Manual

In its broadest sense, change means to make things different or to become different. Striving for social change is an eager goal that involves the alternation of the social order of a society. This assumes interconnected sustainable change in social institutions, social behaviours and social relations.

In our context, social change determines the learning pathway towards tackling the complex challenge of a more healthy society. It refers to mid- to long-term developments in society at large that are often accompanied by disruption. This includes more citizens enjoying a (more) healthy lifestyle but also their social environment holding (greater) capacity to enable and value healthy aging.

For us, social innovation is then the process of commonly developing and deploying novel ideas and effective solutions. This includes out-of-the-box-thinking to meet social needs, create social relationships and implement co-creation towards healthy lifestyles. Such social innovations can be products, services, programmes or models addressing unmet complex societal challenges more effectively.

From our experience, social innovation requires an ecosystem in which all stakeholders collaborate from a multi-actor approach. This innovation ecosystem must have a special emphasize towards collective ownership and active involvement of the end users in all phases of the social innovation process.

We help social innovators to understand the grand societal challenges and to create such a social innovation ecosystem through the communities of practice approach.

We support them to adapt or co-create applicable solutions to the local environment that are driven by purpose, partnership, and accountability.