2008 San Sebastian

SIX, The Young Foundation and Mondragon Innovation & Knowledge (MIK), held SIX’s first summer school in 2008 bringing together the community of people and organisations involved in practical social innovation to share skills, methods and insights.

The aim of the summer school was to help build the growing field of social innovation – sharing practical skills on issues ranging from finance and design, and from managing incubators to public policy.

Around the world, at the time, there was growing interest in the field of social and public innovation. Networks were forming, research was being carried out and new intermediaries were being set up to promote and support social innovation.  Despite this growing interest and activity around social innovation – many questions remained unanswered: how do we create the conditions that will help innovation flourish? How can we turn new ideas into practical solutions? How do we then take these solutions to scale?

The event was held on 28-39 July, 2008 in San Sebastian, Spain, and brought together over 80 participants from all around the globe from fields as diverse as social enterprise, incubators, government, the private sector, charities and foundations to address these very issues. Participants were also able to learn from the numerous innovations that were underway in the Basque country, including within the Mondragon Group (of which MIK is a part) which is the world’s largest cooperative.