Abstract

CHEST aims to create a Pan-European 'point of presence' to activate social interaction and social innovation that lies latent within and across organizations, enterprises, and individuals. The goal is to increment the number and success rate of initiatives that use collective awareness approaches to respond to high-impact societal challenges. To do so, the project will:- engage a large base of organizations, networks, and programs that already operate successfully in the areas of social innovation, entrepreneurship, early stage business incubation, service design, and creativity. This CHEST Community has been started with 18 important organizations already involved as supporting partners;- create a liquid information and social deliberation platform, based on a cooperative awareness approach and implemented on top of a broad spectrum of social media, which gives voice to communities bearing interests about hard-to-solve, high-impact social problems. The platform promotes the emergence of innovative solutions and allows a transparent and collective testing and selection of social innovation experiments;- launch and manage three rounds of open calls to distribute a consistent part of our project budget (around 2,5 Million euro); these funds will be allocated with a public competition for ideas with social innovation, and measure the effectiveness of proposed responses to social problems. This evaluation and co-funding scheme includes public assessment of proposals with crowdfunding and crowdsourcing (for optimal combination of expert/stakeholders input).The beneficiaries of the project are individuals, companies and organizations that want social innovation projects, and need to have their original ideas field-tested by an intelligent ad hoc crowd of experts and stakeholders.