“Social innovation and collaborative networks must be fully used in order to boost participation by the public and civil society in general in designing and managing EU policies, by means of distributed collective and bottom-up projects that strengthen more direct democracy.”

The European Commission has created a policy paper that examines the role of Social Innovation in Social Sciences and Humanities research, especially in those research projects funded under FP6 and 7, as well as Horizon 2020.

The first chapter goes over the history of the use of the concept of social innovation; the second explores its variety of approaches in contemporary research; the third analyses how social innovation research projects deal with collective action, and the last chapter assesses the lessons learned from screening the research projects.

Download the paper here.