of the project, however, especially iED edited the graphic design of the handbook.
You can watch the entire educational material completely free of charge here
Established in 2005, Institute of Entrepreneurship Development (IED) is a fast-growing Center of Excellence in European Entrepreneurship. As a state-of-the-art international organization, iED promotes change for the better, through entrepreneurial and innovative actions and supports every entrepreneurial venture across Europe.
With the use of our EU partner network and our experience in diverse EU funded research programmes focused on entrepreneurship, we have created a Knowledge Hub tailor-made to cover the need of the entrepreneurial world, in the European area.
Here in IED, we recognize the importance of Entrepreneurship and its crucial role as a stakeholder for the development and cohesion of societies. Our mission is a simple yet important one. We:
We offer guidance, training, and coaching and through IED Academy we bring the knowledge to those that need it. From EU project management and project proposal writing all the way to running a business effectively, Academy is the perfect tool to help us achieve our goal of connecting research with innovation in business.
We take things a step further with our platform EUcalls. We work to make your introduction and journey to EU projects easy.
More information is available here: https://ied.eu/
This publication has been prepared within INDIGISE project. The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of the project coordinator and may not always reflect the views of the European Commission or the National Agency.
Imagine you had a ‘eureka’ moment – an idea for a new way of doing something that could, in some way, make the world a better place.
How would you go about turning that idea into reality? One place you could go, is UpLink, a platform which lets anyone from anywhere in the world submit their ideas on how to solve global issues.
Announced during the 2019 Sustainable Development Impact Summit and launched at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2020, UpLink is a digital crowd-engagement platform that connects entrepreneurs and champions of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Its goal is to link-up the best SDG innovators to a growing network of experts and decision-makers who can implement the change needed for the next decade.
As a global platform, UpLink responds to the demand for a more inclusive approach to SDG action by targeting the creativity and expertise of grassroots innovators who can meaningfully contribute to the delivery of the SDGs. Through its challenges and collaborative action groups, UpLink aspires to nurture a world whereanyone with impact-oriented ideas and solutions is empowered to address the world’s most pressing challenges.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRUsgiXUMJg[/embedyt]
UpLink is the first World Economic Forum-managed online network that anyone can sign up and contribute to. Through its challenges, UpLink seeks to connect entrepreneurs with game-changing SDG solutions to experts and investors looking to identify and scale-up the most innovative solutions. Through its action groups, UpLink offers thought leaders and activists a curated platform to discuss ongoing roadblocks to SDG attainment and build alliances with like-minded champions from across the globe. UpLink also provides clear support for organisations that are keen to surface innovations that respond to specific needs by enabling them to co-design topics and challenges.
Read more here: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/03/uplink-radio-davos/
Source: https://uplink.weforum.org/uplink/s/
This publication has been prepared within INDIGISE project. The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of the project coordinator and may not always reflect the views of the European Commission or the National Agency.
When launching a social business or a social innovation project, there are several different aspects that should be taken into consideration. Among various practical things such as the right time, location and funding, the social innovator should always seek for another very important aspect – participation and engagement of the community. Social business or other social innovation ideas are usually born when facing a certain societal issue or challenge, therefore engaging the local community in different phases of the business or social project is not only important – it is crucial.
A European research report “Engaging Citizens in Social Innovation: A short guide to the research for policymakers and practitioners” suggests different ways how to engage citizens in social innovation. At the first stages of the innovation or launching of the business, citizen involvement can be very valuable for the purposes of “informing about the present states” – providing information regarding their needs and challenges that they are experiencing at the moment. This information and opinion gathering can take different forms – research and consultations, practical workshops or online activities. The opinions and experiences of the community members can be very valuable also when developing future solutions – through such activities as idea camps or competitions people can help to create better solutions for social innovation projects or social businesses.
The research report indicates three main ways of how citizens can be engaged in social innovation processes. Providing information and resources is one of those approaches. As previously stated, the opinions and experiences of the citizens are very important throughout all the phases of social innovation projects – either by helping to define the main challenges and needs or in later phases when evaluation and feedback of the involved people is of very high importance. This category also involves providing resources – not only time but also money. Local people can get engaged in the social innovation projects by volunteering or donations – therefore providing very practical support for social innovation. The second way how to engage the local community is through problem-solving which essentially means engaging groups of people in the development processes. Involving people with different backgrounds can be very beneficial to a social initiative as it helps to make it valuable and useful for a variety of social groups in the local community. Engaging in the problem solving also means involving people who are facing specific challenges that the social initiative or business is trying to tackle – when those initiatives are not done for the people but are done with the people. The third approach to engage citizens in social innovation is through taking and influencing decisions. This form of engagement is more consistent and requires continuous involvement and cooperation with the people rather than just taking part in events or workshops. Through this approach, the community is given quite a significant power in decision making. A very good example of this approach is participatory budgeting when the local community is given the power to decide on the spending of a certain part of the municipal budget.
There are many reasons why to strive to engage the community in the social innovation processes. First of all, sometimes the people who are planning to launch the business or the social initiative are not very well informed about the actual desires and needs in society. Asking them to engage and share their thoughts and actual every-day challenges may render the social initiative a lot more useful, valuable and legitimate. Moreover, engaging citizens through workshops and competitions can lead to new innovative ideas as often the local people themselves are full of genius ideas on how to solve the challenges that the community is facing. Involving community members often means cooperating and finding common solutions with people with completely different opinions, experiences, and viewpoints. This diversity of approaches can help to develop the social business or social initiative further and make it more appealing to various groups of society.
Read the full research and also a few interesting case studies here: https://youngfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Engagign-citizens-in-social-inno.pdf
(Davies, A and Simon, J, (2013). Engaging Citizens in Social Innovation: A short guide to the research for policy makers and practitioners. A deliverable of the project: “The theoretical, empirical and policy foundations for building social innovation in Europe” (TEPSIE), European Commission – 7 th Framework Programme, Brussels: European Commission, DG Research.)
The organization MovingWorlds has helped 900 social enterprises around the world scale their businesses over the years. They have done so with help using their Experteers, Capacity Building Programs, research, and educational programming.
Their experience is that many social enterprise startups fall short of their projections and end up giving up. There is a number of reasons for that, but one of the reasons is that social entrepreneurs is so convinced that they have an idea that will work, that they have not taken the time to develop it thoroughly, eg. Making a market reseach – is the market interested in the idea. Or have taken the time to really look at and understand the problem they are trying to solve and be sure they are trying to solve the right problem. This could eg. Be done by using Design Thinking.
MovingWorlds has gathered their experiences from working with social entrepreneurs over the years in “The complete guide to growing and scaling your social enterprise” that is a ten step guide that social entrepreneurs can follow to increase their ability to create lasting change.
the 10 steps are:
The guide covers all the essential elements you need develop a social enterprise, whether you just starting or want to launch a new social enterprise within an existing organization. Through the guide there are lots of links to useful tools and further ressources.
See the guide here
This publication has been prepared within SENBS project No. 2020-1-EE01-KA204-077999. The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of the project coordinator and may not always reflect the views of the European Commission or the National Agency.
While most of impact analysis materials are still available only in English, there are luckily more and more materials also in national languages of the Baltic Sea Region countries.
Please find selected materials in Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Lithuanian and Polish.
DENMARK
1. The Danish Ministry of Education´s guide on how to create a Theory of Change – link is here.
2. Example of the SROI report by Gallo Crisis Counseling in 2014 – link is here.
3. Example of the Impact Analysis Report by The Specialist People Foundation in 2013 – link is here.
ESTONIA
1. Social impact analysis handbook for civil society organisations – link is here.
2. Outcome and impact reports of Estonian social enterprises – link is here.
3. A video about social impact analysis for the municipalities that cooperate with social enterprises and other civil society organisations – link is here.
FINLAND
1. A report by the ESR project “Third Source” (2013) investigates a wide range of impact
measurement methodologies and also includes a wide range of links to databases, indicator banks, publications etc. – link is here.
2. Jelli – A compilation site that introduces helpful tools and links to impact measurement methodologies – link is here.
3. A handbook of social accounting – link is here.
4. Sofie method – a Finnish impact measurement system combining Social Accounting and SROI methodologies – link is here.
LITHUANIA
1. General methodology of state impact assessment system, including social impact, which provides the baseline for impact assessment of state funded projects and strategies – link is here.
2. Methodological support for impact assessment provided by the Association of Public
Private partnerships – link is here.
POLAND
1. eRPES – IT tool for the evaluation and benchmarking of social economy entities in five
dimensions: economic efficiency, cooperation, resources and organizational competence and social utility – link is here. A presentation about the tool can be found here.
2. ProveIt.pl – a tool for measuring various aspects of social economy entities, including the impact of socio-economic, human and social capital (including the contribution of volunteers) – links are here and here.
3. Esometr – a tool for verifying the extent to which social economy entities meet the targets that are placed before them (social and professional integration, social capital, local community)
– links are here and here.
The Institute of Entrepreneurship Development presents the handbook created for trainers regarding the training courses in Social Economy and Entrepreneurship.
The educational material was created in the framework of the European project ERASMUS+ entitled “Open Mind – gamified platform and open online course in Social Entrepreneurship for female learners and students from diverse fields of study”.
Open Mind project focus on the lack of entrepreneurship skills, especially seeing the differences in skills between genders, attempting to boost entrepreneurship and creativity through an innovative gamified social entrepreneurship course.
The training material which developed for social entrepreneurship, concerns a lot of individuals across Europe, trying to map the skills that are needed to start a business as well as it pursues to enhance employment in this sector.
This special educational material has created with the participation of all partners of the project, however, especially iED edited the graphic design of the handbook.
You can watch the entire educational material completely free of charge here
Established in 2005, Institute of Entrepreneurship Development (IED) is a fast-growing Center of Excellence in European Entrepreneurship. As a state-of-the-art international organization, iED promotes change for the better, through entrepreneurial and innovative actions and supports every entrepreneurial venture across Europe.
With the use of our EU partner network and our experience in diverse EU funded research programmes focused on entrepreneurship, we have created a Knowledge Hub tailor-made to cover the need of the entrepreneurial world, in the European area.
Here in IED, we recognize the importance of Entrepreneurship and its crucial role as a stakeholder for the development and cohesion of societies. Our mission is a simple yet important one. We:
We offer guidance, training, and coaching and through IED Academy we bring the knowledge to those that need it. From EU project management and project proposal writing all the way to running a business effectively, Academy is the perfect tool to help us achieve our goal of connecting research with innovation in business.
We take things a step further with our platform EUcalls. We work to make your introduction and journey to EU projects easy.
More information is available here: https://ied.eu/
This publication has been prepared within INDIGISE project. The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of the project coordinator and may not always reflect the views of the European Commission or the National Agency.
Imagine you had a ‘eureka’ moment – an idea for a new way of doing something that could, in some way, make the world a better place.
How would you go about turning that idea into reality? One place you could go, is UpLink, a platform which lets anyone from anywhere in the world submit their ideas on how to solve global issues.
Announced during the 2019 Sustainable Development Impact Summit and launched at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2020, UpLink is a digital crowd-engagement platform that connects entrepreneurs and champions of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Its goal is to link-up the best SDG innovators to a growing network of experts and decision-makers who can implement the change needed for the next decade.
As a global platform, UpLink responds to the demand for a more inclusive approach to SDG action by targeting the creativity and expertise of grassroots innovators who can meaningfully contribute to the delivery of the SDGs. Through its challenges and collaborative action groups, UpLink aspires to nurture a world whereanyone with impact-oriented ideas and solutions is empowered to address the world’s most pressing challenges.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRUsgiXUMJg[/embedyt]
UpLink is the first World Economic Forum-managed online network that anyone can sign up and contribute to. Through its challenges, UpLink seeks to connect entrepreneurs with game-changing SDG solutions to experts and investors looking to identify and scale-up the most innovative solutions. Through its action groups, UpLink offers thought leaders and activists a curated platform to discuss ongoing roadblocks to SDG attainment and build alliances with like-minded champions from across the globe. UpLink also provides clear support for organisations that are keen to surface innovations that respond to specific needs by enabling them to co-design topics and challenges.
Read more here: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/03/uplink-radio-davos/
Source: https://uplink.weforum.org/uplink/s/
This publication has been prepared within INDIGISE project. The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of the project coordinator and may not always reflect the views of the European Commission or the National Agency.
When launching a social business or a social innovation project, there are several different aspects that should be taken into consideration. Among various practical things such as the right time, location and funding, the social innovator should always seek for another very important aspect – participation and engagement of the community. Social business or other social innovation ideas are usually born when facing a certain societal issue or challenge, therefore engaging the local community in different phases of the business or social project is not only important – it is crucial.
A European research report “Engaging Citizens in Social Innovation: A short guide to the research for policymakers and practitioners” suggests different ways how to engage citizens in social innovation. At the first stages of the innovation or launching of the business, citizen involvement can be very valuable for the purposes of “informing about the present states” – providing information regarding their needs and challenges that they are experiencing at the moment. This information and opinion gathering can take different forms – research and consultations, practical workshops or online activities. The opinions and experiences of the community members can be very valuable also when developing future solutions – through such activities as idea camps or competitions people can help to create better solutions for social innovation projects or social businesses.
The research report indicates three main ways of how citizens can be engaged in social innovation processes. Providing information and resources is one of those approaches. As previously stated, the opinions and experiences of the citizens are very important throughout all the phases of social innovation projects – either by helping to define the main challenges and needs or in later phases when evaluation and feedback of the involved people is of very high importance. This category also involves providing resources – not only time but also money. Local people can get engaged in the social innovation projects by volunteering or donations – therefore providing very practical support for social innovation. The second way how to engage the local community is through problem-solving which essentially means engaging groups of people in the development processes. Involving people with different backgrounds can be very beneficial to a social initiative as it helps to make it valuable and useful for a variety of social groups in the local community. Engaging in the problem solving also means involving people who are facing specific challenges that the social initiative or business is trying to tackle – when those initiatives are not done for the people but are done with the people. The third approach to engage citizens in social innovation is through taking and influencing decisions. This form of engagement is more consistent and requires continuous involvement and cooperation with the people rather than just taking part in events or workshops. Through this approach, the community is given quite a significant power in decision making. A very good example of this approach is participatory budgeting when the local community is given the power to decide on the spending of a certain part of the municipal budget.
There are many reasons why to strive to engage the community in the social innovation processes. First of all, sometimes the people who are planning to launch the business or the social initiative are not very well informed about the actual desires and needs in society. Asking them to engage and share their thoughts and actual every-day challenges may render the social initiative a lot more useful, valuable and legitimate. Moreover, engaging citizens through workshops and competitions can lead to new innovative ideas as often the local people themselves are full of genius ideas on how to solve the challenges that the community is facing. Involving community members often means cooperating and finding common solutions with people with completely different opinions, experiences, and viewpoints. This diversity of approaches can help to develop the social business or social initiative further and make it more appealing to various groups of society.
Read the full research and also a few interesting case studies here: https://youngfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Engagign-citizens-in-social-inno.pdf
(Davies, A and Simon, J, (2013). Engaging Citizens in Social Innovation: A short guide to the research for policy makers and practitioners. A deliverable of the project: “The theoretical, empirical and policy foundations for building social innovation in Europe” (TEPSIE), European Commission – 7 th Framework Programme, Brussels: European Commission, DG Research.)
The organization MovingWorlds has helped 900 social enterprises around the world scale their businesses over the years. They have done so with help using their Experteers, Capacity Building Programs, research, and educational programming.
Their experience is that many social enterprise startups fall short of their projections and end up giving up. There is a number of reasons for that, but one of the reasons is that social entrepreneurs is so convinced that they have an idea that will work, that they have not taken the time to develop it thoroughly, eg. Making a market reseach – is the market interested in the idea. Or have taken the time to really look at and understand the problem they are trying to solve and be sure they are trying to solve the right problem. This could eg. Be done by using Design Thinking.
MovingWorlds has gathered their experiences from working with social entrepreneurs over the years in “The complete guide to growing and scaling your social enterprise” that is a ten step guide that social entrepreneurs can follow to increase their ability to create lasting change.
the 10 steps are:
The guide covers all the essential elements you need develop a social enterprise, whether you just starting or want to launch a new social enterprise within an existing organization. Through the guide there are lots of links to useful tools and further ressources.
See the guide here
This publication has been prepared within SENBS project No. 2020-1-EE01-KA204-077999. The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of the project coordinator and may not always reflect the views of the European Commission or the National Agency.
While most of impact analysis materials are still available only in English, there are luckily more and more materials also in national languages of the Baltic Sea Region countries.
Please find selected materials in Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Lithuanian and Polish.
DENMARK
1. The Danish Ministry of Education´s guide on how to create a Theory of Change – link is here.
2. Example of the SROI report by Gallo Crisis Counseling in 2014 – link is here.
3. Example of the Impact Analysis Report by The Specialist People Foundation in 2013 – link is here.
ESTONIA
1. Social impact analysis handbook for civil society organisations – link is here.
2. Outcome and impact reports of Estonian social enterprises – link is here.
3. A video about social impact analysis for the municipalities that cooperate with social enterprises and other civil society organisations – link is here.
FINLAND
1. A report by the ESR project “Third Source” (2013) investigates a wide range of impact
measurement methodologies and also includes a wide range of links to databases, indicator banks, publications etc. – link is here.
2. Jelli – A compilation site that introduces helpful tools and links to impact measurement methodologies – link is here.
3. A handbook of social accounting – link is here.
4. Sofie method – a Finnish impact measurement system combining Social Accounting and SROI methodologies – link is here.
LITHUANIA
1. General methodology of state impact assessment system, including social impact, which provides the baseline for impact assessment of state funded projects and strategies – link is here.
2. Methodological support for impact assessment provided by the Association of Public
Private partnerships – link is here.
POLAND
1. eRPES – IT tool for the evaluation and benchmarking of social economy entities in five
dimensions: economic efficiency, cooperation, resources and organizational competence and social utility – link is here. A presentation about the tool can be found here.
2. ProveIt.pl – a tool for measuring various aspects of social economy entities, including the impact of socio-economic, human and social capital (including the contribution of volunteers) – links are here and here.
3. Esometr – a tool for verifying the extent to which social economy entities meet the targets that are placed before them (social and professional integration, social capital, local community)
– links are here and here.
The Institute of Entrepreneurship Development presents the handbook created for trainers regarding the training courses in Social Economy and Entrepreneurship.
The educational material was created in the framework of the European project ERASMUS+ entitled “Open Mind – gamified platform and open online course in Social Entrepreneurship for female learners and students from diverse fields of study”.
Open Mind project focus on the lack of entrepreneurship skills, especially seeing the differences in skills between genders, attempting to boost entrepreneurship and creativity through an innovative gamified social entrepreneurship course.
The training material which developed for social entrepreneurship, concerns a lot of individuals across Europe, trying to map the skills that are needed to start a business as well as it pursues to enhance employment in this sector.
This special educational material has created with the participation of all partners of the project, however, especially iED edited the graphic design of the handbook.
You can watch the entire educational material completely free of charge here
Established in 2005, Institute of Entrepreneurship Development (IED) is a fast-growing Center of Excellence in European Entrepreneurship. As a state-of-the-art international organization, iED promotes change for the better, through entrepreneurial and innovative actions and supports every entrepreneurial venture across Europe.
With the use of our EU partner network and our experience in diverse EU funded research programmes focused on entrepreneurship, we have created a Knowledge Hub tailor-made to cover the need of the entrepreneurial world, in the European area.
Here in IED, we recognize the importance of Entrepreneurship and its crucial role as a stakeholder for the development and cohesion of societies. Our mission is a simple yet important one. We:
We offer guidance, training, and coaching and through IED Academy we bring the knowledge to those that need it. From EU project management and project proposal writing all the way to running a business effectively, Academy is the perfect tool to help us achieve our goal of connecting research with innovation in business.
We take things a step further with our platform EUcalls. We work to make your introduction and journey to EU projects easy.
More information is available here: https://ied.eu/
This publication has been prepared within INDIGISE project. The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of the project coordinator and may not always reflect the views of the European Commission or the National Agency.
Imagine you had a ‘eureka’ moment – an idea for a new way of doing something that could, in some way, make the world a better place.
How would you go about turning that idea into reality? One place you could go, is UpLink, a platform which lets anyone from anywhere in the world submit their ideas on how to solve global issues.
Announced during the 2019 Sustainable Development Impact Summit and launched at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2020, UpLink is a digital crowd-engagement platform that connects entrepreneurs and champions of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Its goal is to link-up the best SDG innovators to a growing network of experts and decision-makers who can implement the change needed for the next decade.
As a global platform, UpLink responds to the demand for a more inclusive approach to SDG action by targeting the creativity and expertise of grassroots innovators who can meaningfully contribute to the delivery of the SDGs. Through its challenges and collaborative action groups, UpLink aspires to nurture a world whereanyone with impact-oriented ideas and solutions is empowered to address the world’s most pressing challenges.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRUsgiXUMJg[/embedyt]
UpLink is the first World Economic Forum-managed online network that anyone can sign up and contribute to. Through its challenges, UpLink seeks to connect entrepreneurs with game-changing SDG solutions to experts and investors looking to identify and scale-up the most innovative solutions. Through its action groups, UpLink offers thought leaders and activists a curated platform to discuss ongoing roadblocks to SDG attainment and build alliances with like-minded champions from across the globe. UpLink also provides clear support for organisations that are keen to surface innovations that respond to specific needs by enabling them to co-design topics and challenges.
Read more here: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/03/uplink-radio-davos/
Source: https://uplink.weforum.org/uplink/s/
This publication has been prepared within INDIGISE project. The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of the project coordinator and may not always reflect the views of the European Commission or the National Agency.
When launching a social business or a social innovation project, there are several different aspects that should be taken into consideration. Among various practical things such as the right time, location and funding, the social innovator should always seek for another very important aspect – participation and engagement of the community. Social business or other social innovation ideas are usually born when facing a certain societal issue or challenge, therefore engaging the local community in different phases of the business or social project is not only important – it is crucial.
A European research report “Engaging Citizens in Social Innovation: A short guide to the research for policymakers and practitioners” suggests different ways how to engage citizens in social innovation. At the first stages of the innovation or launching of the business, citizen involvement can be very valuable for the purposes of “informing about the present states” – providing information regarding their needs and challenges that they are experiencing at the moment. This information and opinion gathering can take different forms – research and consultations, practical workshops or online activities. The opinions and experiences of the community members can be very valuable also when developing future solutions – through such activities as idea camps or competitions people can help to create better solutions for social innovation projects or social businesses.
The research report indicates three main ways of how citizens can be engaged in social innovation processes. Providing information and resources is one of those approaches. As previously stated, the opinions and experiences of the citizens are very important throughout all the phases of social innovation projects – either by helping to define the main challenges and needs or in later phases when evaluation and feedback of the involved people is of very high importance. This category also involves providing resources – not only time but also money. Local people can get engaged in the social innovation projects by volunteering or donations – therefore providing very practical support for social innovation. The second way how to engage the local community is through problem-solving which essentially means engaging groups of people in the development processes. Involving people with different backgrounds can be very beneficial to a social initiative as it helps to make it valuable and useful for a variety of social groups in the local community. Engaging in the problem solving also means involving people who are facing specific challenges that the social initiative or business is trying to tackle – when those initiatives are not done for the people but are done with the people. The third approach to engage citizens in social innovation is through taking and influencing decisions. This form of engagement is more consistent and requires continuous involvement and cooperation with the people rather than just taking part in events or workshops. Through this approach, the community is given quite a significant power in decision making. A very good example of this approach is participatory budgeting when the local community is given the power to decide on the spending of a certain part of the municipal budget.
There are many reasons why to strive to engage the community in the social innovation processes. First of all, sometimes the people who are planning to launch the business or the social initiative are not very well informed about the actual desires and needs in society. Asking them to engage and share their thoughts and actual every-day challenges may render the social initiative a lot more useful, valuable and legitimate. Moreover, engaging citizens through workshops and competitions can lead to new innovative ideas as often the local people themselves are full of genius ideas on how to solve the challenges that the community is facing. Involving community members often means cooperating and finding common solutions with people with completely different opinions, experiences, and viewpoints. This diversity of approaches can help to develop the social business or social initiative further and make it more appealing to various groups of society.
Read the full research and also a few interesting case studies here: https://youngfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Engagign-citizens-in-social-inno.pdf
(Davies, A and Simon, J, (2013). Engaging Citizens in Social Innovation: A short guide to the research for policy makers and practitioners. A deliverable of the project: “The theoretical, empirical and policy foundations for building social innovation in Europe” (TEPSIE), European Commission – 7 th Framework Programme, Brussels: European Commission, DG Research.)
The organization MovingWorlds has helped 900 social enterprises around the world scale their businesses over the years. They have done so with help using their Experteers, Capacity Building Programs, research, and educational programming.
Their experience is that many social enterprise startups fall short of their projections and end up giving up. There is a number of reasons for that, but one of the reasons is that social entrepreneurs is so convinced that they have an idea that will work, that they have not taken the time to develop it thoroughly, eg. Making a market reseach – is the market interested in the idea. Or have taken the time to really look at and understand the problem they are trying to solve and be sure they are trying to solve the right problem. This could eg. Be done by using Design Thinking.
MovingWorlds has gathered their experiences from working with social entrepreneurs over the years in “The complete guide to growing and scaling your social enterprise” that is a ten step guide that social entrepreneurs can follow to increase their ability to create lasting change.
the 10 steps are:
The guide covers all the essential elements you need develop a social enterprise, whether you just starting or want to launch a new social enterprise within an existing organization. Through the guide there are lots of links to useful tools and further ressources.
See the guide here
This publication has been prepared within SENBS project No. 2020-1-EE01-KA204-077999. The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of the project coordinator and may not always reflect the views of the European Commission or the National Agency.
While most of impact analysis materials are still available only in English, there are luckily more and more materials also in national languages of the Baltic Sea Region countries.
Please find selected materials in Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Lithuanian and Polish.
DENMARK
1. The Danish Ministry of Education´s guide on how to create a Theory of Change – link is here.
2. Example of the SROI report by Gallo Crisis Counseling in 2014 – link is here.
3. Example of the Impact Analysis Report by The Specialist People Foundation in 2013 – link is here.
ESTONIA
1. Social impact analysis handbook for civil society organisations – link is here.
2. Outcome and impact reports of Estonian social enterprises – link is here.
3. A video about social impact analysis for the municipalities that cooperate with social enterprises and other civil society organisations – link is here.
FINLAND
1. A report by the ESR project “Third Source” (2013) investigates a wide range of impact
measurement methodologies and also includes a wide range of links to databases, indicator banks, publications etc. – link is here.
2. Jelli – A compilation site that introduces helpful tools and links to impact measurement methodologies – link is here.
3. A handbook of social accounting – link is here.
4. Sofie method – a Finnish impact measurement system combining Social Accounting and SROI methodologies – link is here.
LITHUANIA
1. General methodology of state impact assessment system, including social impact, which provides the baseline for impact assessment of state funded projects and strategies – link is here.
2. Methodological support for impact assessment provided by the Association of Public
Private partnerships – link is here.
POLAND
1. eRPES – IT tool for the evaluation and benchmarking of social economy entities in five
dimensions: economic efficiency, cooperation, resources and organizational competence and social utility – link is here. A presentation about the tool can be found here.
2. ProveIt.pl – a tool for measuring various aspects of social economy entities, including the impact of socio-economic, human and social capital (including the contribution of volunteers) – links are here and here.
3. Esometr – a tool for verifying the extent to which social economy entities meet the targets that are placed before them (social and professional integration, social capital, local community)
– links are here and here.
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