INN@SE | Innovative Social Entrepreneurship with Youth Engagement

Social innovation and social economy represent an interesting sector of the market, fundamental for European societies since they generate economic benefit as well as social ones. Protagonists of this scenario are represented by social enterprises, and in particular SEs run by young people. Nonetheless, the concept of “social innovation” is widely unknown or misunderstood and it seems to be considered rarely as an important factor for business. On the other hand social entrepreneurship ideas usually develop from the no-profit sector, which is far from a “business oriented” approach. For this reason, social economy start-ups encounter more difficulties in reaching the economic sustainability.
Considering these factors the project idea concept rely on the fact that a successful approach could be represented by developing an innovative methodology based on a cross-sectoral collaborative process: business-oriented methodologies, know-how and tools mixed to social-oriented ones. To do so, we want to use the Open Innovation approach, which has largely been studied in the private, for-profit sector of the economy in different countries around the world, in a less examined context: in the non-profit sector, usually defined as Open Social Innovation (OSI). In fact the cross-sectoral collaborative process is the main characteristic of open innovation, which can help small social innovations to have the potential to change the global system.
The partners will elaborate a joint strategic methodology incorporating their different experiences and approaches in young people empowerment, training, Social Economy research, and start-ups development, aimed at supporting profit and non profit organizations to better engage young people in social innovation topics and to support them in developing sustainable social enterprises.