Final Report Summary - WILCO (Welfare Innovations at the Local level In favour of Cohesion)
Executive Summary:
During the recent years of economic crisis, European cities have seen a huge growth in distress and inequality. At the urban level, these great challenges become visible and tangible, which in many senses makes cities a microcosm of society. It means that local welfare systems are at the forefront of the struggle to address this challenge – and they are far from winning. While the statistics show some positive signs, the overall picture still shows sharp and sometimes rising inequalities, a loss of social cohesion and failing policies of integration. When we focus on specific groups in society (e.g. migrants) the situation is even direr. It is clear that new ideas and approaches to tackle these problems are needed.
Such innovation has accordingly been high on the policy agenda. Indeed, ‘social innovation’ has become a buzzword in policy circles and features prominently on the agenda of the European Union. Yet there is still little solid evidence on how social innovation works. The project ‘Welfare Innovations at the Local Level in Favour of Cohesion” (WILCO, 2010-2014) was funded by the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme to address this gap in our knowledge.
WILCO had the following goals:
• To identify innovative practices in European cities and the factors that make them emerge and spread
• To set them against the context of current social problems and urban policies
• To make recommendations how to encourage local social innovation.
For this purpose, the project brought together universities from ten countries (Croatia, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK), as well as the research networks EMES and NISPACEE. The project was coordinated by Radboud University Nijmegen.
We selected twenty European cities (two per country) on which we focused our research. The chosen cities were: Münster and Berlin Friedrichshain – Kreuzberg (DE); Zagreb and Varaždin (HR); Amsterdam and Nijmegen (NL); Barcelona and Pamplona (ES); Milan and Brescia (IT); Stockholm and Malmø (SE); Birmingham and Medway area (UK); Warsaw and Plock (PL); Lille and Nantes (FR); Bern and Genève (CH).
More information about the project and our reports can be found on our website www.wilcoproject.eu.
Project Context and Objectives:
In this project, we examined innovative solutions to urban social problems, such as social exclusion and unemployment. Specifically, we investigate how new and promising social innovations emerge and how they could be more effectively spread to other cities and countries, notwithstanding legal, cultural and political differences. The project not only aimed to contribute to academic knowledge in this area, but also to actively encourage and support the use of its results in European cities.
Within its general aim, the WILCO project had several objectives. To begin with, it charted patterns of social inequality and exclusion in European cities. Specifically, three demographic categories that are particularly at risk of being at the wrong end of the statistics will be considered: the young unemployed, migrants and women. As for policy fields, WILCO focused on three areas where the problems of inequality and exclusion are especially hard to solve: child care, unemployment, and housing. It is in these areas that social innovation is especially important.
A second important objective was to identify innovative practices in European cities. Europe is swarming with citizen-led initiatives, professional discoveries and challenging local welfare policies. If all this creativity can be put to full use, the fight to raise social cohesion and lower social inequality will be much more successful.
But it is not just a question of transmitting knowledge – if this were true, it would be sufficient to rely on existing urban knowledge networks, which have done important work in encouraging the cross-national exchange of ideas. However, social innovations emerge in a certain context and often cannot be simply transplanted from one place to the other. It is necessary to understand how these innovations emerge within different socio-economic models and traditions of local welfare.
From an institutionalist perspective, WILCO contextualised innovations in local welfare and analyse how they must be positioned within national and local traditions. The project has increased knowledge of the factors that make innovative practices in the fight against social inequality successful (or not). Good ideas can falter, while bad practices can be sustained surprisingly long. Indeed, what is regarded as a good result in one place or at one time may be totally off the mark under different policies, within a different culture of welfare, with more active or passive citizens, a different welfare mix of public, for- and non-profit providers, and so forth. The reverse may also be true. The sign of an effective exchange of knowledge at the European level is that it is smart exchange, not simply throwing information around, but, on the basis of up-to-date information, assessing the potential for sustainable practices and policies: spotting opportunities where they arise and avoiding the risk of becoming a ‘policy fashion victim’: what looks good on others does not necessarily look good on you.
The projet has made recommendations about how, using these insights, the fight against social inequality and for social cohesion can be fought better. It is necessary, through the cooperation of practitioners, to develop methods that allow good ideas to spread around rapidly and effectively. In other words, the project has linked academic research to professional practice. The EMES European Research Network, with a solid track record on making the findings of scientific international projects relevant to policy-making and the work of practitioners and other stakeholders, was responsible for the coordination of the dissemination. In addition to using existing contacts in the consortium, it actively fed the results into its own network and activities as well as into other networks in which it is actively involved.
Project Results:
Findings with regard to social exclusion and vulnerability
The first part of our research consisted of mapping the main patterns of social exclusion in European cities. Our research took place at the time of the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s. Of course this means that the conditions we describe are in some respects extraordinary. However, the underlying trends predate the crisis and can be observed in other studies. The data are described in detail in the WILCO city reports, available through our website, and in the forthcoming publication Social Vulnerability in European Cities in Times of Crisis and The Role of Local Welfare (Palgrave, 2014).
Predictably, indicators on most dimensions have taken a turn for the worse in the areas we studied (childcare, housing and employment):
- Housing prices everywhere have increased, leading to problems of affordability for vulnerable people. In most cities reductions of public support from the national level, combined with the decentralisation of housing policy, have led to a drastic reduction of the resources available for local welfare housing policies.
- Despite substantial efforts by local governments in the 2000s to improve the number of childcare services and facilities in the majority of cities, the shortage of affordable places and long waiting lists remain a substantial obstacle, although to varying degrees, for families with dependent young children. Lack of affordability, lack of appropriate childcare opening hours and geographical polarisation limit access to childcare in practice, specifically for single mothers.
- Youth unemployment has risen strongly everywhere, especially in Southern European cities. It is now not uncommon that the average duration of the last spell of unemployment is longer than the average length of the last job experience. Furthermore, there is a trend toward extremely short-term contracts reduces the capacity of planning for these young people, both in terms of establishing a new household and in terms of building a successful career.
The current financial crisis is perceived as a catalyst of existing problems, for young people in general, and more specifically for some categories like first- or second-generation migrants. However, the analysis also shows the emergence of a new type of problem, which is the growing numbers of people in a condition of social vulnerability. More than by severe material deprivation or permanent poverty, this condition is characterized by instability in a context of harsh constraints. It is a situation of economic stress and uncertain financial position, accompanied by a marked reduction in the standard of living. This fragility increases the probability of social exclusion when further negative events occur (illness, unemployment, family breakdowns, and so on). Social vulnerability affects a total of 16 per cent of the population in European countries, which suggests that severe hardship today is less widespread than income fragility and work instability.
Different dynamics come together here: an increase in temporary employment, a lack of affordable housing, changing family relations and increasing migration within Europe. Temporary workers, people with low income hit by chronic invalidity, women with small children dealing with severe work/private life reconciliation problems, and individuals whose income is fluctuating just above and below the poverty line are experiencing situations characterized by few social guarantees, instability in the fundamental mechanisms for acquiring essential resources and fragility of social or family relations. What they have in common is that their position within the main systems of social integration (work, family, the welfare system) is weakened because of their being for a long time in a condition of uncertainty.
The nature of these problems appears similar across different types of cities. Although they differ in extent and effects, notions that they occur primarily in depressed economic areas or in globally competitive with rising levels of inequality are false. Indeed, the focus on national differences in social policy research tends to mask the fact that the similarities between large European cities in different countries are often greater than those between city and countryside within the same country.
Local welfare systems deal with the emerging social reality in various ways and with varying degrees of success. The different strategies are described elaborately in the city reports the WILCO project has compiled, based on an analysis both of local policies, politics and discourse. It is clear that welfare is being increasingly shaped at the local, rather than national, level, through the involvement of several types of local actors. Social innovations are one part of this emerging welfare mix.
Findings with regard to urban welfare governance
Our 20 cities have certainly common features, but are distinct in the way social policies are ideologically and practically justified. Following a process of typologising, including temporal dynamics and information about values and policy choices, we identified four kind of regimes, characterised by different relations between social and economic policies at the city level. They can be described as follow:
• The governance of innovation is characterised by the continuous search of synergies between economic and social policies. The political consensus is fragile, but stabilises ambivalences in the city’s driving coalitions around the idea of the innovative (or creative) city. The coalition’s major orientation is to foster urbanity as a project and as a way of live, bohemian and innovative, open to differences and responsive to marginality. Through urbanity, that’s the guiding hypothesis, economic dynamics would be improved. From the organisational point of view, this governance style privileges welfare mix solutions. Values that all actors share are the idea of urbanity, pragmatism and efficiency; ideologies are secondary in the definition of policy priorities. Examples of this governance style were Bern, Münster, Barcelona and Varaždin. Varaždin’s orientation was developed following indications from the EU.
• The governance of growth gives priority to economic policies. The orientation is anti-urban and politics are strongly influenced by economic interest groups. This growth machine orientation privatises social problems as individual faults. Pamplona and Birmingham were examples of the predominance of this kind of governance.
• The governance of social challenges gives priority to social policy orientations in the production of services. Economic dynamics are handled parallel to social polices and are not related nor in conflict to them. It follows a more traditional social welfare policies in which the local state plays a primordial role in the production and distribution of services. Political parties and party politics define this orientation and the dominant, more paternalistic choices in the field of social policy. Shared values are solidarity and the social responsibility of the state. Cities like Malmø, Stockholm, Geneva, Lille, Nantes, Nijmegen, Brescia, Zagreb, Warsaw and Plock were examples of this kind of governance. Concerning Zagreb, Warsaw and Plock we find again the EU as dominant partner in the definition of the governance style.
• Finally, we identified a conflicting governance of social and economic challenges. In this case, a combination of a weak local government and strong economic and social interest groups create a concurrence between economic and social investments. The value orientation in the field of social policies is conflicting with an opposition between a social and an economic lobby. Each social policy creates a debate between individualism (and individual responsibility) vs. solidarity and a collective responsibility. Berlin and Milan were examples of such a conflicting kind of governance.
Findings with regard to emerging social innovations
The WILCO project examined a total number of 77 cases of social innovation. They are described and comparatively analysed in the e-book Social Innovations for Social Cohesion: Transnational Patterns and Approaches from 20 European cities, available for download on our website.
We have grouped innovations according to five dimensions that we regard as the most important recurring approaches and instruments. One initiative can incorporate several types of innovations. For example, The ‘Young people with a future’ initiative in Barcelona constituted both a service and a governance innovation.
1. Innovations in services and their ways to address users: The majority of the social innovations we studied were service innovations. Since personal social services are by definition a special form of social relationship between people, this is not a surprise. Moreover, services are more accessible to small-scale innovations by social entrepreneurs, groups of citizens and other change agents than most high-tech products. Innovations focused on investing in capabilities; open approaches avoiding targeting with stigmatizing effects; initiatives that bridge the gaps between professional services and people‘s life worlds; and services that connect separated forms of support and access, allowing for personalized bundles of support.
2. Innovations in regulations and rights: In addition to reinventing services, social innovations can also pertain to the rules governing such services. Innovations of this type included creating flexible forms of ad hoc support; developing offers beyond fixed social and participation rights and entitlements that meet newly emerging risks; and working with “social contracts” for individuals and groups.
3. Innovations in governance: social innovations represent a combination of new “products” and new “processes” (including the internal organisation of decision-making and ways of interacting with the environment). Most innovations that aim at developing new kinds of services also have a governance dimension. For some innovations this is even a core issue. Governance innovations found by the project are fostering units and types of organization that operate in more embedded and networked ways; giving new concerns and groups a voice in the public domain; organizing more intense forms of public debate and opinion-building around challenges in cohesion policies; and building issue related coalitions and partnerships
4. Innovations in modes of working and financing: These include flexicurity in working contracts; levels of institutionalization and security below traditional standards; combining professional teams and voluntary commitments; defining strong mission profiles; and combining resources from different stakeholders. When an innovation means to deal differently with a given challenge or pressure this must often entail a way to accept and live with worsening material conditions. This tends to increase the imbalance between ambitions on the one hand, and conditions and means on the other hand. Therefore innovative elements like flexible teamwork are hard to disentangle from conditions where it is impossible to offer some basic degree of job security. Likewise an innovative way of working in a multi-stakeholder perspective can entail a chronically underfunded local public sector, making it difficult to differentiate between winning additional societal support and using local partners as a spare wheel.
5. Innovations concerning the entity of (local) welfare systems: Finally, we have looked at the possible contributions of innovations to developments in local welfare systems. We have understood these to include, besides the local welfare state, the welfare-related roles and responsibilities of the third sector, the market, communities and families. Such types of innovations include reaching out to all sectors of local welfare systems and reducing the state focus; aiming at less standardized, more diverse and localized welfare arrangements; upgrading the community component in mixed welfare systems (families, support); integrating economic and social logics (entrepreneurial action, developmental welfare) and Integrating welfare and urban politics.
Findings with regard to the sustainability of innovations
In addition to analysing the types of emerging innovations, we also made some observations with respect to how they continued to develop. There is a tendency in publicity on social innovation to discuss successful cases and those that are scaled up to a system-wide level. Based on our evidence, it must be concluded that the reality of local social innovations is a different one. The majority remain local and last only a limited number of years. The emphasis on success stories and scaling-up is an important one, with implications for the direction of future funding; but it is equally important to realise that the majority of local innovations (especially those not originating in professional organisations) do not fit such a pattern of growth and that one should not disregard the cumulative effect of the many small, temporary initiatives that are of high value within their local context. Public policy should therefore not focus only on the selective group of innovations with a high growth potential, but also on the capacity of cities to continue generating many new initiatives of a highly local nature.
Of the innovations we studied, the majority were either discontinued after a few years or faced an uncertain future in the short term. Cutbacks in public sector funding no doubt play a part in this, but the underlying structural dynamics, such as project-based funding, dependence on charismatic initiators and shifting political fashions, suggest that the underlying conditions are of a structural nature.
The most sustainable innovations were those that were either fully integrated into the local welfare administration or even initiated by the local authorities. Generally, local authorities tended to favour innovations that were complementary to their growth strategy, aimed at making the city more dynamic and attractive. This means that there is not necessarily a smooth fit between social innovation and economic growth agendas.
Another factor that affected innovations’ chance of survival was whether they involved a wide coalition of parties. Such parties could include the third sector, local governments, businesses and groups of citizens. A broad alliance made it easier to sustain the innovation even when one of the parties (like the local authorities) withdrew its support. Highly vulnerable were those innovations which were primarily dependent on European funds.
Finally, what also mattered to a large degree was the governance style of local authorities. Innovations could more easily gain recognition and sustainability where there was an open governance style, that is, where authorities proved open to contributions to local welfare by different parties. To some extent such openness appeared related to institutional factors, such as the level of decentralisation within the state structure and historical traditions of working with the third sector; but it also depended on the nature of local politics, the prevailing discourse and availability of people who could act as ‘boundary spanners’, connecting institutional and life worlds.
Findings with regard to the diffusion of innovations
Another way for social innovations to gain a longer life is for them to be diffused to other cities and countries. Most of the publications on the diffusion of innovations are based on business contexts and on products, rather than services, which means that it is important to identify clearly how local social innovations are different. The nature of products made for the commercial market is that they are not made primarily for the local market, but deliberately designed to spread widely to other places. Social innovations, by contrast, are usually initiated to solve a local problem. Wider diffusion is only of secondary importance to the innovators, if not irrelevant. The image of the highly visible entrepreneur giving TedX talks is, in this case, unrepresentative. Therefore it is especially important for this type of innovation to have intermediaries, who know the situation on the ground and assess what it takes for innovations to take root elsewhere. There was no evidence that at this point in time established EU channels play a significant role in this process.
Unlike many products, which can shift places easily, social innovations have to be ‘translated’ to be effective elsewhere. It is rare to have a straight transfer from an idea from one place to another, although we did find some examples of this (for initiatives that were typically low-resource, low-skill). Approaches or projects will in some way need to be adapted to the context into which they are adopted. For instance, what is originally a project to keep young people socially active may elsewhere be justified with the discourse of unemployment or crime prevention. The shape of a collaborative arrangement may have to be altered, for example, because responsibilities for a certain policy area are distributed differently over governments at different levels, or because services are provided privately in the country and publicly in the other. The innovation will need to be re-shaped. The adaptation may concern the structure of an innovation, e.g. its formal organisational shape, but also the regulation that supports it, the instruments through which it is implemented, or the discourse with which it is described and justified. Innovations are therefore usually hybrids of different ideas and inspirations.
Given that such a process of reconstruction and translation must take place, it requires new ways of collaboration, for example, between governments and citizens, and new ways of thinking. Our material shows that, in local welfare, this process does not start when an innovation is introduced, but usually well before that. Rather, it is the other way round: an innovation is adopted when minds are ripe. A good idea is not convincing in itself – it comes when people are open to it. What this means is that adopting an innovation from elsewhere is, from the perspective of the adopting parties, not fundamentally different from inventing one. After all, it requires similar breakthroughs in institutional routines, whether of content, collaboration, or other aspects of working.
This means that the process of diffusion starts before the actual adoption of an innovation. Research on diffusion tends to focus on the process after the adoption, and then especially at successful cases of adoption. Yet the innovative capacity of a city is not only reflected in what is adopted (a specific approach to solving a problem), but also in the groundwork that is done before the adoption (getting the right people together, getting minds ready for new options). This is very relevant to public administration reform, because it means that simply finding the right kinds of solutions is in itself not enough. It requires a different approach to governance.
Methodology
In this appendix, we will give an overview of the methodology used throughout the different stages of the WILCO project.
First stage
The first part of the project consisted of mapping the context of social innovations at the local level. We described the historical-institutional background on the basis of two dimensions, the structure of the overall welfare state and the degree of centralisation and the position of ‘the local’ in shaping welfare. For this purpose, we made an inventory of variables that must be regarded as formal pre-conditions for local welfare policies and initiatives, including key regulations, financial provisions, contractual arrangements and entitlements. Because at this concrete level there were many changes in key variables (e.g. in financial and regulatory conditions), we set a time frame covering the last 10 years. The variables were specified for three policy fields central to the project: child care, employment and housing.
We started with a literature review. To be sure our information was up-to-date, we also conducted six interviews per country (two in each of the three policy fields, with public officials and professionals), sixty overall.
Second stage
After we had mapped these national backgrounds to social innovation, we moved to the local level. We chose twenty European cities (two per country) on which we focused our remaining research. The chosen cities were: Münster and Berlin Friedrichshain – Kreuzberg (DE); Zagreb and Varazdin (HR); Amsterdam and Nijmegen (NL); Barcelona and Pamplona (ES); Milan and Brescia (IT); Stockholm and Malmø (SE); Birmingham and Medway area (UK); Warsaw and Plock (PL); Lille and Nantes (FR); Bern and Genève (CH). For the twenty chosen cities, we gathered data about social inequality and exclusion in the local labour market, housing market and child care facilities, as well as more general data on patterns of social cohesion. Specifically, we identified the relative position of age, gender and migrant groups with respect to general patterns of social inequality and exclusion.
Data collection consisted of two parts. The first was an analysis of the Eurostat Database Urban Audit, that includes data for more than 200 European cities, constituted the background for our comparative analysis. The following aspects were analysed: the structure of the labour market (employment by sector, activity rate by gender and age, unemployment rate by gender and age); the demographic structure (changes in the population over the last ten years, the structure of the population by age, proportion of immigrants on the overall population, old age dependency ratio), the inequality structure (gaps in the unemployment rates between centre and periphery, inequalities in the education level of the population, gender gaps in the activity rate and employment). The second part consisted of 360 intensive interviews, thirty-six in each country (six interviews for each group mentioned above in each city). The analysis was aimed at describing the living conditions of these people experiencing difficult situations and at identifying the strategies they adopt in order to deal with these situations. Special attention was paid to the factors preventing these people from getting social benefits and support from public, private or non-profit services.
On the basis of these data we wrote city reports, which included the following:
• An analysis of the main characteristics and trends of the local labour market (main sectors, employment and unemployment levels, groups of population mainly affected by long-term unemployment);
• An analysis of demographic structure of the population and of the trends taking place in the last 10 years (proportion of the elderly, fertility and natality rates, proportion of immigrants and their distribution in the urban territory, etc.);
• An analysis of the housing market, with special attention to critical situations such as overcrowding, difficult affordability, evictions, homelessness; a special attention will be paid also to the territorial distribution of the population most at risk and to identify critical urban areas with high concentration of problematic social groups;
• An analysis of the use of child care services, both public and private, with the aim of identifying specific situations characterised by a mismatch between supply and demand.
The interviews were translated into Excel sheets, as a basis for the analysis. The analysis was aimed at describing the living conditions of these people experiencing difficult situations and at identifying the strategies they adopt in order to deal with these situations. Special attention has been paid to understand what are the main factors preventing these people from getting social benefits and support from public, private or non-profit services.
The comparative analysis among similar situations in different cities allowed us to clarify the local factors influencing why and how people get into these situations (or are protected from them). The reconstruction of the specific everyday strategies of people affected by these problems allowed an understanding not only their needs, but also the resources (social networks, welfare benefits, reintegration programmes) that people at risk can mobilise in order to alleviate their own situation. This analysis helped to identify the specific local innovations that could be developed in order to meet these social needs.
Third stage
Having identified the context of innovations in local welfare in the first part of the project, the project turned to the innovations themselves. In order to do so, a distinction was made between the core ideas behind local welfare and the concrete approaches and instruments through which local welfare is implemented.
The first part of the analysis focused on discourses about social inequality and social cohesion in the three policy fields mentioned above, revealing the core ideas that drive innovations in local welfare. The key methods used were:
• Document analysis: content analysis of policy documents, minutes of local council meetings and a media analysis.
• Interviews: Researchers held 36 qualitative semi-structured interviews per country, with stakeholders both within the analysed fields and at the level of general policy. For each policy field, we selected policymakers (3), civil servants (3), and representatives of civil society organisations (3), representatives of our three chosen groups (3).
• Focus groups: To involve stakeholders in the progress of the research, one focus group meeting was organised in each city to which we invited policymakers, civil servants, representatives of civil society organisations and representatives of the three groups of interest.
The data were analysed and organised along guidelines spread by the WP leader, the University of Geneva.
After the discourses, we described instruments and approaches that are used to fight against social inequality and stimulate social cohesion. By virtue of the knowledge accumulated in previous phases of the research, we could assess how instruments and approaches were innovative in their context and whether they would be so in another context. In total, we gathered information about 77 social innovations.
A number of criteria were used to select innovations:
• An innovation is innovative in its specific context. So, what mattered is whether an innovation was regarded as new in a particular city. It did not have to be path-breaking on a European or global scale.
• Since we looked as well at the dynamics of social innovations, we selected only those that have overcome the very inception stage. According to this criterion, every selected innovation had to have existed for at least one year (since March 2011) in order to be scrutinized. The innovations we looked at are about ideas or approaches that have been implemented in practice to some degree. This "project" can be an organisation or an organisational subunit with new services that clearly differs from what existed so far in the field, but it can also be a measure/intervention such as a new transfer, tax or resource arrangement.
• Social innovations could refer to a large project, but also to a cluster of small, similar projects. In such a case, it was the task to describe the whole cluster and zoom in on one or two of the small cases, to get a sense of the micro-dynamics.
• In case the innovation was part of a government program meant to promote, finance and regulate an innovative approach, only those innovations from wider national programs that could be seen as "local" – in the sense that there was a considerable degree of freedom to shape them in the local context – were picked up.
• Since social innovations generally included both bottom-up and top-down elements, we chose projects with variations in the mix (i.e. both innovations that were more citizen-driven as well as others with a stronger government involvement, etc.) in order to get a good sense of the different dynamics.
• As a mandatory requirement, in each city at least three and at most six innovations had to be featured and analysed by each team. The actual number of cases chosen in a city depended largely on the complexity of the respective cases.
• Each team had to cover all the three policy fields (child care, employment and housing) and target groups (single mothers, youngsters and migrants).
In addition to the material collected at previous stages, new data were gathered through interviews, with policymakers, professionals and users, at least 18 per country team (180 overall).
The data were analysed and organised along guidelines spread by the WP leader, Justus-Liebig University Giessen.
Fourth stage
At the final stage of the project, the data from the preceding stages of the project were analysed, integrated and discussed with stakeholders. It resulted in this final report and various other outputs.
Potential Impact:
Lessons learnt about social innovation
Of the many lessons we learnt from the research in this project, we would like to emphasize the following:
1. There is a tendency in publicity on social innovation to discuss successful cases and those that are scaled up to a system-wide level. Based on our evidence, it must be concluded that the reality of local social innovations is a different one. Many social innovations are short-lived and remain small in scope.
2. Public policy should not focus singularly on the selective group of innovations that can be mainstreamed. Instead, it should pay more attention to the capacity of cities to continue generating many new initiatives of a highly local nature.
3. Social innovation does not necessarily complement strategies for economic growth, nor is it necessarily an adequate substitute for existing welfare policies. It can in specific cases; but general statements to this effect should be distrusted.
4. Approaches or projects will in some way need to be adapted to the context into which they are adopted. Encouraging social innovation is best done by allocating resources, not only to spreading information and building networks, but also to boundary spanning and translation activities. It is essential to include local people who know the situation on the ground and assess what it takes for innovations to take root elsewhere.
5. The concept behind a social innovation is less important than the collaborative relationships needed to implement it in a local context.
6. Innovations can more easily gain recognition and sustainability where there was an open governance style, that is, where authorities proved open to contributions to local welfare by different parties. To some extent such openness derives from structural features of administrative systems, but policymakers and officials in all types of systems have proven capable of achieving it.
Recommendations on EU-funded social innovation research
On February 1, 2013, representatives of several European Union-funded projects came together to discuss the potential for collaboration and to determine where we stand. As part of this effort the European Commission, in collaboration with the WILCO project, commissioned a study to map the state of the art of the current projects. On the basis of this review, we published the position paper Social Innovation Research in Horizon 2020, endorsed by several other European projects.
In this position paper, we noted that European Union-funded research can play a crucial role in encouraging social innovation; that there is a risk, however, that in its current form competition for funding fragments the research community rather than bringing it together. We signalled the challenge to combine the added value of European Union-funded research (the broad interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, the combined emphasis on academic excellence and practical application) with a more coherent approach to the study of social innovation.
On the basis of this analysis, we made the following recommendations to the European Union:
1. To devote sufficient funds for social innovation in Horizon 2020, including funds for transfer and dissemination.
2. To involve all stakeholders (the scientific community, civil society and the public and private sectors) in identifying and defining research topics on social innovation, whilst ensuring that social need and open processes remain paramount.
3. To address the following key themes in its research funding:
o The clarification of the relationship between technological and social innovation.
o The impact and outcomes of social innovations on urgent problems in contemporary society.
o The measurement and evaluation of social innovations.
o The link between research and capacity building.
4. To encourage more collaboration, both between European Union-funded projects and between academics and practitioners.
5. To increase the flexibility within projects, to allow project managers more scope for responding to stakeholders and addressing emerging needs on an on-going basis, through a combination of small scale experimentation and strategic thinking.
Outputs of the project
1. RESEARCH REPORTS
10 National reports on local welfare systems focused on housing, employment and childcare:
United Kingdom (WILCO Publication #1)
Italy (WILCO Publication #2)
Sweden (WILCO Publication #3)
The Netherlands (WILCO Publication #4)
Croatia (WILCO Publication #5)
Spain (WILCO Publication #6)
Switzerland (WILCO Publication #7)
Germany (WILCO Publication #8)
Poland (WILCO Publication #9)
France (WILCO Publication #10)
First Comparative Report (WILCO Publication #11) – Also available as EMES Working Paper no. 12/01 “Local Welfare from a Historical and Institutional Perspective: A Comparative Report” by T. Brandsen, O. Segnestam Larsson, M. Nordfeldt (149 downloads)
Missing data report (WILCO Publication #12)
20 City reports on the development of social welfare:
Amsterdam, NL (WILCO Publication #13)
Barcelona, ES (WILCO Publication #14)
Berlin, DE (WILCO Publication #15)
Bern, CH (WILCO Publication #16)
Birmingham, UK (WILCO Publication #17)
Brescia, IT (WILCO Publication #18)
Geneva, CH (WILCO Publication #19)
Lille, FR (WILCO Publication #20)
Malmö, SE (WILCO Publication #21)
Medway, UK (WILCO Publication #22)
Milan, IT (WILCO Publication #23)
Münster, DE (WILCO Publication #24)
Nantes, FR (WILCO Publication #25)
Nijmegen, NL (WILCO Publication #26)
Pamplona, ES (WILCO Publication #27)
Płock, PL (WILCO Publication #28)
Stockholm, SE (WILCO Publication #29)
Varaždin, HR (WILCO Publication #30)
Warsaw, PL (WILCO Publication #31)
Zagreb, HR (WILCO Publication #32)
Second Comparative Report (WILCO Publication #33) – Also available as EMES Working Paper no.12/02 “Measures of Social Cohesion: Comparative Report” by C. Ranci, G. Costa, S. Sabatinelli, T. Brandsen (175 downloads)
20 city reports on the innovation and local welfare system interplay:
Amsterdam, NL (WILCO Publication #34)
Barcelona, ES (WILCO Publication #35)
Berlin, DE (WILCO Publication #36)
Bern, CH (WILCO Publication #37)
Birmingham, UK (WILCO Publication #38)
Brescia, IT (WILCO Publication #39)
Geneva, CH (WILCO Publication #40)
Lille, FR (WILCO Publication #45)
Malmö, SE (WILCO Publication #46)
Medway, UK (WILCO Publication #47)
Milan, IT (WILCO Publication #48)
Münster, DE (WILCO Publication #49)
Nantes, FR (WILCO Publication #50)
Nijmegen, NL (WILCO Publication #51)
Pamplona, ES (WILCO Publication #52)
Płock, PL (WILCO Publication #53)
Stockholm, SE (WILCO Publication #54)
Varaždin, HR (WILCO Publication #55)
Warsaw, PL (WILCO Publication #56)
Zagreb, HR (WILCO Publication #57)
Third Comparative Report (WILCO Publication #58) – Urban Policy Innovations in Local Welfare: Core Ideas
20 reports on innovations in European cities:
Amsterdam, NL (WILCO Publication #59)
Barcelona, ES (WILCO Publication #60)
Berlin, DE (WILCO Publication #61)
Bern, CH (WILCO Publication #62)
Birmingham, UK (WILCO Publication #63)
Brescia, IT (WILCO Publication #64)
Geneva, CH (WILCO Publication #65)
Lille, FR (WILCO Publication #66)
Malmö, SE (WILCO Publication #67)
Medway, UK (WILCO Publication #68)
Milan, IT (WILCO Publication #69)
Münster, DE (WILCO Publication #70)
Nantes, FR (WILCO Publication #71)
Nijmegen, NL (WILCO Publication #72)
Pamplona, ES (WILCO Publication #73)
Płock, PL (WILCO Publication #74)
Stockholm, SE (WILCO Publication #75)
Varaždin, HR (WILCO Publication #76)
Warsaw, PL (WILCO Publication #77)
Zagreb, HR (WILCO Publication #78)
Fourth Comparative Report (WILCO Publication #79) – Approaches and instruments in local welfare systems: innovation, adoption and adaptation
2. EDITED VOLUMES
Two edited volumes on social innovation:
- “Social vulnerability in European cities” (2014) - (WILCO Publication #80)
- “Social Innovations in the urban context” (2015) - (WILCO Publication #81)
An e-book “Social Innovations for social cohesion 77 cases 20 European cities” (ISBN: 978-2-930773-00-1. Available in PDF, eReader and ePub) - WILCO Publication #82
3. POLICY BRIEFS & POSITION PAPER
"Social innovation research in the European Union: Approaches, findings and future directions" Policy Brief (October 2013) - WILCO Publication #83
“Lessons Learnt about the Sustainability and Diffusion of Social Innovation. Policy brief based on the evidence of the WILCO project” (February 2014) - WILCO Publication #84
"Social Innovation Research in Horizon 2020" Position paper (June 2013) This paper was endorsed by four other European research projects (INNOSERV, LIPSE, TEPSIE and CSEYHP), showing that the views and concerns expressed in the paper are widely shared - WILCO Publication #85
4. SUMMARY OF FINDINGS
“Summary of findings from the WILCO Project (2010-2014)” (February 2014) - WILCO Publication #86
5. SPECIAL JOURNAL ISSUE
A special theme issue in the journal Voluntary Sector Review will be published, co-edited by Taco Brandsen and Adalbert Evers in late 2014.
6. PROJECT BROCHURES
Two project brochures were created during the project:
- The first brochure produced in the second month of the project focusing on the objectives of the project (3000 copies printed and distributed among WILCO partners and handed out in public seminars and events). It was also published on the web site as a downloadable resource; and
- The final brochure summarizing the outputs of the project and the main findings in a succinct manner. The electronic format has been prioritized for the last one although 100 copies were printed and distributed for the closing event.
7. WILCO Up! NEWS ALERTS
09/01/2014 - WILCO Up! Final Event Video
16/10/2013 - WILCO Up! Oct 2013
12/17/2012 - WILCO Up! #4 - News from the WILCO project
07/13/2012 - WILCO Up! #3 - News from the WILCO project
04/30/2012 - WILCO Up! #2 News Alert
02/21/2012 - WILCO Up! #1 News Alert
A total of 1581 people signed up for the WILCO Up! news alert, which represents about 9486 people potentially hit my our
8. GRASSROOTS EVENTS
Location (Country)/Date:
20. Milan (IT-2)/ March 2014
19. Lille (FR-2)/ February 2014
18. Brescia (IT-1)/ 24.1.2014
17. Dover (UK-2 )/22.1.2014
16. Malmö (SE-2)/14.1.2014
15. Nijmegen (NL-2)/9.1.2014
14. Paris (FR-1)/15.11.2013
13. Bern (CH-2)/ 6.11.2013
12. Geneva (CH-1)/ 30.10.2013
11. Birmingham (UK-1)/ 17.9.2013
10. Zagreb (HR-2)/ 8.7.2013
9. Warsaw (PL-2)/13.5.2013
8. Zagreb (HR-1)/ 23.3.2013
7. Münster (DE-2)/ 15.4.2013
6. Barcelona (ES-2)/12.4.2013
5. Berlin (DE-1)/ 28.2.2013
4. Utrecht (NL-1)/ 28.2.2013
3. Warsaw (PL-1)/ 9.1.2013
2. Barcelona (ES-1)/12.11.2012
1. Stockholm (SE-1)/ 6.11.2012
A brief report on each of the grassroots events is available at www.wilcoproject.eu
9. AUDIOVISUAL OTUPUTS
WILCO Final Documentary: A documentary divided in three individual video pieces was produced and published at the end of the Project (January 31st, 2014). The titles and views as of by February 24th, 2014 of each part are:
• Social vulnerability in European cities (178 full views and 2,098 full downloads)
• Social Innovations across Europe (201 full views and 2,057 full downloads)
• Governance of innovation across European cities (75 full views and 586 full downloads; this video was launched a bit later so as to re-launch interest in the Project)
Considering then that the period covered here only includes 24 days for the first two videos and 9 days for the third video, the total number of full views reached (454) is quite impressive.
WILCO Video Series
This series of videos aim at capturing in a succinct way various aspects of the WILCO project, including its potential impact, the people involved in the project, or how to get involved in its activities. A total of nine videos were produced (number of views by February 24th, 2014 included in the third column):
Number/Title/Views
#1 Interview with Heiko Prange-Gstöehl, project officer of WILCO/Views: 130
#2 Solving housing challenges for artists through social innovation: The Bookstore project/Views: 646
#3 Thoughts on the Relevance of Social Innovation for Europe/Views: 203
#4 What is the added value of WILCO?/Views: 200
#5 What are the main challenges facing the transferring on social innovation?/Views: 111
#6 “Approaches to research on Social Innovation I"/Views: 25
#7"Approaches to research on Social Innovation II"/Views 23
#8 "Disseminating research results: WILCO and the EMES network"/View: 104
#9 "Community mothers - social innovation in Berlin" (connected to the Bertelsmann Summer School, see below)/Views 49
Total Views: 1491
10. INTERNET-BASED OTUPUTS
WILCO Project website
A full-fledged website was created for the project. After the initial launching of the site, it is regularly updated with events, documents and news. In addition to the main sections, two direct buttons for visitors to use were created: a feedback form and a mailing list subscription button. Regarding traffic and number of visitors, the following table summarizes information about the traffic (period included 25 May 2011 to 28 February 2014).
Table 1 - Main website statistics regarding visitors
Unique visitors 23/05/11 23/05/12: 2,569; 24/05/12-28/2/14: 3,052, Total: 5,621
Pageviews 23/05/11 23/05/12: 14,110; 24/05/12-28/2/14: 20,214, Total: 34,324
Pages per visit 23/05/11 23/05/12: 3.47; 24/05/12-28/2/14: 3.53 Total: n/a
New visits 23/05/11 23/05/12: 61.32%; 24/05/12-28/2/14: 53.30%; Total: n/a
WILCO Project Facebook page and Twitter account
WILCO gradually built up followers in the form of people who “like” its Facebook page and in the form of followers in Twitter. The Facebook page was created on 1st December 2010 and it has been “liked” by 202 users. Over 700 posts were created with an average total reach of 80 people per post (all the reach are organic, non paid).
As for Twitter (@WILCOproject), a total of 278 Tweets were published and WILCO ended up with 158 Followers and followed 143 accounts.
11. TRAINING OTUPUTS
Under the overarching title of “The three SE pillars: Social Entrepreneurship, Social Economy and Solidarity Economy”, two EMES International PhD Summer Schools were organized related to WILCO:
- 3rd EMES PhD Summer School, 4 - 8 July 2012, University of Trento, Italy. A total of 70 applications were received and 39 participants were finally selected. About half of the participants (54%) were of European origin and there were participants from all Asia (18%), South America (10%), North America (10%) and Africa (8%). Taco Brandsen, WILCO coordinator, led a plenary session to describe the work covered in WILCO.
More information: http://www.emes.net/what-we-do/training-education/phd-summer-schools/3rd-emes-international-phd-summer-school
- 4th EMES PhD Summer School, 29 June – 2 July 2014, Western Timisoara University (Romania). This event will be held after the closing of WILCO but the Project will be an intrinsic part of the event program. WILCO will be discussed from a methodological perspective and the Project findings will be discussed as well by Taco Brandsen and Adalbert Evers, both members of the event Academic Committee and Faculty Body.
More information: http://www.emes.net/what-we-do/training-education/phd-summer-schools/4th-emes-international-phd-summer-school
1st Bertelsmann Summer School on Scaling Social Innovation, 27 - 29 September 2013, University of Münster (WILCO partner)
In order to realise training for professionals in the field of social innovation, the WILCO project engaged in collaboration with the Bertelsmann Foundation and several German universities that host postgraduate programme in the area of non-profit management. In 2013, the first of a series of summer schools were organised to highlight the topic of scaling up social innovations, to which faculty from all the participating universities will contribute. The WILCO findings were integrated through lectures and learning videos. Taco Brandsen, Adalbert Evers and Annette Zimmer were among the five faculty members participating in the event.
More information (in German) at: http://weiterbildung.uni-muenster.de/weiterbildungsangebote/masterstudiengang-nonprofit-management-governance/sommerakademie.html
List of Websites:
Project’s Website: www.wilcoproject.eu
Team members of the project:
Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands)
• Taco Brandsen
• Francesca Broersma
• Joost Fledderus
• Astrid Souren
Münster University (Germany)
• Annette Zimmer
• Patrick Boadu
• Danielle Gluns
• Thorsten Hallmann
• Maren Meissner
• Christina Rentzsch
• Andrea Walter
• Andrè Christian Wolf
Politecnico de Milano (Italy)
• Costanzo Ranci
• Giuliana Costa
• Stefania Sabatinelli
University of Geneva (Switzerland)
• Sandro Cattacin
• Nathalie Kakpo
• Patricia Naegeli
• Maxime Felder
Universitat de Barcelona (Spain)
• Teresa Montagut Antoli
• Manuel Aguilar Hendrickson
• Sebastià Riutort
• Marta Llobet Estany
• Cristina López Villanueva
• Gemma Vilà Bosqued
• Anna Escobedo
• Catalina Chamorro
University of Zagreb (Croatia)
• Gojko Bezovan
• Danijel Baturina
• Jelena Matančević
CRIDA (France)
• Laurent Fraisse
• Anouk Coqblin
• Christian Laidebeur
Warsaw University
• Renata Siemienska-Zochowska
• Anna Domaradzka-Widla
• Ilona Matysiak
University of Kent (United Kingdom)
• Jeremy Kendall
• Nadia Brookes
• Lavinia Mitton
Ersta Sköndal University College (Sweden)
• Marie Nordfeldt
• Ola Segnestam Larsson
• Anna Carrigan
Justus-Liebig University Giessen (Germany)
• Adalbert Evers
• Benjamin Ewert
EMES International Research Network
• Rocío Nogales Muriel
• Sophie Adam
• Jenny Eschweiler
• Sabine Spada
European Research Services
• Oliver Panzer
• Friedrich Paulsen
• Nadine Bresch
NISPAcee
• Ludmila Gajdosova
WILCO ADVISORY COMMITTEE
• Amana Ferro, European Anti Poverty Network (EAPN)
• Mathias Maucher, European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU)
• Alice Pittini, CECODHAS Housing Europe
• Steven Rathgeb Smith, University of Washington
• Anne Skevik Grødem, Institute for Labour and Social Research (FAFO)
During the recent years of economic crisis, European cities have seen a huge growth in distress and inequality. At the urban level, these great challenges become visible and tangible, which in many senses makes cities a microcosm of society. It means that local welfare systems are at the forefront of the struggle to address this challenge – and they are far from winning. While the statistics show some positive signs, the overall picture still shows sharp and sometimes rising inequalities, a loss of social cohesion and failing policies of integration. When we focus on specific groups in society (e.g. migrants) the situation is even direr. It is clear that new ideas and approaches to tackle these problems are needed.
Such innovation has accordingly been high on the policy agenda. Indeed, ‘social innovation’ has become a buzzword in policy circles and features prominently on the agenda of the European Union. Yet there is still little solid evidence on how social innovation works. The project ‘Welfare Innovations at the Local Level in Favour of Cohesion” (WILCO, 2010-2014) was funded by the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme to address this gap in our knowledge.
WILCO had the following goals:
• To identify innovative practices in European cities and the factors that make them emerge and spread
• To set them against the context of current social problems and urban policies
• To make recommendations how to encourage local social innovation.
For this purpose, the project brought together universities from ten countries (Croatia, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK), as well as the research networks EMES and NISPACEE. The project was coordinated by Radboud University Nijmegen.
We selected twenty European cities (two per country) on which we focused our research. The chosen cities were: Münster and Berlin Friedrichshain – Kreuzberg (DE); Zagreb and Varaždin (HR); Amsterdam and Nijmegen (NL); Barcelona and Pamplona (ES); Milan and Brescia (IT); Stockholm and Malmø (SE); Birmingham and Medway area (UK); Warsaw and Plock (PL); Lille and Nantes (FR); Bern and Genève (CH).
More information about the project and our reports can be found on our website www.wilcoproject.eu.
Project Context and Objectives:
In this project, we examined innovative solutions to urban social problems, such as social exclusion and unemployment. Specifically, we investigate how new and promising social innovations emerge and how they could be more effectively spread to other cities and countries, notwithstanding legal, cultural and political differences. The project not only aimed to contribute to academic knowledge in this area, but also to actively encourage and support the use of its results in European cities.
Within its general aim, the WILCO project had several objectives. To begin with, it charted patterns of social inequality and exclusion in European cities. Specifically, three demographic categories that are particularly at risk of being at the wrong end of the statistics will be considered: the young unemployed, migrants and women. As for policy fields, WILCO focused on three areas where the problems of inequality and exclusion are especially hard to solve: child care, unemployment, and housing. It is in these areas that social innovation is especially important.
A second important objective was to identify innovative practices in European cities. Europe is swarming with citizen-led initiatives, professional discoveries and challenging local welfare policies. If all this creativity can be put to full use, the fight to raise social cohesion and lower social inequality will be much more successful.
But it is not just a question of transmitting knowledge – if this were true, it would be sufficient to rely on existing urban knowledge networks, which have done important work in encouraging the cross-national exchange of ideas. However, social innovations emerge in a certain context and often cannot be simply transplanted from one place to the other. It is necessary to understand how these innovations emerge within different socio-economic models and traditions of local welfare.
From an institutionalist perspective, WILCO contextualised innovations in local welfare and analyse how they must be positioned within national and local traditions. The project has increased knowledge of the factors that make innovative practices in the fight against social inequality successful (or not). Good ideas can falter, while bad practices can be sustained surprisingly long. Indeed, what is regarded as a good result in one place or at one time may be totally off the mark under different policies, within a different culture of welfare, with more active or passive citizens, a different welfare mix of public, for- and non-profit providers, and so forth. The reverse may also be true. The sign of an effective exchange of knowledge at the European level is that it is smart exchange, not simply throwing information around, but, on the basis of up-to-date information, assessing the potential for sustainable practices and policies: spotting opportunities where they arise and avoiding the risk of becoming a ‘policy fashion victim’: what looks good on others does not necessarily look good on you.
The projet has made recommendations about how, using these insights, the fight against social inequality and for social cohesion can be fought better. It is necessary, through the cooperation of practitioners, to develop methods that allow good ideas to spread around rapidly and effectively. In other words, the project has linked academic research to professional practice. The EMES European Research Network, with a solid track record on making the findings of scientific international projects relevant to policy-making and the work of practitioners and other stakeholders, was responsible for the coordination of the dissemination. In addition to using existing contacts in the consortium, it actively fed the results into its own network and activities as well as into other networks in which it is actively involved.
Project Results:
Findings with regard to social exclusion and vulnerability
The first part of our research consisted of mapping the main patterns of social exclusion in European cities. Our research took place at the time of the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s. Of course this means that the conditions we describe are in some respects extraordinary. However, the underlying trends predate the crisis and can be observed in other studies. The data are described in detail in the WILCO city reports, available through our website, and in the forthcoming publication Social Vulnerability in European Cities in Times of Crisis and The Role of Local Welfare (Palgrave, 2014).
Predictably, indicators on most dimensions have taken a turn for the worse in the areas we studied (childcare, housing and employment):
- Housing prices everywhere have increased, leading to problems of affordability for vulnerable people. In most cities reductions of public support from the national level, combined with the decentralisation of housing policy, have led to a drastic reduction of the resources available for local welfare housing policies.
- Despite substantial efforts by local governments in the 2000s to improve the number of childcare services and facilities in the majority of cities, the shortage of affordable places and long waiting lists remain a substantial obstacle, although to varying degrees, for families with dependent young children. Lack of affordability, lack of appropriate childcare opening hours and geographical polarisation limit access to childcare in practice, specifically for single mothers.
- Youth unemployment has risen strongly everywhere, especially in Southern European cities. It is now not uncommon that the average duration of the last spell of unemployment is longer than the average length of the last job experience. Furthermore, there is a trend toward extremely short-term contracts reduces the capacity of planning for these young people, both in terms of establishing a new household and in terms of building a successful career.
The current financial crisis is perceived as a catalyst of existing problems, for young people in general, and more specifically for some categories like first- or second-generation migrants. However, the analysis also shows the emergence of a new type of problem, which is the growing numbers of people in a condition of social vulnerability. More than by severe material deprivation or permanent poverty, this condition is characterized by instability in a context of harsh constraints. It is a situation of economic stress and uncertain financial position, accompanied by a marked reduction in the standard of living. This fragility increases the probability of social exclusion when further negative events occur (illness, unemployment, family breakdowns, and so on). Social vulnerability affects a total of 16 per cent of the population in European countries, which suggests that severe hardship today is less widespread than income fragility and work instability.
Different dynamics come together here: an increase in temporary employment, a lack of affordable housing, changing family relations and increasing migration within Europe. Temporary workers, people with low income hit by chronic invalidity, women with small children dealing with severe work/private life reconciliation problems, and individuals whose income is fluctuating just above and below the poverty line are experiencing situations characterized by few social guarantees, instability in the fundamental mechanisms for acquiring essential resources and fragility of social or family relations. What they have in common is that their position within the main systems of social integration (work, family, the welfare system) is weakened because of their being for a long time in a condition of uncertainty.
The nature of these problems appears similar across different types of cities. Although they differ in extent and effects, notions that they occur primarily in depressed economic areas or in globally competitive with rising levels of inequality are false. Indeed, the focus on national differences in social policy research tends to mask the fact that the similarities between large European cities in different countries are often greater than those between city and countryside within the same country.
Local welfare systems deal with the emerging social reality in various ways and with varying degrees of success. The different strategies are described elaborately in the city reports the WILCO project has compiled, based on an analysis both of local policies, politics and discourse. It is clear that welfare is being increasingly shaped at the local, rather than national, level, through the involvement of several types of local actors. Social innovations are one part of this emerging welfare mix.
Findings with regard to urban welfare governance
Our 20 cities have certainly common features, but are distinct in the way social policies are ideologically and practically justified. Following a process of typologising, including temporal dynamics and information about values and policy choices, we identified four kind of regimes, characterised by different relations between social and economic policies at the city level. They can be described as follow:
• The governance of innovation is characterised by the continuous search of synergies between economic and social policies. The political consensus is fragile, but stabilises ambivalences in the city’s driving coalitions around the idea of the innovative (or creative) city. The coalition’s major orientation is to foster urbanity as a project and as a way of live, bohemian and innovative, open to differences and responsive to marginality. Through urbanity, that’s the guiding hypothesis, economic dynamics would be improved. From the organisational point of view, this governance style privileges welfare mix solutions. Values that all actors share are the idea of urbanity, pragmatism and efficiency; ideologies are secondary in the definition of policy priorities. Examples of this governance style were Bern, Münster, Barcelona and Varaždin. Varaždin’s orientation was developed following indications from the EU.
• The governance of growth gives priority to economic policies. The orientation is anti-urban and politics are strongly influenced by economic interest groups. This growth machine orientation privatises social problems as individual faults. Pamplona and Birmingham were examples of the predominance of this kind of governance.
• The governance of social challenges gives priority to social policy orientations in the production of services. Economic dynamics are handled parallel to social polices and are not related nor in conflict to them. It follows a more traditional social welfare policies in which the local state plays a primordial role in the production and distribution of services. Political parties and party politics define this orientation and the dominant, more paternalistic choices in the field of social policy. Shared values are solidarity and the social responsibility of the state. Cities like Malmø, Stockholm, Geneva, Lille, Nantes, Nijmegen, Brescia, Zagreb, Warsaw and Plock were examples of this kind of governance. Concerning Zagreb, Warsaw and Plock we find again the EU as dominant partner in the definition of the governance style.
• Finally, we identified a conflicting governance of social and economic challenges. In this case, a combination of a weak local government and strong economic and social interest groups create a concurrence between economic and social investments. The value orientation in the field of social policies is conflicting with an opposition between a social and an economic lobby. Each social policy creates a debate between individualism (and individual responsibility) vs. solidarity and a collective responsibility. Berlin and Milan were examples of such a conflicting kind of governance.
Findings with regard to emerging social innovations
The WILCO project examined a total number of 77 cases of social innovation. They are described and comparatively analysed in the e-book Social Innovations for Social Cohesion: Transnational Patterns and Approaches from 20 European cities, available for download on our website.
We have grouped innovations according to five dimensions that we regard as the most important recurring approaches and instruments. One initiative can incorporate several types of innovations. For example, The ‘Young people with a future’ initiative in Barcelona constituted both a service and a governance innovation.
1. Innovations in services and their ways to address users: The majority of the social innovations we studied were service innovations. Since personal social services are by definition a special form of social relationship between people, this is not a surprise. Moreover, services are more accessible to small-scale innovations by social entrepreneurs, groups of citizens and other change agents than most high-tech products. Innovations focused on investing in capabilities; open approaches avoiding targeting with stigmatizing effects; initiatives that bridge the gaps between professional services and people‘s life worlds; and services that connect separated forms of support and access, allowing for personalized bundles of support.
2. Innovations in regulations and rights: In addition to reinventing services, social innovations can also pertain to the rules governing such services. Innovations of this type included creating flexible forms of ad hoc support; developing offers beyond fixed social and participation rights and entitlements that meet newly emerging risks; and working with “social contracts” for individuals and groups.
3. Innovations in governance: social innovations represent a combination of new “products” and new “processes” (including the internal organisation of decision-making and ways of interacting with the environment). Most innovations that aim at developing new kinds of services also have a governance dimension. For some innovations this is even a core issue. Governance innovations found by the project are fostering units and types of organization that operate in more embedded and networked ways; giving new concerns and groups a voice in the public domain; organizing more intense forms of public debate and opinion-building around challenges in cohesion policies; and building issue related coalitions and partnerships
4. Innovations in modes of working and financing: These include flexicurity in working contracts; levels of institutionalization and security below traditional standards; combining professional teams and voluntary commitments; defining strong mission profiles; and combining resources from different stakeholders. When an innovation means to deal differently with a given challenge or pressure this must often entail a way to accept and live with worsening material conditions. This tends to increase the imbalance between ambitions on the one hand, and conditions and means on the other hand. Therefore innovative elements like flexible teamwork are hard to disentangle from conditions where it is impossible to offer some basic degree of job security. Likewise an innovative way of working in a multi-stakeholder perspective can entail a chronically underfunded local public sector, making it difficult to differentiate between winning additional societal support and using local partners as a spare wheel.
5. Innovations concerning the entity of (local) welfare systems: Finally, we have looked at the possible contributions of innovations to developments in local welfare systems. We have understood these to include, besides the local welfare state, the welfare-related roles and responsibilities of the third sector, the market, communities and families. Such types of innovations include reaching out to all sectors of local welfare systems and reducing the state focus; aiming at less standardized, more diverse and localized welfare arrangements; upgrading the community component in mixed welfare systems (families, support); integrating economic and social logics (entrepreneurial action, developmental welfare) and Integrating welfare and urban politics.
Findings with regard to the sustainability of innovations
In addition to analysing the types of emerging innovations, we also made some observations with respect to how they continued to develop. There is a tendency in publicity on social innovation to discuss successful cases and those that are scaled up to a system-wide level. Based on our evidence, it must be concluded that the reality of local social innovations is a different one. The majority remain local and last only a limited number of years. The emphasis on success stories and scaling-up is an important one, with implications for the direction of future funding; but it is equally important to realise that the majority of local innovations (especially those not originating in professional organisations) do not fit such a pattern of growth and that one should not disregard the cumulative effect of the many small, temporary initiatives that are of high value within their local context. Public policy should therefore not focus only on the selective group of innovations with a high growth potential, but also on the capacity of cities to continue generating many new initiatives of a highly local nature.
Of the innovations we studied, the majority were either discontinued after a few years or faced an uncertain future in the short term. Cutbacks in public sector funding no doubt play a part in this, but the underlying structural dynamics, such as project-based funding, dependence on charismatic initiators and shifting political fashions, suggest that the underlying conditions are of a structural nature.
The most sustainable innovations were those that were either fully integrated into the local welfare administration or even initiated by the local authorities. Generally, local authorities tended to favour innovations that were complementary to their growth strategy, aimed at making the city more dynamic and attractive. This means that there is not necessarily a smooth fit between social innovation and economic growth agendas.
Another factor that affected innovations’ chance of survival was whether they involved a wide coalition of parties. Such parties could include the third sector, local governments, businesses and groups of citizens. A broad alliance made it easier to sustain the innovation even when one of the parties (like the local authorities) withdrew its support. Highly vulnerable were those innovations which were primarily dependent on European funds.
Finally, what also mattered to a large degree was the governance style of local authorities. Innovations could more easily gain recognition and sustainability where there was an open governance style, that is, where authorities proved open to contributions to local welfare by different parties. To some extent such openness appeared related to institutional factors, such as the level of decentralisation within the state structure and historical traditions of working with the third sector; but it also depended on the nature of local politics, the prevailing discourse and availability of people who could act as ‘boundary spanners’, connecting institutional and life worlds.
Findings with regard to the diffusion of innovations
Another way for social innovations to gain a longer life is for them to be diffused to other cities and countries. Most of the publications on the diffusion of innovations are based on business contexts and on products, rather than services, which means that it is important to identify clearly how local social innovations are different. The nature of products made for the commercial market is that they are not made primarily for the local market, but deliberately designed to spread widely to other places. Social innovations, by contrast, are usually initiated to solve a local problem. Wider diffusion is only of secondary importance to the innovators, if not irrelevant. The image of the highly visible entrepreneur giving TedX talks is, in this case, unrepresentative. Therefore it is especially important for this type of innovation to have intermediaries, who know the situation on the ground and assess what it takes for innovations to take root elsewhere. There was no evidence that at this point in time established EU channels play a significant role in this process.
Unlike many products, which can shift places easily, social innovations have to be ‘translated’ to be effective elsewhere. It is rare to have a straight transfer from an idea from one place to another, although we did find some examples of this (for initiatives that were typically low-resource, low-skill). Approaches or projects will in some way need to be adapted to the context into which they are adopted. For instance, what is originally a project to keep young people socially active may elsewhere be justified with the discourse of unemployment or crime prevention. The shape of a collaborative arrangement may have to be altered, for example, because responsibilities for a certain policy area are distributed differently over governments at different levels, or because services are provided privately in the country and publicly in the other. The innovation will need to be re-shaped. The adaptation may concern the structure of an innovation, e.g. its formal organisational shape, but also the regulation that supports it, the instruments through which it is implemented, or the discourse with which it is described and justified. Innovations are therefore usually hybrids of different ideas and inspirations.
Given that such a process of reconstruction and translation must take place, it requires new ways of collaboration, for example, between governments and citizens, and new ways of thinking. Our material shows that, in local welfare, this process does not start when an innovation is introduced, but usually well before that. Rather, it is the other way round: an innovation is adopted when minds are ripe. A good idea is not convincing in itself – it comes when people are open to it. What this means is that adopting an innovation from elsewhere is, from the perspective of the adopting parties, not fundamentally different from inventing one. After all, it requires similar breakthroughs in institutional routines, whether of content, collaboration, or other aspects of working.
This means that the process of diffusion starts before the actual adoption of an innovation. Research on diffusion tends to focus on the process after the adoption, and then especially at successful cases of adoption. Yet the innovative capacity of a city is not only reflected in what is adopted (a specific approach to solving a problem), but also in the groundwork that is done before the adoption (getting the right people together, getting minds ready for new options). This is very relevant to public administration reform, because it means that simply finding the right kinds of solutions is in itself not enough. It requires a different approach to governance.
Methodology
In this appendix, we will give an overview of the methodology used throughout the different stages of the WILCO project.
First stage
The first part of the project consisted of mapping the context of social innovations at the local level. We described the historical-institutional background on the basis of two dimensions, the structure of the overall welfare state and the degree of centralisation and the position of ‘the local’ in shaping welfare. For this purpose, we made an inventory of variables that must be regarded as formal pre-conditions for local welfare policies and initiatives, including key regulations, financial provisions, contractual arrangements and entitlements. Because at this concrete level there were many changes in key variables (e.g. in financial and regulatory conditions), we set a time frame covering the last 10 years. The variables were specified for three policy fields central to the project: child care, employment and housing.
We started with a literature review. To be sure our information was up-to-date, we also conducted six interviews per country (two in each of the three policy fields, with public officials and professionals), sixty overall.
Second stage
After we had mapped these national backgrounds to social innovation, we moved to the local level. We chose twenty European cities (two per country) on which we focused our remaining research. The chosen cities were: Münster and Berlin Friedrichshain – Kreuzberg (DE); Zagreb and Varazdin (HR); Amsterdam and Nijmegen (NL); Barcelona and Pamplona (ES); Milan and Brescia (IT); Stockholm and Malmø (SE); Birmingham and Medway area (UK); Warsaw and Plock (PL); Lille and Nantes (FR); Bern and Genève (CH). For the twenty chosen cities, we gathered data about social inequality and exclusion in the local labour market, housing market and child care facilities, as well as more general data on patterns of social cohesion. Specifically, we identified the relative position of age, gender and migrant groups with respect to general patterns of social inequality and exclusion.
Data collection consisted of two parts. The first was an analysis of the Eurostat Database Urban Audit, that includes data for more than 200 European cities, constituted the background for our comparative analysis. The following aspects were analysed: the structure of the labour market (employment by sector, activity rate by gender and age, unemployment rate by gender and age); the demographic structure (changes in the population over the last ten years, the structure of the population by age, proportion of immigrants on the overall population, old age dependency ratio), the inequality structure (gaps in the unemployment rates between centre and periphery, inequalities in the education level of the population, gender gaps in the activity rate and employment). The second part consisted of 360 intensive interviews, thirty-six in each country (six interviews for each group mentioned above in each city). The analysis was aimed at describing the living conditions of these people experiencing difficult situations and at identifying the strategies they adopt in order to deal with these situations. Special attention was paid to the factors preventing these people from getting social benefits and support from public, private or non-profit services.
On the basis of these data we wrote city reports, which included the following:
• An analysis of the main characteristics and trends of the local labour market (main sectors, employment and unemployment levels, groups of population mainly affected by long-term unemployment);
• An analysis of demographic structure of the population and of the trends taking place in the last 10 years (proportion of the elderly, fertility and natality rates, proportion of immigrants and their distribution in the urban territory, etc.);
• An analysis of the housing market, with special attention to critical situations such as overcrowding, difficult affordability, evictions, homelessness; a special attention will be paid also to the territorial distribution of the population most at risk and to identify critical urban areas with high concentration of problematic social groups;
• An analysis of the use of child care services, both public and private, with the aim of identifying specific situations characterised by a mismatch between supply and demand.
The interviews were translated into Excel sheets, as a basis for the analysis. The analysis was aimed at describing the living conditions of these people experiencing difficult situations and at identifying the strategies they adopt in order to deal with these situations. Special attention has been paid to understand what are the main factors preventing these people from getting social benefits and support from public, private or non-profit services.
The comparative analysis among similar situations in different cities allowed us to clarify the local factors influencing why and how people get into these situations (or are protected from them). The reconstruction of the specific everyday strategies of people affected by these problems allowed an understanding not only their needs, but also the resources (social networks, welfare benefits, reintegration programmes) that people at risk can mobilise in order to alleviate their own situation. This analysis helped to identify the specific local innovations that could be developed in order to meet these social needs.
Third stage
Having identified the context of innovations in local welfare in the first part of the project, the project turned to the innovations themselves. In order to do so, a distinction was made between the core ideas behind local welfare and the concrete approaches and instruments through which local welfare is implemented.
The first part of the analysis focused on discourses about social inequality and social cohesion in the three policy fields mentioned above, revealing the core ideas that drive innovations in local welfare. The key methods used were:
• Document analysis: content analysis of policy documents, minutes of local council meetings and a media analysis.
• Interviews: Researchers held 36 qualitative semi-structured interviews per country, with stakeholders both within the analysed fields and at the level of general policy. For each policy field, we selected policymakers (3), civil servants (3), and representatives of civil society organisations (3), representatives of our three chosen groups (3).
• Focus groups: To involve stakeholders in the progress of the research, one focus group meeting was organised in each city to which we invited policymakers, civil servants, representatives of civil society organisations and representatives of the three groups of interest.
The data were analysed and organised along guidelines spread by the WP leader, the University of Geneva.
After the discourses, we described instruments and approaches that are used to fight against social inequality and stimulate social cohesion. By virtue of the knowledge accumulated in previous phases of the research, we could assess how instruments and approaches were innovative in their context and whether they would be so in another context. In total, we gathered information about 77 social innovations.
A number of criteria were used to select innovations:
• An innovation is innovative in its specific context. So, what mattered is whether an innovation was regarded as new in a particular city. It did not have to be path-breaking on a European or global scale.
• Since we looked as well at the dynamics of social innovations, we selected only those that have overcome the very inception stage. According to this criterion, every selected innovation had to have existed for at least one year (since March 2011) in order to be scrutinized. The innovations we looked at are about ideas or approaches that have been implemented in practice to some degree. This "project" can be an organisation or an organisational subunit with new services that clearly differs from what existed so far in the field, but it can also be a measure/intervention such as a new transfer, tax or resource arrangement.
• Social innovations could refer to a large project, but also to a cluster of small, similar projects. In such a case, it was the task to describe the whole cluster and zoom in on one or two of the small cases, to get a sense of the micro-dynamics.
• In case the innovation was part of a government program meant to promote, finance and regulate an innovative approach, only those innovations from wider national programs that could be seen as "local" – in the sense that there was a considerable degree of freedom to shape them in the local context – were picked up.
• Since social innovations generally included both bottom-up and top-down elements, we chose projects with variations in the mix (i.e. both innovations that were more citizen-driven as well as others with a stronger government involvement, etc.) in order to get a good sense of the different dynamics.
• As a mandatory requirement, in each city at least three and at most six innovations had to be featured and analysed by each team. The actual number of cases chosen in a city depended largely on the complexity of the respective cases.
• Each team had to cover all the three policy fields (child care, employment and housing) and target groups (single mothers, youngsters and migrants).
In addition to the material collected at previous stages, new data were gathered through interviews, with policymakers, professionals and users, at least 18 per country team (180 overall).
The data were analysed and organised along guidelines spread by the WP leader, Justus-Liebig University Giessen.
Fourth stage
At the final stage of the project, the data from the preceding stages of the project were analysed, integrated and discussed with stakeholders. It resulted in this final report and various other outputs.
Potential Impact:
Lessons learnt about social innovation
Of the many lessons we learnt from the research in this project, we would like to emphasize the following:
1. There is a tendency in publicity on social innovation to discuss successful cases and those that are scaled up to a system-wide level. Based on our evidence, it must be concluded that the reality of local social innovations is a different one. Many social innovations are short-lived and remain small in scope.
2. Public policy should not focus singularly on the selective group of innovations that can be mainstreamed. Instead, it should pay more attention to the capacity of cities to continue generating many new initiatives of a highly local nature.
3. Social innovation does not necessarily complement strategies for economic growth, nor is it necessarily an adequate substitute for existing welfare policies. It can in specific cases; but general statements to this effect should be distrusted.
4. Approaches or projects will in some way need to be adapted to the context into which they are adopted. Encouraging social innovation is best done by allocating resources, not only to spreading information and building networks, but also to boundary spanning and translation activities. It is essential to include local people who know the situation on the ground and assess what it takes for innovations to take root elsewhere.
5. The concept behind a social innovation is less important than the collaborative relationships needed to implement it in a local context.
6. Innovations can more easily gain recognition and sustainability where there was an open governance style, that is, where authorities proved open to contributions to local welfare by different parties. To some extent such openness derives from structural features of administrative systems, but policymakers and officials in all types of systems have proven capable of achieving it.
Recommendations on EU-funded social innovation research
On February 1, 2013, representatives of several European Union-funded projects came together to discuss the potential for collaboration and to determine where we stand. As part of this effort the European Commission, in collaboration with the WILCO project, commissioned a study to map the state of the art of the current projects. On the basis of this review, we published the position paper Social Innovation Research in Horizon 2020, endorsed by several other European projects.
In this position paper, we noted that European Union-funded research can play a crucial role in encouraging social innovation; that there is a risk, however, that in its current form competition for funding fragments the research community rather than bringing it together. We signalled the challenge to combine the added value of European Union-funded research (the broad interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, the combined emphasis on academic excellence and practical application) with a more coherent approach to the study of social innovation.
On the basis of this analysis, we made the following recommendations to the European Union:
1. To devote sufficient funds for social innovation in Horizon 2020, including funds for transfer and dissemination.
2. To involve all stakeholders (the scientific community, civil society and the public and private sectors) in identifying and defining research topics on social innovation, whilst ensuring that social need and open processes remain paramount.
3. To address the following key themes in its research funding:
o The clarification of the relationship between technological and social innovation.
o The impact and outcomes of social innovations on urgent problems in contemporary society.
o The measurement and evaluation of social innovations.
o The link between research and capacity building.
4. To encourage more collaboration, both between European Union-funded projects and between academics and practitioners.
5. To increase the flexibility within projects, to allow project managers more scope for responding to stakeholders and addressing emerging needs on an on-going basis, through a combination of small scale experimentation and strategic thinking.
Outputs of the project
1. RESEARCH REPORTS
10 National reports on local welfare systems focused on housing, employment and childcare:
United Kingdom (WILCO Publication #1)
Italy (WILCO Publication #2)
Sweden (WILCO Publication #3)
The Netherlands (WILCO Publication #4)
Croatia (WILCO Publication #5)
Spain (WILCO Publication #6)
Switzerland (WILCO Publication #7)
Germany (WILCO Publication #8)
Poland (WILCO Publication #9)
France (WILCO Publication #10)
First Comparative Report (WILCO Publication #11) – Also available as EMES Working Paper no. 12/01 “Local Welfare from a Historical and Institutional Perspective: A Comparative Report” by T. Brandsen, O. Segnestam Larsson, M. Nordfeldt (149 downloads)
Missing data report (WILCO Publication #12)
20 City reports on the development of social welfare:
Amsterdam, NL (WILCO Publication #13)
Barcelona, ES (WILCO Publication #14)
Berlin, DE (WILCO Publication #15)
Bern, CH (WILCO Publication #16)
Birmingham, UK (WILCO Publication #17)
Brescia, IT (WILCO Publication #18)
Geneva, CH (WILCO Publication #19)
Lille, FR (WILCO Publication #20)
Malmö, SE (WILCO Publication #21)
Medway, UK (WILCO Publication #22)
Milan, IT (WILCO Publication #23)
Münster, DE (WILCO Publication #24)
Nantes, FR (WILCO Publication #25)
Nijmegen, NL (WILCO Publication #26)
Pamplona, ES (WILCO Publication #27)
Płock, PL (WILCO Publication #28)
Stockholm, SE (WILCO Publication #29)
Varaždin, HR (WILCO Publication #30)
Warsaw, PL (WILCO Publication #31)
Zagreb, HR (WILCO Publication #32)
Second Comparative Report (WILCO Publication #33) – Also available as EMES Working Paper no.12/02 “Measures of Social Cohesion: Comparative Report” by C. Ranci, G. Costa, S. Sabatinelli, T. Brandsen (175 downloads)
20 city reports on the innovation and local welfare system interplay:
Amsterdam, NL (WILCO Publication #34)
Barcelona, ES (WILCO Publication #35)
Berlin, DE (WILCO Publication #36)
Bern, CH (WILCO Publication #37)
Birmingham, UK (WILCO Publication #38)
Brescia, IT (WILCO Publication #39)
Geneva, CH (WILCO Publication #40)
Lille, FR (WILCO Publication #45)
Malmö, SE (WILCO Publication #46)
Medway, UK (WILCO Publication #47)
Milan, IT (WILCO Publication #48)
Münster, DE (WILCO Publication #49)
Nantes, FR (WILCO Publication #50)
Nijmegen, NL (WILCO Publication #51)
Pamplona, ES (WILCO Publication #52)
Płock, PL (WILCO Publication #53)
Stockholm, SE (WILCO Publication #54)
Varaždin, HR (WILCO Publication #55)
Warsaw, PL (WILCO Publication #56)
Zagreb, HR (WILCO Publication #57)
Third Comparative Report (WILCO Publication #58) – Urban Policy Innovations in Local Welfare: Core Ideas
20 reports on innovations in European cities:
Amsterdam, NL (WILCO Publication #59)
Barcelona, ES (WILCO Publication #60)
Berlin, DE (WILCO Publication #61)
Bern, CH (WILCO Publication #62)
Birmingham, UK (WILCO Publication #63)
Brescia, IT (WILCO Publication #64)
Geneva, CH (WILCO Publication #65)
Lille, FR (WILCO Publication #66)
Malmö, SE (WILCO Publication #67)
Medway, UK (WILCO Publication #68)
Milan, IT (WILCO Publication #69)
Münster, DE (WILCO Publication #70)
Nantes, FR (WILCO Publication #71)
Nijmegen, NL (WILCO Publication #72)
Pamplona, ES (WILCO Publication #73)
Płock, PL (WILCO Publication #74)
Stockholm, SE (WILCO Publication #75)
Varaždin, HR (WILCO Publication #76)
Warsaw, PL (WILCO Publication #77)
Zagreb, HR (WILCO Publication #78)
Fourth Comparative Report (WILCO Publication #79) – Approaches and instruments in local welfare systems: innovation, adoption and adaptation
2. EDITED VOLUMES
Two edited volumes on social innovation:
- “Social vulnerability in European cities” (2014) - (WILCO Publication #80)
- “Social Innovations in the urban context” (2015) - (WILCO Publication #81)
An e-book “Social Innovations for social cohesion 77 cases 20 European cities” (ISBN: 978-2-930773-00-1. Available in PDF, eReader and ePub) - WILCO Publication #82
3. POLICY BRIEFS & POSITION PAPER
"Social innovation research in the European Union: Approaches, findings and future directions" Policy Brief (October 2013) - WILCO Publication #83
“Lessons Learnt about the Sustainability and Diffusion of Social Innovation. Policy brief based on the evidence of the WILCO project” (February 2014) - WILCO Publication #84
"Social Innovation Research in Horizon 2020" Position paper (June 2013) This paper was endorsed by four other European research projects (INNOSERV, LIPSE, TEPSIE and CSEYHP), showing that the views and concerns expressed in the paper are widely shared - WILCO Publication #85
4. SUMMARY OF FINDINGS
“Summary of findings from the WILCO Project (2010-2014)” (February 2014) - WILCO Publication #86
5. SPECIAL JOURNAL ISSUE
A special theme issue in the journal Voluntary Sector Review will be published, co-edited by Taco Brandsen and Adalbert Evers in late 2014.
6. PROJECT BROCHURES
Two project brochures were created during the project:
- The first brochure produced in the second month of the project focusing on the objectives of the project (3000 copies printed and distributed among WILCO partners and handed out in public seminars and events). It was also published on the web site as a downloadable resource; and
- The final brochure summarizing the outputs of the project and the main findings in a succinct manner. The electronic format has been prioritized for the last one although 100 copies were printed and distributed for the closing event.
7. WILCO Up! NEWS ALERTS
09/01/2014 - WILCO Up! Final Event Video
16/10/2013 - WILCO Up! Oct 2013
12/17/2012 - WILCO Up! #4 - News from the WILCO project
07/13/2012 - WILCO Up! #3 - News from the WILCO project
04/30/2012 - WILCO Up! #2 News Alert
02/21/2012 - WILCO Up! #1 News Alert
A total of 1581 people signed up for the WILCO Up! news alert, which represents about 9486 people potentially hit my our
8. GRASSROOTS EVENTS
Location (Country)/Date:
20. Milan (IT-2)/ March 2014
19. Lille (FR-2)/ February 2014
18. Brescia (IT-1)/ 24.1.2014
17. Dover (UK-2 )/22.1.2014
16. Malmö (SE-2)/14.1.2014
15. Nijmegen (NL-2)/9.1.2014
14. Paris (FR-1)/15.11.2013
13. Bern (CH-2)/ 6.11.2013
12. Geneva (CH-1)/ 30.10.2013
11. Birmingham (UK-1)/ 17.9.2013
10. Zagreb (HR-2)/ 8.7.2013
9. Warsaw (PL-2)/13.5.2013
8. Zagreb (HR-1)/ 23.3.2013
7. Münster (DE-2)/ 15.4.2013
6. Barcelona (ES-2)/12.4.2013
5. Berlin (DE-1)/ 28.2.2013
4. Utrecht (NL-1)/ 28.2.2013
3. Warsaw (PL-1)/ 9.1.2013
2. Barcelona (ES-1)/12.11.2012
1. Stockholm (SE-1)/ 6.11.2012
A brief report on each of the grassroots events is available at www.wilcoproject.eu
9. AUDIOVISUAL OTUPUTS
WILCO Final Documentary: A documentary divided in three individual video pieces was produced and published at the end of the Project (January 31st, 2014). The titles and views as of by February 24th, 2014 of each part are:
• Social vulnerability in European cities (178 full views and 2,098 full downloads)
• Social Innovations across Europe (201 full views and 2,057 full downloads)
• Governance of innovation across European cities (75 full views and 586 full downloads; this video was launched a bit later so as to re-launch interest in the Project)
Considering then that the period covered here only includes 24 days for the first two videos and 9 days for the third video, the total number of full views reached (454) is quite impressive.
WILCO Video Series
This series of videos aim at capturing in a succinct way various aspects of the WILCO project, including its potential impact, the people involved in the project, or how to get involved in its activities. A total of nine videos were produced (number of views by February 24th, 2014 included in the third column):
Number/Title/Views
#1 Interview with Heiko Prange-Gstöehl, project officer of WILCO/Views: 130
#2 Solving housing challenges for artists through social innovation: The Bookstore project/Views: 646
#3 Thoughts on the Relevance of Social Innovation for Europe/Views: 203
#4 What is the added value of WILCO?/Views: 200
#5 What are the main challenges facing the transferring on social innovation?/Views: 111
#6 “Approaches to research on Social Innovation I"/Views: 25
#7"Approaches to research on Social Innovation II"/Views 23
#8 "Disseminating research results: WILCO and the EMES network"/View: 104
#9 "Community mothers - social innovation in Berlin" (connected to the Bertelsmann Summer School, see below)/Views 49
Total Views: 1491
10. INTERNET-BASED OTUPUTS
WILCO Project website
A full-fledged website was created for the project. After the initial launching of the site, it is regularly updated with events, documents and news. In addition to the main sections, two direct buttons for visitors to use were created: a feedback form and a mailing list subscription button. Regarding traffic and number of visitors, the following table summarizes information about the traffic (period included 25 May 2011 to 28 February 2014).
Table 1 - Main website statistics regarding visitors
Unique visitors 23/05/11 23/05/12: 2,569; 24/05/12-28/2/14: 3,052, Total: 5,621
Pageviews 23/05/11 23/05/12: 14,110; 24/05/12-28/2/14: 20,214, Total: 34,324
Pages per visit 23/05/11 23/05/12: 3.47; 24/05/12-28/2/14: 3.53 Total: n/a
New visits 23/05/11 23/05/12: 61.32%; 24/05/12-28/2/14: 53.30%; Total: n/a
WILCO Project Facebook page and Twitter account
WILCO gradually built up followers in the form of people who “like” its Facebook page and in the form of followers in Twitter. The Facebook page was created on 1st December 2010 and it has been “liked” by 202 users. Over 700 posts were created with an average total reach of 80 people per post (all the reach are organic, non paid).
As for Twitter (@WILCOproject), a total of 278 Tweets were published and WILCO ended up with 158 Followers and followed 143 accounts.
11. TRAINING OTUPUTS
Under the overarching title of “The three SE pillars: Social Entrepreneurship, Social Economy and Solidarity Economy”, two EMES International PhD Summer Schools were organized related to WILCO:
- 3rd EMES PhD Summer School, 4 - 8 July 2012, University of Trento, Italy. A total of 70 applications were received and 39 participants were finally selected. About half of the participants (54%) were of European origin and there were participants from all Asia (18%), South America (10%), North America (10%) and Africa (8%). Taco Brandsen, WILCO coordinator, led a plenary session to describe the work covered in WILCO.
More information: http://www.emes.net/what-we-do/training-education/phd-summer-schools/3rd-emes-international-phd-summer-school
- 4th EMES PhD Summer School, 29 June – 2 July 2014, Western Timisoara University (Romania). This event will be held after the closing of WILCO but the Project will be an intrinsic part of the event program. WILCO will be discussed from a methodological perspective and the Project findings will be discussed as well by Taco Brandsen and Adalbert Evers, both members of the event Academic Committee and Faculty Body.
More information: http://www.emes.net/what-we-do/training-education/phd-summer-schools/4th-emes-international-phd-summer-school
1st Bertelsmann Summer School on Scaling Social Innovation, 27 - 29 September 2013, University of Münster (WILCO partner)
In order to realise training for professionals in the field of social innovation, the WILCO project engaged in collaboration with the Bertelsmann Foundation and several German universities that host postgraduate programme in the area of non-profit management. In 2013, the first of a series of summer schools were organised to highlight the topic of scaling up social innovations, to which faculty from all the participating universities will contribute. The WILCO findings were integrated through lectures and learning videos. Taco Brandsen, Adalbert Evers and Annette Zimmer were among the five faculty members participating in the event.
More information (in German) at: http://weiterbildung.uni-muenster.de/weiterbildungsangebote/masterstudiengang-nonprofit-management-governance/sommerakademie.html
List of Websites:
Project’s Website: www.wilcoproject.eu
Team members of the project:
Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands)
• Taco Brandsen
• Francesca Broersma
• Joost Fledderus
• Astrid Souren
Münster University (Germany)
• Annette Zimmer
• Patrick Boadu
• Danielle Gluns
• Thorsten Hallmann
• Maren Meissner
• Christina Rentzsch
• Andrea Walter
• Andrè Christian Wolf
Politecnico de Milano (Italy)
• Costanzo Ranci
• Giuliana Costa
• Stefania Sabatinelli
University of Geneva (Switzerland)
• Sandro Cattacin
• Nathalie Kakpo
• Patricia Naegeli
• Maxime Felder
Universitat de Barcelona (Spain)
• Teresa Montagut Antoli
• Manuel Aguilar Hendrickson
• Sebastià Riutort
• Marta Llobet Estany
• Cristina López Villanueva
• Gemma Vilà Bosqued
• Anna Escobedo
• Catalina Chamorro
University of Zagreb (Croatia)
• Gojko Bezovan
• Danijel Baturina
• Jelena Matančević
CRIDA (France)
• Laurent Fraisse
• Anouk Coqblin
• Christian Laidebeur
Warsaw University
• Renata Siemienska-Zochowska
• Anna Domaradzka-Widla
• Ilona Matysiak
University of Kent (United Kingdom)
• Jeremy Kendall
• Nadia Brookes
• Lavinia Mitton
Ersta Sköndal University College (Sweden)
• Marie Nordfeldt
• Ola Segnestam Larsson
• Anna Carrigan
Justus-Liebig University Giessen (Germany)
• Adalbert Evers
• Benjamin Ewert
EMES International Research Network
• Rocío Nogales Muriel
• Sophie Adam
• Jenny Eschweiler
• Sabine Spada
European Research Services
• Oliver Panzer
• Friedrich Paulsen
• Nadine Bresch
NISPAcee
• Ludmila Gajdosova
WILCO ADVISORY COMMITTEE
• Amana Ferro, European Anti Poverty Network (EAPN)
• Mathias Maucher, European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU)
• Alice Pittini, CECODHAS Housing Europe
• Steven Rathgeb Smith, University of Washington
• Anne Skevik Grødem, Institute for Labour and Social Research (FAFO)
