Problem addressed

Social innovators may encounter certain obstacles when designing and implementing projects directly funded by the national or regional programmes of European Social Fund (ESF). Having to deliver on ambitious outputs – such as a high number of beneficiaries or inclusive employment outcomes – may hinder the engagement of smaller organisations in experimental projects, particularly those that do not have access to expert guidance and support. A 2018 study on beneficiaries’ experiences of the ESF by the European Parliament showed that around 90% of beneficiaries think that more support is required to enable them to fully participate in the ESF, particularly for NGOs and small private operators.

Innovative solution

The region of Flanders in Belgium, which has allocated 8.5% of its overall ESF budget (EUR 33.8 million) to social innovation priorities, has addressed this challenge by introducing and developing a dedicated support package of guidance, tools and capacity-building services for socially innovative organisations using the ESF. The support aims to help social innovation projects in their design, implementation and scale-up.

To receive funding, proposals need to have an explicit focus on the interaction between service providers and users, where the user is the employed person or jobseeker facing a specific social or labour challenge. Hence, the focus is on providing innovative services that directly benefit users. The calls for funding are published on a regular basis and structured into two different types:

• innovation via exploration – for projects that want to start with a societal challenge and, based on exploration, devise new concepts to address it;
• innovation via adaptation – for projects that take an already existing concept, for which there is some proof that it will be effective, in order to directly develop and test it.

Exploration proposals are selected in phases – phase 1 is for research, idea generation, concept writing and initial prototyping, and phase 2 for rapid and live prototyping, piloting and impact evaluation. Selected projects are mentored and coached directly by the ESF managing authority innovation team. They are stimulated to use part of their ESF funding to draw on the expertise of local innovation experts that work with the managing authority, to build their innovation capacity. This includes organisations that have experience in social innovation, such as the Social Innovation Factory, Antwerp Management School and commercial service designers. In line with their expertise, these partners advise the social innovators on a range of topics, helping them to detail the overall logic of the service provided, design the business plan, ensure the service is financially sustainable and develop innovative work organisation methods, as needed.

Key results and benefits

By 2018, there were 4 rounds of calls and 93 projects had applied for funding – 35 for innovation via exploration and 58 for innovation via adaptation. The projects covered the following topics: adapting to change, active inclusion, entrepreneurship, lifelong learning and reducing early school leaving. A large proportion of the projects submitted and selected had a specific focus on vulnerable groups such as migrants, people with disabilities and people and families in poverty. Others focused on human resources, reducing early school leaving, lifelong learning and developing future-oriented skills.

35% of the exploration proposals submitted (19 projects) were approved for phase 1 (research, idea generation, concept writing and prototyping). Of these, eight were approved for phase 2 (live prototyping, piloting and impact evaluation). 41% of the adaptation proposals (16 projects) were approved.

One of the successful projects was Re-start (Doorstart), a new service aimed at supporting staff affected by collective dismissals in Flanders. Another one was an innovative system to connect senior inhabitants of Brussels with a migrant background with job-seeking migrants who are active or experienced in informal homecare, living in Brussels and have a professional ambition to work in the care sector.

The evaluation conducted on the first round of the calls showed that all of the stakeholders involved in the process could see the benefits of this system in supporting social innovation. Project promoters saw a unique opportunity to try new things, to learn and to focus on users. The methodology used by the ESF managing authority to evaluate the projects provided clarity as to what was expected from the projects while at the same time helping project promoters to focus their energy on what innovative aspect their project could offer to users. The great majority of project promoters also appreciated the coaching by ESF managing authority staff and the local expert partners. Notably, coaching was deemed useful to structure and design the projects as well as bring needed expertise and knowledge on existing innovation tools.

Potential for mainstreaming

The social innovation support was made possible not only thanks to the focus of the ESF regulation on experimentation and to Flanders dedicating funding to social innovation, but also to the strong transnational orientation of the Flemish ESF managing authority. This enabled the Flemish ESF managing authority to engage in a transnational research and development project to identify and learn from good practices on how to support social innovation in other countries, such as Poland, Sweden and Czechia. Based on this, the ESF managing authority now has a well-established social innovation support mechanism that ensures the effective use of ESF funding for a wide range of organisations in Flanders to develop and test social innovations. This support for social innovation, codified in a toolkit, has the potential to be transferred to other contexts, particularly where the ESF is being used to finance social innovation.