A common feature of the initiatives promoting Creative and Social Innovation in the INTERREG-MED programme is that they are working towards innovation that is ‘inclusive by design’. They promote new business models and opportunities for employment, open up these possibilities to people of different gender, origin, and cultural background, and bring innovation to communities in rural, remote and insular areas to build territorial cohesion.
This Policy Brief looks at concrete ways for enhancing the contribution of Knowledge Champions (defined here as organisations in either the public and private spheres active both within and outside a territory and make a key contribution to a region’s capacity to grasp, understand and process knowledge coming from the outside) to territorial dynamics of proximity and agglomeration in a context of transnational cooperation.
This entails a focus on the learning dynamics that occur prior to diffused innovation, considered in all its possible meanings: technological, organisational, social, and institutional. In particular, we explore how on-going projects in the Creative and Social Innovation community leverage Knowledge Champions to promote joint collaborative efforts by local stakeholders and policy makers, towards the development of an innovation climate that favours inclusive knowledge creation, transfer and assimilation.