User driven Social Innovation and Living Labs

Abstract

The DEMOCRAT Project is conceived as an open social innovation process in the field of Education for Democracy (EfD) and related fields. The project aims to develop a Competences Framework for Responsible Democratic Citizenship (RCD), a European Curriculum for EfD prototype, and tools to assess RCD competences. This will be tested in real-world settings through local projects. As innovation, particularly social innovations, can be conceived of as an open-ended process of problem-solving, it is imperative to involve those affected by the social problems. For this reason, DEMOCRAT has opted for a strategy of continuous collaboration with the educational community through the establishment of Living Labs. DEMOCRAT conceives Living Labs as an iterative mutual learning process among different stakeholders in three dimensions: i) Learning with practitioners and other stakeholders to resolve the problem of effective education for democracy and to enhance democratic commitment in the EU countries. ii) Learning from one's own experience with novel approaches to education for democracy in education practice. iii) Learning from others' experience with novel approaches of education for democracy in education practice. This comprehensive Living Lab strategy based on a combination of social science research methods enables the integration of social science research with practical experience in the field, thereby facilitating the development of novel tools or methods for EfD with the active participation of the community of education, putting the ground so that the proposed social invention can become social innovation.