Press Release Three
The first universities and training organisations have implemented InnoSocial - the international programme on inclusive innovation and social entrepreneurship
In late 2024 and early 2025, the first universities and training institutions from Italy, Lithuania and Poland implemented a pilot of the InnoSocial course. This is the final stage of the project, co-funded by the European Union through the Erasmus+ programme, which started in November 2022. The initiative aims to facilitate education and training in II&SE - inclusive innovation and social entrepreneurship.
Academic staff as well as trainers and educators have already received a set of teaching materials to enable them to conduct lessons in this field. More than 50 students are taking part in pilot courses at the University of Pavia, the Social Academy of Sciences in Warsaw and Vilniaus Kolegija in Lithuania. Training courses using InnoSocial materials are also being used by inCREA Foundation trainers in the project ‘Yesterday excluded, today active’, in which 100 people are upgrading their social competences to improve their labour market situation and retraining.
The InnoSocial training material set includes not only the presentations that form a 75-hour course equivalent to 3 ECTS. The developed materials also contain a Syllabus for trainers specifying the workload associated with the course, its structure, learning outcomes, delivery modes and methods, a set of assessments and grading rules. ‘The InnoSocial Toolkit’, in turn, is used for the design and delivery of training courses on inclusive innovation and social entrepreneurship. It provides guidelines for adapting the developed course to the requirements of the implementation environment and the needs of the target groups.
The InnoSocial training materials are available free of charge and anyone wishing to use them in their current educational work can become qualified to teach by contacting one of the project Partners. So far, 30 academics, trainers and educators from different EU countries have participated in the Train the Trainer workshops.
The results of the pilot phase will be taken into account in developing the final version of the InnoSocial materials. Their final version will be presented at the final conference which will take place on 4 April 2025 at the headquarters of the Social Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. The event will be accompanied by speeches by representatives of the partners from Italy, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Poland. At that time, all the project results will be presented, it will be possible to learn about the detailed principles of implementation from the perspective of the different countries and participate in a discussion to exchange good practices and experiences. Summary meetings will also be held in the other partner countries and the detailed dates will be announced by the partner institutions. We warmly invite not only representatives of academic and training institutions, but all those interested in the topic of innovation in inclusion and social entrepreneurship to attend one of the closing events.
Full project information and contact details for the implementing institutions are published at https://www.innosocial.eu/.
Read in: Bulgarian, English, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish