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Innovation Lab - from vague idea to strong plan
Innovation Lab - from vague idea to strong plan
Start date: May 15, 2016,
End date: Feb 14, 2017
PROJECT
FINISHED
Innovation Lab is a training course dedicated to empowering voluntary and professional youthworkers to realise their ideas and start social innovation projects. 24 people from 11 different countries (Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Turkey) will work together in a six day innovation lab in Hungary, Szeged. Date: 01/08/2016-06/08/2016Innovation seems like a new buzzword. On the market and in policy, ‘innovation’ appears as the key for welfare and for stimulating economic growth. Do youthworkers have to do something with social innovation? We think so. The European youth work is challenged to deal with social and societal developments. We’re facing major challenges. To come up with new solutions, we need a lot of experiment. That why we want to start with innovation labs. Why an innovation lab? Social innovation is more than suddenly get sparkling inspiration for innovative practices. Sparkling ideas don’t come easily. They often need a lot of work before they are concrete and workable. For example, you need to find resources, people and time, based on the description of your idea. Ideas can also be threatening or bizarre for the organisation of the youth worker. So the supervisors, managers or teams, partners/ funders, need to be convinced to actually realize an innovative idea. You have to be able to sell it within your own organization. In that case, it helps if you have a clear plan. So by this innovation lab we create the framework, the support, the time and the space to work on strong plans for experiment for new youth work practises. The final result of an Innovation LAB: a strong projectplan for the implementation social innovative idea. In this TC the participating youthwoker learn through their own planning process how to use the method of Innovation Lab and how to support youngsters to realize their own societal innovative ideas. This experimental youthwork ideas can lead to different kinds of Erasmus+ projects. From youth exchanges, over trainings to large scale projects. Besides that, the innovation lab is a valuable learning process. Participants learn to look through the eyes of other people to their ideas and working context. They question their way of working and get inspired by others. The methods we use are based on the potential of self directed learning. We follow the pace of the participants and work on their needs.