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 inspire social innovation agents.
Digital media provide suitable tools for these purposes. For this reason, we launch innovations.upsocial.org, a platform containing relevant and browsable information on social innovations from all around the world that successfully respond to social challenges.
In the new platform you will find:
- 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 contexts. When the initiative has been selected to explore local implementation in other contexts within the frame of a given project implemented by UpSocial, available Toolkits sistematise the learnings on transfer first-steps.
- 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. All these specifications will enable users to analyse and compare innovations.
- 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: public decision-makers, private donors and social innovations promoters, social entrepreneurs, practitioners, social investors and the media.
The platform has been developed under the umbrella of Accelerating Change for Social Inclusion (ACSI), a project to catalyse the transfer of successful innovations among European cities, but it is conceived to go beyond it and evolve as a useful tool addressed to the social innovation ecosystem at international level.
The model proposes different ways to integrate capacities from a wide range of local and international stakeholders that could collaborate in enriching the platform. We invite all of them to think together on actions towards know-how sharing, which could have multiple positive effects, including improving or scaling existing solutions, fostering alliances to strengthen the social innovation ecosystem and generating new impact investment opportunities.
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.