European Innovation Alliance on Healthy Living
Ten partners from six countries plus one European network partner from higher education, VET, research, and business pick up two main learning questions:
- How to position and organise a social innovation ecosystem sustainably into long term societal transitions?
- And how to grow and maintain knowledge and collective agency of the diverse healthy living stakeholders in social innovation ecosystems?
To answer them, we implement four international communities of practice on a) social business development, b) engaged community science, c) reflexive monitoring, and d) knowledge creation. With it, we learn about appropriate governance and leadership structures, about building engagement and capacity towards sustaining, and about innovative solutions for transformative learning.
It leads to a blueprint of a Social Innovation Ecosystem for Healthy Living (SIEHL) with effective governance and sustainable implementation strategies, plus educational courses to empower change agents. A unique feature is that we dock our learning in SIEHL with existing educational structures.
This leads to greater capacity of education institutes to co-create with socio-economic stakeholders towards a quintuple helix. Ultimately leading to more innovative and sustainable solutions for healthy living in local communities, and a healthier and more resilient society in Europe.
Objectives
NEST has the following objectives:
- Co-create a blueprint for social innovation ecosystems that allow for contextualized co-learning and immersive co-creation towards facilitating social innovation that favour healthy living. The local ecosystems function as a sustainable enabler and accelerator by engaging diverse stakeholders through collective agenda setting.
- Co-create new knowledge in the related thematic working fields of (a) social business development, (b) engaged community science, (c) reflexive monitoring, and (d) knowledge creation; all tailored towards our SIEHL. The knowledge creation exploits an international communities of practice (ICOP) approach to engage wider stakeholders across sectors and to co-create innovative solutions that can be anchored in our SIEHL.
- Implement a specific iterative learning and co-creation process that includes “playing back and forth” between ICOP level progression and experimentation in the social innovation ecosystems at the local level in practice. Leading to direct impact at organisational and individual levels of all participating education and socio-economic stakeholders, including the citizens.
- Develop open access learning and teaching materials that enable innovation readiness and empower change agents across sectors to effectively frame, govern and facilitate SIEHL. They feed into a standalone online course and an onsite intensive program, plus they can be exploited for existing HE and VET courses.
- Develop a virtual learning space as an adapted educational tool that hosts and promotes our courses and open access training learning and teaching materials.
- Facilitate the docking of learning in SIEHL with existing educational systems. Developing frameworks and tools to ensure that HE and VET students and educators bring their knowledge and skills adequately into a SIEHL, and that they can take their learnings and new skills successfully “home” into existing education courses, and in their (future) workplace respectively.
- Initiate a knowledge transfer to education courses and existing local communities of practice / learning networks, and to make our Innovation Alliance a sustainable player that inspires and empowers all relevant stakeholders to engage in societal transition in healthy lifestyle.
