Through events, summits, gathering of existing tools for best practice and a digital ecosystem for social entrepreneurs, we will strengthen the ecosystem for social innovation in Europe. We will create a European peer-to-peer academy for social & impact entrepreneurship support. Co-owned by European support organizations, we will endeavor to increase the capacities of social entrepreneurship support organizations in Europe. The academy aims to sustainably boost the impact of the European ecosystem for social & impact-driven entrepreneurship. We will gather and promote tools and facilitate locally based events, and facilitate summits where knowledge, methods, best practices, and tools are disseminated. In addition, we will build on existing digital platforms to create a social innovation ecosystem where best practices, knowledge and tools will be granted free of charge for social entrepreneurs. Key output from the project: - Registration of best practice out before and after intervention. The registration forms from the first registration will be used to select relevant tools to be included in the digital ecosystem. - Two social innovation policy summits and a final conference for actors in the social innovation ecosystem. - Collection of tools from actors working with social innovation. The tools may come from relevant accelerators, investors, incubators and public entities such as universities and government. All activities and tools will be free accessible at the digital ecosystem. The digital ecosystem will be built on existing software systems. The digital ecosystem will be a strong European network with various actors within different branches and knowledge from professionals within the field.

EXPAND will develop a toolbox for implementing ‘Challenge Based Idea Accelerators’ and run a first Idea Accelerator focused on homelessness.The toolbox is aimed at higher education teaching staff and will enable a practical new method responding to the need for more civic engagement, developing new problem solving skills and stimulate social entrepreneurship in students. The proposed project builds on the creativity of students combined with design thinking and challenge-based education to tackle societal challenges, with a focus on homelessness in the pilot programme. We call out for students, innovators, creative thinkers, tech people and the higher education world, in particular, to join forces and bring heavyweight social challenges in the spotlight. Our project aims to forge unlikely alliances across a wide spectrum of partners to define a viable, replicable and scalable methodology for tackling systemic societal problems.In this project, we will design a 4 month idea-accelerator with a strong focus on the needs analysis of the challenge in question resulting in a public demo day.The alliance will consist of business school teaching staff, design thinking experts, social enterprise leaders with expertise on how to tackle the issue and startup professionals. These different actors will work together in order to finetune the methods to the specific environment and challenge, in this case homelessness.