SocialTech4EU

Social economy organisations often face structural difficulties related to the access to new digital and green business models and their implication in the twin transition. Challenges are related to weak financial sustainability and access to finance, lack of skills and talent attraction capacity, low competitiveness on the market compared to traditional SMEs. These challenges hamper their potential to create more jobs and address societal challenges on a larger scale while inspiring systemic changes in the mainstream economy.

This project aims at strengthening the resilience and innovation capacity, competitiveness, and sustainability of social economy ecosystems and of start-ups and SMEs of the social economy, with a special focus on technology social ventures. The project will do this through providing them with support in the form of grants, vouchers and professional services. New digital and green business models enabled by new technologies are at the core of this project, as well as clusters’ support to agile forms of public-private partnerships and new forms of cooperation between private and public sectors within and across different value chains and territories, to accelerate the delivery of innovative impact solutions that would not be achieved otherwise.

This project is one of the 14 Industrial Ecosystems – linked to the EU industrial Strategy and is part of the Proximity and Social Economy Industrial Ecosystem. In September 2022, 30 Euroclusters have been launched to implement the EU Industrial Strategy. Euroclusters are cross-sectoral, interdisciplinary and trans-European strategic initiatives of industry clusters and other economic actors such as research organisations, companies, etc. Learn more and access the European Cluster Collaboration Platform here.