Mission accomplished! Last Social Innovation training was successfully organised yesterday in Maribor!

Maribor – the 2018 European Capital for Social Economy - was the perfect place for organising our last Social Innovation Traning and to contribute to create a common understanding on what social innovation actually offers and, more importantly, how it can be done in practice.

In such a framework, the training was successfully organized by the local partner - Knowledge and technology office of University of Maribor who also created ad-hoc synergies with the Association for Social Economy of Slovenia to provide a further occasion to learn from real case studies and examples of Social Innovations in Slovenia. In front of 33 participants, Peter Alešnik, Head of the Knowledge and Technology Transfer Office of University of Maribor, opened the floor while introducing the Made in Danube project. Further on the representative of the Association of Social Economy Slovenia, Miro Mihec presented its organization and invited participants to attend the “Best Practises of Social Innovations in Slovenia” workshop which took place immediately after the social innovation training.

Desiree Pecarz, ZSi GmbH, run the whole training and provided participants with solid conceptual foundations in the search for innovative solutions, while reinforcing and developing their vision, knowledge, skills, and abilities that are crucial to understand why and under which circumstances social innovation initiatives succeed or fail. Specific attention during the events was paid on design thinking to develop a context-responsive user-friendly service or product while exploring approaches and tools useful to plan, assess and deliver services and products able to answer to pressing social problems. Similarly also proper engagement of stakeholders and different audiences was analysed to help future innovators participating in the training to get familiar with design and implementation of engagement process plan.

Thanks to the 3 trainings more than 80 representatives of small and medium‐sized enterprises, as well as early stage project managers in research, social and technological innovation, young graduates as first-time applicants to transnational projects from business sector and intermediaries could improve their:

• Familiarity with social innovation definitions and process
• Understanding of the enabling conditions for Social Innovation
• Learning how to set up and run social innovation initiatives
• Learning the principle of effective design thinking and stakeholders engagement