The Foundation for Partnership and Civil Society Development

Workshop: „Developing social innovations using Design thinking“

Foundation for partnership and civil society development in cooperation with The Region of Istria – Administrative Department for international cooperation and European affairs organized a workshop „Developing social innovations using Design thinking“ implemented through +RESILIENT project activities, Interreg Mediterranean program 2014. – 2020.

During the introduction, Mirna Karzen from Social innovation Laboratory Zagreb informed the participants about the term 'social innovations' in order to bring them closely the good practice examples and the benefits which social innovations are bringing to the community. Social innovations are signifying the ideas which are solving specific increasing social issues, like isolation, exclusion, poverty, social imbalance, lack of awareness when it comes to ecology, inefficient competencies and social skills needed for better life quality.

During workshop, 40 participants from civil, private, public and academic sector developed fresh ideas for social innovation using Design thinking method. The Workshop was moderated by the experts from the Apsolon company – Marko Škrobo and Enes Nahić.

During group exercises, the participants developed the project ideas for six different thematic areas: Isolation of elderly people, Raising the self esteem of the disadvantaged groups, Learning about the social services, Free time quality, Education of the adults and How to assure the personal assistants for the children with disabilities.

Solving different issues, the participants developed intergenerational solidarity programmes through various social contents: job club for unemployed experts – especially by refering to the ex Uljanik shipyard  employees as the current social problem, they also created digital portal about the social services which gathers all informations about these issues, one group used the card game to solve the free time programmes, another worked on the digital training for adults and there was also developed the idea how to assure the personal assistants for children with disabilities during summer camps in cooperation with local schools and academic community. They were also discussing other ideas and possibillities about socially useful learning and mentoring the employees which are working in emergency crisis operations. There are many good ideas to develop in further period. The first chance to do it is the social entrepreneurship workshop during which the mentioned themes will be developed in the specific business ideas.