Collaborative Approaches for linking Circular Economy Initiatives Erasmus Project

Project Title

Collaborative Approaches for linking Circular Economy Initiatives

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Environment and climate change; Social entrepreneurship / social innovation

Project Summary

Ciculink focuses on merging social innovation and the world of work, committing to raise awareness about the advantages of Circular Business Models(CBM) and their relationship with Social Innovation at work by a complex b-learning training kit for corporate trainers, Small Medium size Entites(SME:s) and Circular Economic (CE) entrepreneurs. Furthermore, it promoted large scale cooperation building on standardized cooperation models and systematic approach.

Despite the increasing number of CE innovative initiatives in Europe, many of them arose from civil society, they are many times characterized form being sparse in time, space and accession. Many of them are condemned to fail, for lack of visibility (and awareness), in the end, for lack of cooperation. This open environment were CE initiatives raise, offers much chance for development but, at the same time, many of these initiatives are isolated from each other’s and from the innovation mainstream – that could contribute to their success – due to various reasons, e.g. lack of digital ‘socialization’ (older, but still active and involved generations), location (less developed regions far from pulsing innovation hubs or big cities), limited financial possibilities (voluntary basis and / or cooperation with SMEs), lack of relevant strategies and possibilities to share ideas with peers, missing information and know how.
Systematic cooperation remains a challenging task and skill to master; it is crucial that the various actors – education providers, companies, CE actors, civil society, governmental institutions – got informed on social innovations toward CE management and cooperative dimensions, and be skilled to handle this in a harmonized, systematic way involving the widest scale of possible contributors.

Based on the European CEN TS 16555 innovation standard on ‘Collaboration Management’, to promote and facilitate the success of CE initiatives and social innovation; the partnership developed a standard based training and course material on Circular Economy and Innovation based on a Collaboration Management approach. The application of the standards ensured a systematic approach for VET training and enabled the development of strategic partnerships between Circular Economy sector and it´s actors, VET providers and educational institutions and civil society sensitive to the CE cause. Considering the requirements and challenges of the digital era, the training surface was built to be an innovative digital learning platform, as part of a b-learning course. The b-learning model facilitates access the training regardless of financial or geographical disadvantages. It fits the learning style the new generations (‘digital natives’) as well, give chance to older generations to get acquainted with digital tools, in a friendly way, and learn new Circular Economy approaches from peers.

The training material provided a theoretical and practical framework on the most important topics: Circular Business Models (CBMs), Social Innovation – such as open innovation – Collaboration Management, Diversity Management, Social Economy, Corporate Social Responsibility and CEN/TS 16555-5 European Innovation Management standard on Collaboration Management
The training is based on economy.europa.eu/platform/en; facilitating the linking of current and the development of future CE initiatives, their actors and activists, local, regional and at a European level.
The training course addresses:
– Circular Economy actors and SMEs: waste managers, local authorities and civil society with CE projects, SMEs and other players who wish to implement CMBs
– Education sector: VET teachers and training organisations
The consortium consist of five partners INNOVADE, Cyprus with high experience of entreprenuership, innovation, start ups and webproduction. FILP, Ireland specializing in vocational training, education, digital media and social inclusion . STP, Spain with a local vocational training center that offers training and technical support to companies, public administration and entreprenuers. ISQ, Portugal a non profit organisation offering technical support, They also have a research and inspectorial division and a department for education with experience of Life Long learning, e-learning and VET training . Gästrike återvinnare, Sweden with high experience of behaviour changes, supporting companies in Sweden but also cities, departments and countries in capacity building.
The partners has together developed and worked to achieve the objectives and results of the following Intellectual outputs

IO1. Circular Collaboration Management manual
IO2. Training Materials toolkit
IO3. Digital learning platform & collaborative area
IO4. Guide book for further collaboration in CE
The highly demanding work of completin these IO:s has been distributed across the years of the project, the responsibility for developing the IO:s has been allocated evenly among the partners.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 228976 Eur

Project Coordinator

Gästrike återvinnare & Country: SE

Project Partners

• INSTITUTO DE SOLDADURA E QUALIDADE
• FUTURE IN PERSPECTIVE LIMITED
• INNOVADE LI LTD
• SOLUCIONES TECNO-PROFESIONALES CONSULTING