SOCIAL SEDUCEMENT Embracing vulnerability in entrepreneurship development Erasmus Project

Project Title

SOCIAL SEDUCEMENT

Embracing vulnerability in entrepreneurship development

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 addressing more than one field

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2014

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education; Access for disadvantaged; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

The Social Seducement project started with the ambitious idea of empowering the game creator community and social innovators to drive real-world impact – in terms of inclusiveness and employability – through online games. Social Seducement began in 2014 with the development of the proposal, putting together a complementary network of partners that over three years were to provide the space for testing this approach and also in a fast evolving scenario for the chosen topic.

The partners’ network was represented different areas in in 5 EU countries (UK; IT; ES; SE; BE) to approach a comparison in different approaches to inclusive entrepreneurship and use of ICT and gaming for getting social impact:
•pedagogical and didactic competences: TIHR and UNIR
•ICT and gamification development competences: Ecobyte and UNIR
•modelling game as an empowerment process to pursue social impact: LE MAT, COOMPANION and REVES
•inclusive entrepreneurship, cooperative finance and cooperative development: COMPANIOON and REVES
•competences on active labour and welfare policies and strategies: REVES.

The early main focus was “what evidence is there as for social impact for digital games?” The objective was to define a prototype tool helping users improve their employability chances while improving the coherence and collaboration in how stakeholders work together, trying to align creative design with evidence across the various involved disciplines. By bringing together representatives from different domains partners aimed to stay deeply open to many kinds of impact that the game could have.

The activities undertaken by Social Seducement can be summarised as:
•Researching and collecting activity to develop the game environment
•Identifying and analysing the target groups and their needs
•Developing the game features and the game storytelling – imagining all the possible scenarios and thus identifying the game rules. This has been the most difficult activity in terms of depth of analysis of all the possible options and in terms of identification of the most suitable way to translate them into a digital game given this was an Erasmus + project, under the education and training area and not directly a project under the ICT research area.
•Implementing the game into a real virtual environment. This activity required an important and constant adaptation of the gap between what was set up conceptually and what was possible when translating it into practice.
•Developing and identifying the most suitable training materials for the users
•Developing the training paths and training materials for the game facilitators and holding the trainings
•Testing the game in the various countries.
•Drafting the guidelines for an assessment of the results and achieving some valid conclusions and recommendations.

All those activities happened within a shared and constantly renewed network environment inspired by the following core values, which have been transposed to the game as well:
•Inclusiveness: this project included and engaged individuals from across the range of stakeholder groups, sectors, content areas, and expertise to accommodate a broad set of goals, methods, and outcomes.
•The project built on the theoretical models developed by researchers in gaming, incorporating primary source material. The purpose was to expand social impact game design and evaluation beyond a particular content area, and give the full social impact game community the resources to utilize new approaches and supplement their existing methods.
•Transparency to increase communication with interested community members, to promote accountability in achieving the project goals and foster greater openness in discussing process and methods.

Some key findings from across project activities are:
•Social impact digital games benefit from increased communication and collaboration between key stakeholders
•Stakeholders from different sectors benefit from sharing practices in design, impact measurement and dissemination.

The partnership worked on the basis of the following principles:
• Facilitative, by illuminating the working dynamics between different stakeholders, sectors and disciplines to capitalize on shared goals and increase collaboration.
• Evidence-based: being informed by researchers and studies to support the methods identified in Social Seducement.
•Accessibility: the project’s content aimed at becoming an approachable, unified entry point into the social impact games, through which stakeholders and potential collaborators can continue building partnerships and sharing ideas even now that the project is formally completed.
•Visibility: dissemination is a key element for the success of such projects, allowing the initial community to include comments and ideas of other communities, ensuring the content has a real-world forum to be discussed in and expanded upon.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 416436,37 Eur

Project Coordinator

TAVISTOCK INSTITUTE OF HUMAN RELATIONS LBG & Country: UK

Project Partners

• LE MAT AGENZIA DI SVILUPPO CONSORZIO DI COOPERATIVE SOCIALI SC
• UNIVERSIDAD INTERNACIONAL DE LA RIOJA SA
• Ecobyte Technology S.r.l.
• RESEAU EUROPEEN DES VILLES ET REGIONS DE L’ECONOMIE SOCIALE AISBL
• Coompanion Göteborg ek. för.