Abstract
Innovation actions within European Horizon 2020 (H2020) projects aim at testing research results in practice. When supporting social innovations in rural areas, such testing requires the alignment of several rural actors in order to entail behavioral changes beyond the individual level. Recently, social innovation has been recognized as an important tool for rural areas, developing new solutions to respond to wicked problems for improving local living conditions at the grassroots level. In this study, we analyzed the use of an operational framework to support the early governance of social innovation actions. This framework was applied to co-construct seven innovation actions across Europe and the Mediterranean basin applied to forestry, agriculture, and rural development. Our results showed that supporting social innovators and local actors at the early stage of social innovation processes is key for efficiently addressing and tackling challenges and opportunities. Additionally, we showed that the process of defining a social innovation is complex and requires recursive engagement, which might lead to evolution through time, especially in the first phases of the process. Lastly, conducting the feasibility assessment enabled strategic thinking on crucial dimensions for designing a promising social innovation action, such as social networks management, financial sustainability, and know-how. Such findings helped us to draw general lessons for the development and governance of social innovation actions in rural areas, potentially applicable to any rural sector.
Highlights
Current societies in Europe and beyond are facing complex, multi-scale, and interrelated challenges
Drawing from social innovation theories, innovation management, and transdisciplinary approaches, we have developed an operational framework, which has been tested in seven different locations across Europe and the Mediterranean basin to initiate and support grassroots initiatives applied to forestry, agriculture, and rural development
The findings from its testing can be summarized into two main categories: (i) key lessons learnt from the case studies, which helped to understand the critical factors for Social Innovation Actions (SIAs) to emerge when supported by accelerators programs; (ii) broader key findings, to understand whether the proposed operational framework succeeded in fostering and accelerating SIAs or not, and whether the presented lessons learnt can be adapted to other contexts
Summary
Current societies in Europe and beyond are facing complex, multi-scale, and interrelated challenges These include rural depopulation, demographic changes such as aging, in- and out-migration, youth unemployment, increasing poverty and inclusion of vulnerable groups, as well as global issues connected to climate change, energy, and natural resources provision, and food security [1,2,3]. These issues call for innovative solutions that are able to tackle the challenges in a systemic and holistic way. Interest in social innovation for transforming or “reconfiguring” existing social, cultural, and economic arrangements has increased worldwide in practice and in the political arena (e.g., the social innovation fund established in the US in 2009 [7]; EU recommendations [8])
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