Find out about the five social innovations projects from EUROCITIES’ Social Innovation Lab that were presented by Athens, Birmingham, Glasgow, Nantes and Porto during the co-learning workshop in Glasgow, on the ‘Accelerating Change for Social Inclusion’new online platform.

The increase of social needs requires to try out more effective, efficient and fair solutions to some of the critical problems that affect citizens’ life. At the same time, there are successful innovations from all around the world that could be adapted and adopted to respond to these pressing needs.

Processes aimed to generate social inclusion and improve people’s life can be accelerated by putting together proven innovations in a comprehensive way and sharing evidence-based knowledge in order to promote the transfer of existing solutions and inspire social innovation agents.

Under these premises, cities of Athens, Barcelona, Lisbon, Rotterdam and Stockholm have joined efforts to address common social challenges by identifying and exploring local implementation of social innovations from Europe and all around the world.

Within the frame of the Accelerating Change for Social Inclusion project, 60 innovations were analysed following a set of standards that evaluates the potential impact of an innovation on a different context. Some of these initiatives are promoted by EUROCITIES members, such as Jongerenloket (Rotterdam), Relais Accueil Petite Enfance (Nantes) and YFI (Stockholm). With the aim of sharing the knowledge generated by the ACSI project, its promoters have launched innovations.upsocial.org: a platform containing relevant and browsable information on social innovations from all around the world that successfully respond to social challenges.

The platform uses digital tools to share the analysis of evidence-based innovations, as well as Toolkits for those innovations that were selected to explore local implementation in one or more of participant cities. Toolkits sistematise the learnings on transfer first-steps.

The analysis of five best practices from EUROCITIES’ members presented in the Co-learning Workshop that took place in the first Social Innovation Lab are also available in the platform: 5Ponts (Nantes), Curing the Limbo (Athens), Integration of Health and Social Care Services (Glasgow), Jobs City (Porto) and USE-IT! (Birmingham).

For public decision makers, the new platform offers:

• Updated and rigorous information. Key and up-to-date information that allows to understand the value proposition of social innovations, as well as their potential to be adapted and transferred to other cities.
• Well-systematised and curated content. Rigorous analysis and selection based on a set of standards in order to assess different dimensions of social innovations: the strengthen of the evidence, the type of innovation and the experience on the adaptation. Analysis of transfer model and income-generating model are available on Toolkits.
• A user-friendly tool targeted at social innovation agents. Open knowledge offered through a digital tool aimed at responding to the needs of different profiles in the social innovation ecosystem.

We invite you to use the new platform and register to download Toolkits, save favorites innovations and evaluate social innovations by following the UpSocial standards.

Related links:

• Innovations to accelerate change for social inclusion: https://innovations.upsocial.org/en
• Co-learning: five best practices from EUROCITIES’ members: https://innovations.upsocial.org/en/node/2120