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About the visit to NCSI

Posted July 11th, 2008 by Bev Trayner
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The Netherlands Centre for Social Innovation hosted a meeting for CoPIM last week and gave us a splendid tour of what they are doing. The NSCI is a partnership between Trade Union and Employer groups, sponsored by those same groups and from the State.

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Social innovation

Social innovation, in the case of NCSI, refers to innovation in terms of labour relations. The line they take is that traditional labour relations don't fit in a knowledge society and are not effective in mobilizing the newer and younger groups in the labour market. Social innovation is about "working smarter".

This is a different and complementary approach to social innovation in the context of the European Social Fund (ESF). Social innovation in ESF focuses on vulnerable people who are from the labour market, on self employment, and on schemes to bring people back from working on the black market.

The centre hosted a meeting the day before and members of the centre talked with members of the CoPIM about common interests.

Call for grants

The NCSI plans to launch a call for grants (7 million euros) for projects that are implementing ways of making the best use of peoples' competencies and of improving company performance. The important aspect of the call is that there is a plan for showing the potential of social innovation and the expected impact of innovation on productivity. The proposal is geared towards. The key words for project proposals are:

  • work smarter
  • flexible
  • dynanic management

The interesting part is that the evaluation of proposals is not on the success (or not) of the social innovation, but on the design and implementation. Proposals are also expected to describe how people will publicise the results of their experiment.

This call is currently open to companies with employees in the Netherlands, but in the future it could be opened up to transnational co-operations.

Ana Vale introduces CoPIM

Ana Vale, the co-ordinator of CoPIM, briefly gave an overview of CoPIM:

We belong to a community of practice on innovation and mainstreaming which is about learning and about sharing in a communities of practice. The starting point that all of us had developed some innovative tools for innovation in ESF Managing Authorities and for fighting against discrimination in the labour market. During 8 years we spent a lot of time developing interesting projects, and a one year ago we decided to make available this knowledge and share it with others. In the next call for proposals we want to make this legacy available - and to allow others to use it and develop it.

People in this CoP are managers in ESF across Europe - although membership is something we are always discussing... we feel that we have to envisage different kinds of membership. We are focused on innovation and on mainstreaming that innovation. One of the main purposes of the programme was to support innovative projects and if successful to mainstream them.

Innovation as a domain - I'm still not sure if we in this CoP have a common understanding of the innovation we are tackling! My concept of innovation is that it is related to changing practices and processes and people that is connected to integration and access to the labour market. It's aimed at people who suffer some kind of discrimination. Labour market and discrimination is related to our concept of social innovation.

We developed a platform to share and we made available some tools and resources developed by Member States to support innovation and that could be useful to our target group. During this time we have also had other types of activities such as face-to-face events to share the tools. We use the platform and telephone conferences for this....

At the end of the year this CoP will finish, but the EC recently launched a call for proprosals for to support networks/communities of practice in the future.

Mainstreaming

Gerhard Braeunling, from the European Commission, asked if and how the centre approaches gender mainstreaming

The Director of the Centre replied that they did not have any policy for gender mainstreaming although they do for mainstreaming. They constantly consider how to lift projects to a higher level and how to maximise their influence on union leaders, sector organisations, advisors, management consultants and also how to maximise their influence on the kinds of projects and experiments, for example in Higher Education institutions and works councils.

Can you encourage innovation?

The Centre's Director also replied to Gerhard Braeunling's question about the best approach for making innovation happen. He replied that you can't organise innovation, but what you can do is put examples in the window. In such a discussion you also have to distinguish between radical innovation and incremental innovation.

What's more NSCI works as a network, putting people in contact with each other and stimulating internships between, for example, schools and companies.

Ana Vale also reflected on the question: Do we organise innovation? She said that the interesting lesson with EQUAL was that the EQUAL principles helped create an environment in which innovation could emerge. Partnership, gender, and empowerment - EQUAL principles - all contribute to innovation. We are not organising innnovation but, rather, creating an environment in which innovation can grow. In the context of EQUAL project, the EQUAL principles were mandatory. Later people learned how these things contributed to innovation, especially when these projects are funded by public funds.

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