Engaging citizens

In the past fortnight, J.K. Rowling broke many of her young fans’ hearts when she revealed that she didn’t believe her characters Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger to be ideally suited t...

The study "Social engagement of Poles" carried out by the research institute TNS for Groupon Poland clearly shows that Poles appreciate the potential for joint action. The majority (61%) ...

The Satellite Account for the Social Economy published last April by the Portuguese National Institute of Statistics includes the results of a survey on volunteer work done in 2012. Here are some o...

In March 2013 ResPublica published a new essay collection entitled ‘Making it Mutual: The ownership revolution that Britain needs.’ Within its pages, policy-makers and practitioners cal...

In our previous blog-post we talked about the FAS Project, a nationwide training-action project of the confederation representing social welfare organisations in Portugal that has been going on sin...

KaBOOM! Using the internet to scale impact Darell Hammond and Dawn Hutchison founded KaBOOM! in 1996 after Hammond read a tragic story of two children suffocating to death while playing in an aband...

Social innovation is a completely new term for Greece. The Greek social economy is not yet developed or better to say is quite fragmented while the voluntarism rates are quite low, unlike other Eur...

Is social innovation a phenomenon that should take place completely detached from the realm of government? Should local governments just let go and let social innovators invent and drive the local ...

Announcing a new call for forward-thinking research on social innovation Today we’ve published a call for proposals for a major research and policy conference on social innovation, to be held...

In 2012, the Rockefeller Foundation commissioned research looking at some of the methodologies that are leading to social innovations around the world, with a particular focus on Africa and Asia. A...

Carlota Perez is one of the world’s most influential thinkers on innovation and its relationship with economic growth and development. She describes ‘great surges of development’ ...

In late September 2012, the “Danish Municipality Network on Social Innovation” was launched in Copenhagen, Denmark. With representatives of around one-third of Danish local governments ...

One of the key strands of TEPSIE work we’re leading at the Young Foundation is looking at the relationship between citizen engagement and social innovation. Although participation and engagem...

On 24-25 September, researchers, policymakers, social entrepreneurs and other key social innovation actors gathered in Copenhagen in Denmark and Malmö in Sweden to discuss solutions to Europe&...

The Danish welfare system is traditionally based on a large public sector. With the average working Dane paying 44,2% in marginal tax, the public sector is expected to be the actor that detects soc...

The CRESSI Project is a four year project funded by the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme that was initiated in February 2014. CRESSI explores the economic underpinnings of social innovation, ...

On the 12th March, Nesta held an event titled 'Collective Intelligence: Evidence based activism in Patients' Organisations'. I was delighted when I saw that Nesta was hosting a discussi...

By Georg Mildenberger In a 2013 SIR blog article, Rachel Schon discussed the TEPSIE telepresence, where Gunnar Glänzel and I highlighted the mismatch between the needs of innovators and the re...

One of the most known Polish private university, Kozminski University, organize for the first time postgraduate studies on "Social innovation in the economy". The aim of the study is to p...

The ALS #icebucketchallenge is thriving and obviously causing some debate in and beyond social media these days. And it goes like this: In front of a camera, a person pours a bucket of ice water ov...

As part of Tepsie’s work on the ecosystem necessary to support social innovation, I recently conducted some research on social innovation labs. Social innovation labs aim to provide a neutral...

(Written by Łukasz Gajewski) Our engagement in Working Package 8 of the TEPSIE Project leaded us to find examples of Social Innovation in Central and Eastern Europe. In a case of Eastern Europe it...

This guest post from SPRU Senior Lecturer Adrian Smith explores the relationship between concepts of grassroots innovation and truly democratic innovation. This post is based on Adrian's contri...

Problems of Social Economy and Social Innovation become more and more particular in Poland. As a kind of response to demand for knowledge of that matter School of Public Administration at the Unive...

Social enterprises tend to favour a participatory management structure, that has until recently been overlooked by bodies which exist to adjudicate disputes between workers and their employees. Rec...

For the first time in Poland, NESsT and J. P. Morgan are organizing jointly "Competition for Social Enterprise - 2014". The aim of the Competition is to support the development of social ...

Last Wednesday, the INNOSERV team hosted its final workshop in Paris, marking the end of this two year project looking at social services innovations across Europe. This was a great opportunity to ...

“What do pirates, terrorists, computer hackers and inner city gangs have in common with Silicon Valley?” It turns out that the two young ladies' project entitled ‘The Misfit E...

The Greek society after suffering the effects of the economic crisis, started to make its first steps in constructing the foundation of social economy. More and more actions were initiated in order...

Just to promote sustainable city development leaders of Lodz (city in the Central Poland - http://en.uml.lodz.pl/) co-finance activities of non-governmental organizations via Social Innovation Fund...

A few weeks ago I attended TEDxCopenhagen, a one day conference emphasizing the spread of big visions and ideas. My favorite TED talk of the day was Hans Jørgen Wiberg’s talk on micro ...

What is nudge and what does it have to do with social innovation? Much has been said about how Barack Obama harnessed the power of the social web in his ultimately successful bid for the White Hous...

A Renewable Energy Sources Cooperative (REScoop) is a group of citizens who collectively invest in renewable energy. There are approximately 3.000 REScoops across Europe. They work together on a lo...

Diffusion, understood as ‘the act of spreading something more widely’ is fundamentally about processes of change. It is unsurprising therefore that it is the subject of intense interest...

How does a not-for-profit organisation or NGO go about working innovatively, and find new solutions to complex social problems? Although cases of innovative projects are all around us, these anecdo...

In a new collection of essays published by LGiU, the Local Government Information Unit, Jonathan Carr-West argues that English local government is at a crossroads. Funding has been cut and challeng...

Earlier this year, Unicef in Sweden launched a new campaign with the tagline: "Like us on Facebook and we will vaccinate zero children against Polio". It was accompanied by a video of a y...

Since 2009 Greece has experienced a severe financial recession and the government has adopted austerity measures that have had a severe impact on the lives of citizens. At the same time, we are see...

Jeremy Millard (Danish Technological Institute) and Anna Davies (Young Foundation) report back from the INNOSERV international workshop on innovation in social services, 17 May 2013, Brussels INNOS...