On November 28 - 29 the 5th Global Research Conference : Social Innovation and Socio-Digital Transformation – Towards a Comprehensive Innovation Policy organised by ESSI, European School of Social Innovation and its partners took place in Dortmund, Germany. The ESSI community may be part of the BEYOND4.0 scientific conference in Sofia in 2021, and is therefore of interest to us.

During this conference BEYOND4.0 was represented by TUDO and TNO in two sessions and a plenary discussion.

Steven Dhondt participated in the Panel Discussion with the Key Speakers in the Session Future of Innovation Policy in Times of Socio-Digital Transformation. The Panel Discussion dealt with possible changes in policy support for social innovation topics in policy and in future research. He further led a workshop on Socio-digital Transformation of Work: Beyond the Future of Work, in which among others Frank Pot (Radboud University Nijmegen), Michael Kohlgrüber (TU Dortmund University), and Clara Behrend (TU Dortmund University) participated. This session paid interest to the Preliminary results of Beyond 4.0 (by Steven Dhondt and Michael Kohlgrüber). The preliminary results of Paradigms 4.0 (by Steven Dhondt) and two other endeavours regarding future research into digitalisation and work.

In another session about the Measurement of Social Innovation, led by Judith Terstriep (IAT) and Simone Strambach (Philipps-Universität Marburg), Peter Oeij (TNO) presented the study “Measuring cases of social innovation using Qualitative Comparative Analysis: moving away from anecdotalism towards sensemaking patterns”. This study is based on cases of the EU project Social Innovation: Drivers of social change (2014-2017), and applied the method Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), which is also intended to be applied in WP8 of BEYOND4.0. Central question of this session was: What are the essential ingredients of an indicator system that makes it possible to observe continuously entrepreneurial and non-entrepreneurial social innovation activities at the European level?

During this conference the second edition of the ‘Atlas of Social Innovation’ was launched as well, which features a contributions of TNO and TUDO researchers, for example: Pot, Frank, Dhondt, Steven, Oeij, Peter, Rus, Diana, & Totterdill, Peter (2019). Complementing digitalisation with workplace innovation. In: Howaldt, J., Kaletka, C., Schröder, A., Zirngiebl, M. (eds.), Atlas of Social Innovation II (pp. 42-46). Oekoem Verlag, München (ISBN: 978-3-96238-157-8).

Visit for free download online : www.socialinnovationatlas.net