How does CHEST support Digital Social Innovation (DSI)?
CHEST is a 33 month Collaborative project co-financed with support from the European Commission through Framework Programme 7. The aim of the project is simple. To support the rapidly growing European community of technology and social entrepreneurs to advance ideas that focus on the use of digital technologies (such as open data, open knowledge, open hardware, and open networks) to deliver solutions to key societal challenges. The primary mechanisms to achieve this within CHEST are:
- The provision of seed finance (up to €2.5M awarded) through three open funding calls which were delivered in 2014.
- The creation of a community of key stakeholder groups from within Europe’s DSI community.
- The development of a dedicated Community Platform mog.eng.it/chestcommunity/ that is available to anyone with an interest in DSI. The platform will:
- Provide regular updates regarding the projects supported under the 3 open calls with the facility for anyone to provide comments and recommendations.
- A blog style meeting place to enable the community to exchange ideas and opinions relating to DSI providing a mechanism to encourage collaborative project and idea development, the sharing of learning and the exchange of best practice.
- Provide links to key support networks, incubators and financiers that exist within the EU.
- Enable the exchange feedback on the CHEST project.
Objectives
- To facilitate the generation of community derived ideas that address societal challenges, supporting knowledge exchange, the development of best practice, discussion and collaborative activity.
- To invite social entrepreneurs from across Europe to submit their ideas through three open funding calls for proposals, which will then be evaluated by both the crowd community and external independent evaluators, with the highest rated proposals each receiving support for continued development and realisation.
- To transform the novel ideas selected into viable added value social initiatives.
- To communicate the results of the project across the EU and to engage with key communities, investors and incubators active with an interest in digital social innovation to ensure the sustainability of the programme with the potential to facilitate crowd funding to finance future projects and ideas
Our role in the project
PNO is involved in a number of EU funded network projects to build communities to further innovation in specific sectors, such as the bio-based product market (BIOCHEM), transport (SMART), security (OSMOSIS), open source and embedded software (SHARE). The company has the proven capability to link innovation suppliers and adopters from a unique Europe- wide client network in multiple sectors, using advanced methodologies and proprietary on-line networking. Withing the CHEST project PNO ……
