RESIST partners meet in Umeå Sweden and held first transnational strategy lab

RESIST partners during transnational strategy lab

From 17 – 18 September 2024 RESIST project partners from seven countries from the Baltic Sea Region convened in Umeå, Sweden. The 21 participants from Sweden, Germany, Lithuania, Latvia, Norway, Poland and Estonia came together to held the first RESIST transnational strategy lab, learn about the Västerbotten Region’s approach on fostering social innovation and social entrepreneurship and to exchange on the project solutions’ piloting actions.

The first day, the group met at “Kvarkenfisk”, a unique workshop setting directly at the seaside, in a former fishermen’s workshop. The main objective of the first meeting day was the project’s first of three transnational strategy labs. The RESIST transnational strategy lab aims at fostering exchange between project partners regions regarding their strategic regional strategy labs and enhance the specific regional concepts.

The regional strategy labs will develop recommendations on how to adapt regional and national strategies for innovation, including smart specialization strategies. While regional innovation strategies, labelled within the EU as “RIS3”, are powerful instruments to foster innovation, social innovation and social entrepreneurship is often rarely mentioned and in most strategies is lacking substance and SMART goals. RESIST partners seize the opportunity to explore opportunities to impact the further development of RIS3 and other crucial innovation strategies and increase objectives and measures tackling social innovation and social entrepreneurship.

During the transnational strategy lab in Umeå Sweden, the group had the chance to learn about key results from the project’s first regional strategy lab, that took place just a week prior to the consortium meeting with the Västerbotten Region, Sweden. Building on the learning from the transnational forum, RESIST partners will organize regional strategy labs, starting with Lithuania in October and Hamburg in November 2024.

The second day of the meeting took place in an impressive, old brick building, a former school that was built in the 1900s. During the second day, the RESIST partners had the chance to learn about the region of Västerbotten’s approach towards social innovation, social entrepreneurship and how the building of an ecosystem for these forms of innovation are linked to the region’s climate objectives.

The RESIST partners also had the chance to exchange with and learn from researcher from the local university on a recently developed framework for measuring social impact, which directly relates to one of the project’s internal working groups.

The RESIST partners left inspired and full of new ideas for piloting the RESIST solutions to foster ecosystems for social innovation and social entrepreneurship in their respective regions.

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