Social Challenge Innovation Platform, SCHIP, aims at creating an online ecosystem to match pressing social challenges with innovative solutions, by supporting the co-development and execution by social innovators and SMEs of sustainable and market-oriented innovations with clear social impact. The action will enable European stakeholders to clearly define pressing social challenges; to promote a broad participation of social innovators, entrepreneurs and SMEs; to facilitate the testing of concrete solutions to prioritised challenges and their international scaling. SCHIP will provide a complementary grant-making mechanism, focused on the translation of challenges into practical and marketable solutions. The action will test a novel approach in the selection of solutions that is demand driven and user-centred. It will promote the ignition of these solutions by facilitating access to mentors, first clients and investors, and by building on the proven experience of the consortium networks in scaling social innovation across Europe. To maximise value for money and impact, SCHIP will leverage the know-how and reach out of the 3 partners: META Group with its long experience in managing financial instruments and meeting entrepreneurial needs; Impact Hub, the leading global network of centres for social innovation and social entrepreneurship with 85 Hubs, over 13,000 members and a proven track-record in managing social innovation challenge prizes; and EBN (The European Business and Innovation Centre Network), with its over 240 members, reaching out to more than 18,700 SMEs, 8750 start-ups and 485 large companies - 12% of them involved in social innovation related projects.

The SoTecIn Factory - Social and Technological Innovation Factory for Low-Carbon and Circular Industrial Value Chains - goal is to connect industry with society in a community of mission-oriented social innovators, to support social entrepreneurs in their drive to increase the circularity of key product value chains, and to promote a culture of social innovation in European manufacturing businesses. The SoTecIn Factory serves the EU priority ?A European green deal? and its European industrial strategy by giving financial and capacity-building support to social innovations that improve the circularity of the seven key product value chains, as defined by the EU Circular Economy Action Plan. It supports systemic transformation towards restructuring value chains to be low-carbon and circular, by implementing higher value circular economy strategies, i.e. reuse, repair, refurbish and remanufacture. Specifically, the SoTecIn Factory will support 40 mission-oriented social entrepreneurs with services regarding governance (through the creation of stewardship councils for each innovation), business model, capacity-building, fund-raising and exploitation, and 30 mission-oriented pre-market demonstration projects.

Coworking space is a workplace model popularised in the XXI century. It not only provides its members with a place to work and essential services that support their business but also creates a specific environment, where professionals can engage in social interaction, collaborate on shared interests and learn in a community of proactive professionals. It creates a collaborative, shared economy beneficial for all its members, that brings significant value to the local economy.In the last decade, different stakeholders decided to adapt this model to the needs of social innovation and created coworking spaces for social innovation. These coworking spaces boost social innovation by providing social entrepreneurs with a cost-effective working space and accompanying services, giving them at the same time the sense of the collaborative synergy with other professionals dedicated to making a social impact. The members of such spaces exchange ideas, skills and experiences, which leads to a faster and more effective social innovation development and implementation. As most of the members of coworking spaces for social innovation are under 35’, this model fosters youth entrepreneurship, education and participation at the local level.Centrum Rozwoju Inicjatyw Społecznych and its partners have decided to implement this 16-months project in order to map and identify good practices among the existing coworking spaces for social innovation to:- boost their learning potential;- make them more inclusive and adjusted to the needs of youth;- foster the development of social innovation and increase its impact at the local level;- build cooperation between a private, public and non-governmental sector;- strengthen their sustainability. These practices will then be gathered and released in the form of a PUBLICATION, which will be a key tangible result of this project.The project will consist of the following key activities:1) Training course on participatory management of coworking spaces for youth social innovation, which will be an opportunity to train 24 representatives of coworking spaces, civil society organisations and municipality officers on the good practices of coworking spaces management and methods of their implementation.2) 2 Transnational Partners Meetings that will allow the exchange of knowledge on management systems of coworking spaces for social innovation in terms of their effectiveness, inclusiveness and adjustment to the needs of youth and local communities. Each TPM will connect 12 representatives of the consortium (2 participants per partner).These 2 Transnational Partners Meetings will include 2 additional shorter activities, which are:a) seminar on the management systems of coworking spaces for social innovation, which will be an introduction to the Study and an opportunity to bring the attention of relevant stakeholders to this topic.b) conference to present the results of the Study on management systems of coworking spaces for social innovation.Each of these activities should reach directly approximately 20 external stakeholders.Therefore, the project will reach at least 84 participants directly through the planned activities.The project will have an impact at the local, national and European level. The key findings of this project will be implemented by the partner organisations and other relevant stakeholders, making coworking spaces for social innovation more inclusive, effective and adjusted to the needs of youth. It will contribute to mainstreaming the model of coworking spaces for social innovation, as a system that engages youth, boosts social innovation and creates a positive impact at the local level by creating new learning opportunities, vacancies and addressing the needs of the local community.Moreover, the establishment of international cooperation between the partners and other relevant stakeholders in the field of inclusive coworking spaces for social innovation will allow further development of new, more advanced projects in this thematic area.

The overall objective of the project is to unlock the untapped potentials of social innovations (SIs) to boost the EU Missions by promoting, activating, scaling and mainstreaming SIs and by engaging and advising SI funders, investors, social innovators and R&I policymakers at European, national and local level through a series of interconnected measures. To attain this objective, we will address four Key Actions: 1. Identify an evidence base of successful and - regarding the EU Missions - auspicious SIs and co-create suitable impact pathways and anchor points for the integration of SIs in future calls and topics of the EU Missions. 2. Provide training and advice through our Training and Scaling Lab about the opportunities provided by the EU Missions, by upgrading the skills of social innovators and support organisations for successful scaling and participation in calls of the EU and of private and public funders dealing with mission related themes. 3. Create a SI Funding and Investors’ Network to advise and engage private and public funding authorities in supporting, financing and scaling powerful SIs for the EU Missions’ purposes and by expanding the range of financial instruments with the help of a SI Investment Lab. 4. Establish a Community of Practice (CoP) to implement regular exchange and learning between EU Missions, the SI Funders and Investors’ Network and social innovators to meet demand and supply and to co-create a Research Agenda to make the best use of SI for the EU Missions. The Key Exploitable Results (KERs) of the project are a Catalogue of SI impact pathways (KER-1); Operational Training and Scaling Lab (KER-2); 30 credible scaling plans (KER-3); a committed funding network to support EU Missions established (KER-4); one financial Framework Partnership Agreement for a networked catalytic fund prepared (KER-5); A co-designed research agenda (KER-6) and >200 organisations engage in exchange and dialogue (KER-6).

Through events, summits, gathering of existing tools for best practice and a digital ecosystem for social entrepreneurs, we will strengthen the ecosystem for social innovation in Europe. We will create a European peer-to-peer academy for social & impact entrepreneurship support. Co-owned by European support organizations, we will endeavor to increase the capacities of social entrepreneurship support organizations in Europe. The academy aims to sustainably boost the impact of the European ecosystem for social & impact-driven entrepreneurship. We will gather and promote tools and facilitate locally based events, and facilitate summits where knowledge, methods, best practices, and tools are disseminated. In addition, we will build on existing digital platforms to create a social innovation ecosystem where best practices, knowledge and tools will be granted free of charge for social entrepreneurs. Key output from the project: - Registration of best practice out before and after intervention. The registration forms from the first registration will be used to select relevant tools to be included in the digital ecosystem. - Two social innovation policy summits and a final conference for actors in the social innovation ecosystem. - Collection of tools from actors working with social innovation. The tools may come from relevant accelerators, investors, incubators and public entities such as universities and government. All activities and tools will be free accessible at the digital ecosystem. The digital ecosystem will be built on existing software systems. The digital ecosystem will be a strong European network with various actors within different branches and knowledge from professionals within the field.