Pilot programs:
Romania
In Romania two crowdfunding campaigns were successfully developed & funding targets were met. The crowdfunding campaigns were hosted on the consolid8 crowdfunding platform. UEFISCDI developed a research on an alternative financing program for social innovation for local authorities (civic crowdfunding).
Italy
Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini has created a directory of alternative means of financing for social innovations. Also, Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini together with the project partners produced a report on the current state of the innovation ecosystem in Italy, Romania, Slovenia, Greece and Ireland.
Ireland
Ireland initiated a mission to enhance entrepreneurial skills by hosting 7 workshops at Techstars Startup Weekend Social Innovation Dublin. Additionally, they produced 7 podcast episodes on scaling social innovation, featuring interviews with social entrepreneurs and other stakeholders.
Greece
Kollektiva delivered a peer-to-peer capacity building that aimed to outline and discuss solution-based approaches to Diversity-Equity-Inclusion-Accessibility in the social and cultural innovation sector and the need for their implementation in Greece in both the public and private sector. 35 Greek SI and Cultural innovation experts were involved through the capacity building program. KOL also developed a series of five podcasts, in which we discussed cultural and social innovation in the Greek context with experts in the field.
Slovenia
Slovenia hosted a conference on Social Impact and Social Innovation, featuring a co-creation workshop where CN presented social innovation concepts from the SEED project. The focus was on bridging traditional innovation stakeholders with social impact organizations. A panel and co-creation activity addressed wider access to financing social innovations, introducing crowdfunding as an alternative. An eBook and video has been created, detailing a list of successfully scaled social innovation initiatives and social enterprises in Slovenia.
Between September 22 and 24, 2023, consolid8 Festival took place, bringing together keynote speeches, panels, satellite events, interactive activations, workshops, and exhibitions in Brasov, Romania.
In 2024, we ran the consolid8 ecosystem accelerator for social innovation ecosystem builders. From more than 140 applications, we selected 13 ecosystems that we supported via a 6 weeks intensive program, including a demo day held in Krakow, in November 2024.
Outcomes:
-We enabled active participation of social innovation actors in the 5 pioneering ecosystems through targeted capacity building programs that included workshops, conferences and a European festival in Brasov. We are achieving long-lasting effects by harvesting the lessons learned in implementing the pioneering programs and multiplied them through a European accelerator for another 13 ecosystem builders.
- We facilitated the access to alternative financing alternatives through crowdfunding for at 2 initiatives in Romania and we enabled more visibility on alternative financing mechanisms (including private financing) for social innovations by making available information on financing programs for social innovation for local authorities, one toolkit on impact investing for social enterprises, workshops on financing opportunities and a cocreation process on financing social innovators for innovation ecosystems stakeholders
- We presented 21 innovation models with potential of scaling and replicability during the project activities (consolid8 festival, YourY podcast, Kollektiva podcast, Center Noordung e-book).
