Making social impact in Europe
Social Challenges at the EU Industry Days!
Last week Brussels welcomed 90 social innovators, entrepreneurs, impact investors, incubators and policy makers who gathered all together for 2 days of networking, training, matchmaking and pitching.
Organised by EBN with the support of META Group and Impact Hub, it was again #SOCHANGE TIME!
On February 5th, 65 entrepreneurs met at the European BIC Network networking centre. The day was organised around structured and informal networking moments, a training on impact inveand a pitching training.
Divided in thematic groups they exchanged about the overall SocialChallenges.eu experience, commenting upon main opportunities and challenges faced. From this activity partners could draw some initial lessons learned:
1. People make the difference
•The relationship with the challenge owner is key for solution providers, as this heavily influence the development and implementation of the projects in the territories.
•A strong and solid team is key in the implementation phase, complementary skills can make a difference in critical situations.
•Personal motivation is a fundamental driver to turn challenges into new opportunities, to deal with short deadlines (6 months implementation period), and new stakeholders.
2. Setting and managing expectations
•It is fundamental to understand all stakeholders’ expectations and set clear roles so to ensure a smooth deployment of the project activities. This is true at overall SocialChallenges.eu level and individual projects level.
•Intermediaries, like local nodes, play a key role in connecting different players.
3. Local vs international scaling
•Local projects resulted easier to be implemented, due to an easier understanding of the local context (economic, cultural, social) and connections with relevant stakeholders.
•Those solution providers that scaled their solutions to new regions/countries faced bigger challenges in understanding the new context, knowing the local stakeholders and deploying their activities in such a short period. Still it was a great opportunity to test their products and services in new potential markets
4. Turning challenges into opportunities
•The SocialChallenges.eu approach was a real catalyst for solution providers: the short implementation period forced them to adopt a lean approach.
•Stakeholders involvement was a critical aspect for many solution providers. Re-thinking relationships and channels was an important dimension solution providers had to go through, forcing them to reconsider their business model and in some cases to identify new opportunities.
All the above was reported and shared in plenary before starting the training session on Impact Investment and Impact Measurement.
