TEAC Conference Report Dec. 2015 | Page 12

ocial S U E ping Develo on Projects ti Innova Workshop on social innovation Moderated by Ognjen Andrić (Telecentar, Croatia) Speakers: Altheo Valentini (EGINA, Italy) and Jan Gejels (Working with Europe, Denmark) Theme: Developing EU Social Innovation Projects Conclusions and recommendations: 12 • Social innovation policies and initiatives across EU are varied and dispersed. There is no all-encompassing and inclusive social innovation programme on the EU level. • Social inclusion is a strategy for a smart, sustainable and community-based future and social innovation is already a thread linking the official flagship initiatives of the EU 2020 strategy. The Digital Single Market strategy should however integrate b etter the aspect of social innovation policy. • EU funding for social innovation, entrepreneurial and digital inclusion initiatives are still limited to traditional fields and areas. EU funding in this area is mostly not representative of the cross-topic, cross-sector and holistic European innovation policies. • Social innovation is at the core of digital inclusion of persons with disability, just to mention one example. There are numerous other areas where social innovation is key to advance. • Stakeholders active in the field of social innovation should increase collaboration and combine their individual areas of excellence to create new development projects. • Unite-it.eu will be used as a platform for exchange of information and ideas among the members of this working group, and participants are encouraged to stay tuned. Formats to be further exploited to that end are: webinars, summer schools and annual conferences, among others. What did people say on Twitter?