There are dozens of social innovation toolkits online, but the tools are rarely used. The CHESS project tested the practical application ecosystem building tools in Slovenia, Italy, Lithuania and Greece. We documented these tools and how they we used to build ecosystems around migrant integration, the blue ecomy, the energy transition and youth unemployment in this Action Manual.
CHESS (Change Hubs for Ecosystemic Social Solutions) The CHESS project was funded between 2023-2025 under the Horizon Europe programme which seeks to improve the overall ecosystem for innovation in Europe.
Why CHESS project was needed
It is now widely accepted in Europe that we need new approaches if we are to tackle the systemic and urgent societal challenges we face – traditional technological or business innovation alone is not sufficient. ‘Social’ must be part of the bigger innovation picture.
With significant support from the European Commission, social innovation is currently well embedded in several policy agendas, funding streams and the research, education and innovation ecosystems.
Despite this success, the full potential of social innovation remains untapped.
Whilst there are dozens of toolkits available for researchers and practitioners, they are rarely applied and rarely known beyond the social innovation community. If we want to build innovation capacity in European organisations responsible for working on big social challenges, we should start by improving practical application of social innovation through the testing of existing tools.
We also need to help social innovators better interact within the wider innovation ecosystems – otherwise social innovation community will talk to itself, without making any dents on the wider systems that influence the way society is organised.
A Learning by doing approach
With a “learning by doing” approach, the CHESS project works towards these goals by implementing, and testing tools designed to help build ecosystems in four pilot countries, Slovenia, Italy, Lithuania, and Greece.
The project brings together a partner in each of the countries working in a distinct societal challenge, systemic in nature: sustainable blue economy, youth and female unemployment, refugee integration and inclusive energy transition. These organisations were not social innovation practitioners and are not part of the wider social innovation movement.
Instead of creating yet another toolkit, our aim was to test and improve existing SI methods and tools with organisations who are not familiar with them.
We carefully selected a collection of ecosystem building tools from the many toolkits available online. Through a series of workshops, each partner tested these tools in their own contexts. Through a series of learning workshops, we reflected on how easy it was to apply each tool, how relevant it was for the local ecosystem, and how the tools might be improved to be more useful and relevant to the specific context.
After three rounds of workshops applying the tools in each context, reflections, learning and iteration, we created the Social innovation in Action Manual ( downloadable on the left).
The CHESS project created value on two levels:
Firstly, in building social innovation skills and capabilities in the organisations who were part of the project. All of the organisations said they would continue to use the tools in their work going forward. They also recognised the value of taking time to invest in understanding the ecosystem as a first step to developing any new initiative.
On the societal challenges the organisations were tackling – by investing time in building an ecosystem around the challenge, the organisations have developed a deeper understanding of the challenge they are trying to solve and have a community of people to work with. They are better placed to deliver projects or services which can tackle their challenges more effectively.
We produced a Social Innovation in Action manual. It documents the tools that were used, and the experience of each organisation in applying the tools to their local challenges.

