Alexopoulos Yiorgos’s scientific contributions

Young Entrepreneurs Succeed (YES!) is a trust-based partnership engaging eight institutions from Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Spain, and United Kingdom with wide experience promoting entrepreneurship among underserved youth. “YES!” funded by Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway through the EEA (European Economic Area) and Norway Grants Fund for Youth Employment. The aim of the project “The Scaling trust-based partnership models to recharge youth entrepreneurship: Supporting underserved communities with innovative entrepreneurship support instruments (TPM-RYE)” is to activate unemployed youth to access the labor market and promote entrepreneurship. “YES!” provides youth not in education, employment or training (NEETs) from Greece, Poland, Italy and Spain with various services to start and grow business or to find a job: training, coaching, access to finance, mentoring. Ultimately, the aim is to support NEETs in becoming self-employed or entering/returning to education/employment and, consequently, have a positive social impact by bringing economic benefits to society and by building social capital. In order to meet this objective, the project has set to establish trust based partnerships at the appropriate (local/regional) level, engaging and aligning a diverse group of stakeholders to serve the target groups in different ways. This is expected to improve the sustainability of both outcomes and impact, but also secure the sustainability and scalability of the project’s approach beyond the lifetime of the current funding. One of the areas of the program was the implementation of training seminars for NEETs in order to create a cooperative enterprise - a social solidarity economy organization (SSE). Attendance was free for the trainees and there was counseling and mentoring in addition to the seminars. The training, apart from the professional subject of the seminar, included techniques for employment by creating a cooperative enterprise - a SSE organization with emphasis on the social expediency and the comparative advantages of SSE, the governance and management, the creation and operation of the team, the transfer of know-how and SSE good practices.

“SEED - Social Innovation Ecosystem Development” is one of the six projects supported by the European Commission in order to establish national competence centers for social innovation across the European Union. During two years (2021-2023) social innovation organizations, research centers, ESF (European Social Fund) managing authorities and other partners design and develop competence centers, which can help their countries to promote social innovation, including with funding from ESF+ and other EU programmes. The project has received financial support from the European Union Programme for Employment and Social Innovation (EaSI) and the European Social Fund (ESF). The specific objective of SEED is to stimulate and support the establishment of four competence centers for social innovation in Italy, Greece, Romania and Slovenia, where researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and civil servants will work together to create public and open infrastructures capable to assist national ESF managing authorities to better employ the ESF+ funds for the mainstream of social innovation as public sector innovation approach to societal challenges. Cooperatives and social solidarity economy (SSE) organizations have important role in establishing competence centre for social innovation and -among others- in stakeholder engagement for social innovation capacity building. Specifically, in the enlarging of the competence centers network through a process of stakeholder engagement on the territories and through different levels of governance (local, regional, national) to support the process of capacity building in the short and long run of the national competence centers. The main goals of the social innovation capacity building programme are (among others) the increasing capacity of social innovation stakeholders in promoting and delivering social innovation interventions, including a better and leveraged use of ESF funds and creating a network of policy makers and practitioners and facilitating their aggregation around thematic communities.