European Community of Practice

With the will of maximizing the public investment through the ESF we tried to identify the ingredients leading to social innovation in order to promote it.

To let emerge innovative approaches we support the use of the PCM methodology by the partnerships.

To identify the most important products we put in place a validation process in 5 steps.

We saw that partnership was a very important element of this innovation process and we saw also the added value of an exploratory study (on the local situation) before the writing up of the project by all partners.

Then we tried to create an environment where this new solution can emerge specially in the perspective of the decrease of the credits avaliable for our programme in the new programming period.

We also increased the flexibility regarding the lifetime of the projects and the opening of the partnerships to bodies not funded through the ESF.

We have also mainstreamed some of the best examples of EQUAL as measures in the programme like the approach of the ex-offendors made by the Reinsert project.