Research Project: Mapping Support Structure for Social Innovation In Ireland

CoRá is Ireland’s first National Competence Centre on Social Innovation and is being developed to help shape policy and inform the future development of social innovation in Ireland. This exciting project is co-funded by the European Commission and the Department of Community and Rural and Community Development and is informed by partners in Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Portugal which are part of a larger project called FUSE. CoRá is the Irish dimension of the FUSE project which aims to build a National Competence Centre for Social Innovation in each of the partner’s countries.

The report highlights the research on the strengths and needs of social innovation in Ireland which was carried out by Lucas Olmedo, a researcher based at the Department of Food Business and Development at University College Cork. “I carried out a literature review of the social innovation landscape in Ireland,” he says “I surveyed 62 organisations and conducted 16 interviews with different stakeholders who support the social innovation ecosystem. These included organisations from the public sector, industry, academia, and civic society. I got their views on social innovation and the support structures for it in Ireland. The idea was to gather information on the strengths and weaknesses of the support infrastructure.”

The report found that there is an early-stage social innovation ecosystem in Ireland but that more could be done to support it. “There are lots of socially innovative organisations doing a lot of things to tackle the big challenges facing society,” Olmedo notes. “There is some support for them, but it needs to be developed much further.”

Support is particularly needed to help pilot and scale social innovative ideas and organisations. Read the full report here and the Irish Times article here