idw – Informationsdienst Wissenschaft
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
idw - Informationsdienst
Wissenschaft
Award-winning social enterprises and high-profile research institutes from four EU countries collaborate in the EU Horizon2020 funded project RURINNO to foster rural development. Structurally weak rural regions across Europe face similar challenges. Compared to urban centres, such regions suffer from less economic productivity and a lack of qualified jobs. At the same time, less educational and cultural opportunities are provided. As a result, these regions experience out-migration, especially of young, well-qualified people. Without tailored intervention, rural regions are threatened to lose their connection with social and economic developments in Europe.
Social enterprises as change agents can break unfavourable routines through social innovations. In intensive interaction the members of the project team create an empirical knowledge base for contextualized future interventions that tap the potentials of social enterprises in disadvantaged rural regions.
“Promoting social innovations is a strategy for counteracting the challenges”, explains RURINNO principal investigator Gabriela Christmann, professor and deputy director of the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS), Germany. Social enterprises play an important part in this, supporting social innovations by, for example, coaching young people in the development of entrepreneurial ideas and thus providing development impetus in structurally weak areas. RURINNO provides participating social entrepreneurs the opportunity to jointly reflect their strategies and practices freed from the pressure of everyday business. This mutual learning process is facilitated through cross-sectoral study trips and is underpinned by theoretical knowledge provided by researchers. Researchers from the two academic partners IRS and IFI - Institute for Innovation Management, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria, join the social entrepreneurs for participant observation. Likewise, practitioners from four social enterprises – Ballyhoura Development Ltd. (Ireland), NIDA (Poland), Otelo (Austria), Stevia Hellas (Greece) – receive training at the two research institutions. Together, the research team aims at improving knowledge transfer between research and practice, broadening the understanding of the conditions for social innovations in rural regions and enhancing the awareness for social enterprises among politicians and in society.
CONTACT INFORMATION
Prof. Dr Gabriela Christmann
Head of Research Department „Dynamics of Communication, Knowledge and spatial Development“ at Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS)
tel. 03362/793270
email: gabriela.christmann@leibniz-irs.de
http://www.rural-innovations.net
Team of the RurInno project at the Kickoff-Meeting in Berlin
Source: Jan Zwilling (IRS)
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