Two months before CSSboost published its Action Plan for social innovation, a dedicated webinar was held to discuss this challenging topic. As an added value, the webinar brought together other CCRI projects and their stories and experiences.
As an official EU Green Week partner event, the webinar titled “Social innovation for and acceptance of circular systemic solutions” and facilitated by Ernest Kovacs of ACR+ took place on 23 June and included, apart from the representatives of the CSSboost project, speakers on behalf of the Circular Cities and Regions Initiative Coordination Support Office (CCRI-CSO), as well as fellow CCRI projects. Having said this, the webinar met its multiple objectives, namely – to showcase its own approach to social innovation, cross-check it with other experts, and run a clustering event among fellow CCRI projects on the very topic.
After the introduction to the project itself by its coordinator, Georgios Arampatzis of the Technical University of Crete, Jan Wynarski of the CCRI-CSO gave a bigger picture of the Initiative and its various objectives, while looking back at the recent CCRI Conference held in Brussels early June.
The key part of the webinar was a session prepared by Marianthi Liapi of the Technical University of Crete and Cristina Barahona of the Social CRM based in Leipzig. The session saw a proposal for what the CSSboost Social Innovation Action Plan would look like, combined with a participatory exercise addressing enablers and barriers in applying those social innovation actions. The feedback from the participants revolved around various keywords, such as price, brand, peer and social pressure, as well as (social) media influence.
Finally, a panel discussion closed the webinar, with the participation of Jaana Koivisto of the City of Tampere, on behalf of the TREASoURcE project, Ola Bakovska and Hannah Beisel of Circle Economy, on behalf of the SOLSTICE project, and Kaisa Sibelius, Forum Virium, on behalf of Helsinki Municipality. They shared their success stories and lessons learnt, which highlighted various approaches for different target groups while listing different formats and structures for reaching out to them, such as online courses for people with special needs, reuse and repair initiatives, and similar.
After the webinar, Ernest Kovacs, who facilitated the webinar, said: “This webinar took place at a perfect moment for both the CSSboost project, as well as the entire CCRI framework. I was happy to see so many participants, more than 30 to be more precise – something that justified the need for such a webinar. Social innovation and acceptance must not be ignored when it comes to a circular systemic solution. Suppose there is no uptake and deployment among various target groups. In that case, we can easily question all the efforts, ideas, investments, and time practitioners, companies, universities, and individuals are putting into developing them. As for CSSboost, I think this webinar showed our commitment to taking this seriously, and I hope this webinar will lead to further synergies and exchanges on the topic. Now it’s up to us to justify what I just said and put forward an innovative and unconventional social innovation action plan for our pilot cases.”
