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incubators and practitioners in developing their
own journeys of scaling social innovation.
Before presenting the Social Innovation
Journey (SIJ), we would like to briefly introduce
some of the premises that guided the overall
work of TRANSITION and that are at the base of
the elaboration of the SIJ.
_Social innovations often emerge from bottom
up initiatives, from citizens’ activism, from
spontaneous
group
of
neighbours.
TRANSITION action format aims to support
innovators from the very early stage of an idea,
empowering communities to grow solutions to
social needs and raising awareness around
them. Moreover it aims to deliver supporting
activities to groups and innovators usually
excluded from traditional path of incubation.
_Social innovations find a “fertile ground” in
hybrid spaces where the community sector
overlaps with the public one, where the private
one meets the third sector, and in all the
interactions between them. TRANSITION aims
to experiment with the social innovations
coming from a range of sources, including new
ventures as well as innovations based within
existing organisations, or delivered through
strategic partnerships, voluntary initiatives or
campaigns.
_Social innovation overlaps with, but is not the
same as, social entrepreneurship. Supporting
social innovation is a broader task than
supporting social ventures to scale and grow.
_Social innovations aim, by definition, to meet
social needs. The capability of maximizing
social impact must be placed at the centre of
each process of social innovation incubation.
TRANSITION aims to support both initial
concepts but also mature organizations in
increasing their social impact, by designing
new solutions or re-orienting existing ones.
_Social innovations produce innovative social
forms and value creation systems. They often
base their processes on co-creation and
peer-to-peer
collaboration,
on
local