Scaling social innovation across Europe: stories from the DESIGNSCAPES community

In the last couple of months, Alicia and Alberto, researchers at the PCM lab, touched base with the teams of the urban innovators funded in the 3rd Call on Scaling of DESIGNSCAPES, a European research project the Lab is currently working on.  These selected projects all address complex societal challenges, from youth empowerment, community resilience, or the liveability of cities to climate change and sustainable consumption. After prototyping their innovative solution in one city, these initiatives are now busy scaling their projects to another location in Europe. 

With this series of short interviews, Alicia and Alberto wanted to know more about the initiatives’ progress, especially in these challenging times, as well as their specific strategies and lessons they’ve learned while replicating their initiatives. Additionally, these interviews serve the purpose of facilitating connections among the community of innovators by helping initiatives know more about each other projects. The group of innovators are oftentimes too busy to initiate contact themselves or participate in frequent get-togethers, so the researchers had to think creatively to work on community-building. 

Out of these interviews, the PCM lab team working at DESIGNSCAPES has published a series of profiles on the European project’s website and created a set of posters that give a glimpse into each initiative’s work and key insights of scaling. Hopefully, these will serve to not only showcase the interesting stories of these diverse projects but also spark new connections among the group for the exchange of their experiences on scaling. 

Do you want to know more about these projects’ journeys and how they are scaling their impact to different contexts?

Take a look at their #PROFILES on the DESIGNSCAPES website!