Two Fingers Brewing Company gives all of the profits from its beer to prostate cancer research. Three Coins helps to teach teenagers basic money management. Charity Stars is the first pan-European auction platform for celebrity auctions. BeeOdiversity develops projects to preserve biodiversity, amongst bees and other species, and engages with stakeholders and communities.

Four fantastic ideas. Four fledgling endeavours. Four excellent examples of social innovation. And the four finalists for an award created by the Social Innovation Accelerators Network (SIAN), a new pan-European association of social innovation incubators and support services established by the EU-funded Benisi project.

“Europe is full of amazing social entrepreneurs,” says Benisi coordinator Vincent De Coninck. “In Italy there’s a small cooperative developing efficient biomass generators. In Sweden there’s a campaign to increase organ donation. Whether it is charity work, local government, public health services or profit-making companies, social innovations can have a profound impact on target communities.”

Spread the goodness, far and wide

But good ideas are even better when they are shared, De Coninck asserts. “Many social innovations have European potential – ideas and business models may need some tweaking for different contexts, but the underlying ideas behind many social innovations could benefit citizens across the EU – if we can find efficient ways to apply them across EU Member States.”

The Benisi project was launched to establish an ecosystem capable of scaling up social innovations across the EU. SIAN is one important element of the project’s activity.

“SIAN is a network of networks, but is fundamental to sustainable support for social innovators beyond the life of Benisi. It gives incubators and support organisations working in the field of social innovation access to local contacts in target markets and a wider network of experts.”

The Benisi partners also develop best practice in this unusual form of business support. So far they have identified four different scale-up pathways and are now working on common approaches to help clients extend their reach and impact. Support may include business coaching and mentoring or exploiting the SIAN network to identify experts and potential partners in new markets.

Learning from practice

The Benisi partners are already trialling their methods and practices and monitoring their impact. Together they have identified nearly 300 suitable scale-up projects, including the four SIAN award finalists.

BeeOdiversity was proclaimed the winner at a SIAN event in November 2014. Michael van Cutsem, manager of BeeOdiversity, says that the PR surrounding the prize is playing an important role in its plans to launch in France in 2015, and more countries in 2016. “It has had a real snowball effect for us,” he says, and provided access to people the project would never have been able to approach before.

“We would normally have to find our own contacts, funders and business hubs in each country – a difficult and long process. But the ecosystem that Benisi is building will make expansion faster and more efficient. We’ve been introduced to the right people and received all the local help and advice we need. We thought our impact was big when we were just in Belgium – at a European scale it could be huge and make a measurable difference to global biodiversity, bee preservation and, as a result, sustainable European agriculture.”

© i-propeller/Andre Nogueira