LASIN aims to effectively support and promote social innovation as a means to achieve sustainable and inclusive socio-economic growth, social cohesion and equity in Latin America, through intercultural, curricular and extracurricular activities. It will achieve this by establishing Social Innovation Support Units (SISU) within the Partner Countries to promote and support University-social enterprise cooperation, social entrepreneurship and graduate employability with a particular emphasis on social innovation projects, incubation and training. A range of learning and teaching tools will be developed, at a formal level through the development of a doctoral programme and more informally through CPD training of stakeholders in social innovation as well as through books and reports and a social innovation platform – a virtual space for sharing social innovation practices and learning outcomes. The project will establish international cooperation and internationalisation through a network of SISUs across the region introducing a training, mentoring and transfer scheme to ensure that there is an effective roll-out of the scheme beyond the original partnership. In addition, the project will specifically aim to involve local communities and in particular disadvantaged groups to give them access to University facilities and strengthen the ties between HEIs and their local social environment. There are at least two HEI partners representing each Partner country, one of which has experience at delivering social innovation training and other initiatives within their country and beyond. The EU Partners have a wide experience of delivering international innovation projects and embedding social innovative initiatives within their own institutions.

The Free Network project is a Joint Action to be implemented in Central America. Its general objective is improving business opportunities for research-based entrepreneurs, promoting spin-off services in Higher Education Institutions and strengthening the innovation ecosystem in Central America. The FREE Consortium identified a lack of institutional regulations supporting the creation and development of spin-off, and the absence in most of the Central America universities of specific units with qualified and skilled staff. As consequence there is a very limited capacity to exploit the research results coming from academic/research staff and students. In this context FREE proposes facilitating the creation and development of spin-off companies. The project specific objective is the creation and modernisation of spin-off support services within 12 CA Higher Education Institutions through institutional and capacity building and the use of a regional network and platform.The FREE Network activities, implemented by 12 CA HEIS and 3 EU HEIs, will include: - in-depth needs analysis on research-based entrepreneurship in PC will provide a good insight of the situation of the CA HEIs in terms of spin-off regulations and units supporting research-based entrepreneurs;- capacity building for Innovation Support Offices (ISO) staff;- creation/adaptation of ISOs with appropriate institutional legislation, qualified HR and relevant infrastructure for providing spin-off support services;- creation of a regional platform for transferring good practices and exploiting synergies at regional level; - an ambitious disseminating and exploitation strategy of the project outputs;