The European Social Innovation Competition (EUSIC) aims at stimulating the potential of social innovation to provide solutions to societal challenges and to foster sustainable and inclusive growth in Europe. This competition looks for new entrepreneurial solutions responding to the most burning social needs, creating social relationships and enabling new collaborations in an innovative way and bringing effective solutions to systemic social challenges.

This competition is open, among others, to non-profit and for-profit organisations, such as entrepreneurs and social enterprises, corporate responsibility departments of private companies, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), educational institutions and universities.

The competition will directly support the three solutions that best tackle the defined challenge with a prize of EUR 75.000, EUR 50.000 and EUR 25.000 for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd ranked winners.

Objectives and Scope

The European Social Innovation Competition 2024 will focus on social innovation in Digital Democracy.

In the era of rising populism, disinformation, (deep)fake news, hate speech, polarization, radicalisation, foreign interference, and lack of political participation of groups of society, this year’s topic aims to:

• incentivise, support and reward social innovations that will help identify and tackle disinformation, encourage democratic governance models in online services, tools and business models;
• connect actors in emerging democratic practices, such as, for instance, the public consultation and deliberation platforms based on Decidim;
• promote the creation and adoption of digital commons such as open source, open hardware and open data solutions;
• raise awareness amongst the public about democratic values in the virtual and digital world;
• build grassroots communities and strengthen civil society, based on participation, collaboration, deliberation and building spaces for dialogue based on democratic values
• and develop digital organisational and/or business models driven by democratic principles as well as supporting equal access, open and shared technologies.

The European Social Innovation Competition 2024 will emphasise the importance of digital social innovation to strengthen the Union democratic space where social economy actors and civil society play a crucial role In light of this, it will support innovative solutions to achieve the above aims in a range of different ways (e.g., through new, scalable digital technologies or innovative use and commercialization of existing ones). Digital technologies and data are tools and assets for social innovators to build new sustainable and community-driven business models which will ultimately bring positive impacts to democracy and societal changes.

The EUSIC 2024 Competition will showcase social innovators’ concrete ideas to promote civic engagement and mobilisation through innovative digital services promoting the general interest and democratic principles in the Union. In such situations innovative actors are producing, sustaining and governing collective goods efficiently by innovative and collaborative means and offer new solutions to challenges for democratic systems.

The Competition will look for technological and non-technological social innovations, with a particular focus on new participatory and engagement models, breakthroughs, socially sustainable or breakthrough, market-creating and deep-tech innovations embracing the objectives of this year’s edition, which, consequently, will have a positive impact on civic engagement, local prosperity as well as sustainable economic growth.

Expected results

The European Social Innovation Competition aims at raising awareness about social innovation across a wide audience, sparking the creation of new socially innovative ideas creating a network of like-minded practitioners and supporting finalists to transform their ideas into structured businesses.