Minutes of the Workshop

Minutes of the workshop

"New technologies and digitalization: opportunities and challenges for social economy & social enterprises"

Held at the European Economic and Social Committee on 12 May 2017

Rue Van Maerlant 2, 1000 Bruxelles - Room VM3

Disclaimer: This document summarizes the content of the workshop jointly held on May 12th 2017 by the European Commission and the European Economic and Social Committee. Registration was free and open to the public. The participants who chose to introduce themselves during their intervention are named in this document; those who did not are labelled “Participant”. The views expressed in this document should not be taken to reflect the views of either the European Commission or the European Economic and Social Committee.

Welcome Speeches:

Michael Smyth – Vice President in charge of Budget – European Economic and Social Committee

 I firstly want to underline the good cooperation between the European Commission and the European Economic and Social Committee in organising this event.

 I feel directly concerned by the subject matter, as I chair a large social housing association[1] in Belfast that has been grappling with new technologies – indeed, 10% tenants are physically or mentally disabled, and carers increasingly use digital technologies to assist them.

 The social economy has been part of the European agenda since the European Parliament voted the Toia Report in 2009[2], triggering a momentum that was exploited by the European Commission in 2011 through its Social Business Initiative[3]. The EESC has been working consistently on the matter in parallel for over a decade[4].

 The issue of digitalisation is crucial for social economy enterprises, because the changes it implies offer both challenges and opportunities. Indeed, new digital technologies enable quicker exchanges of best practices and offer tools to support the values of the social economy through new collaborative, short-circuit and circular economic models, on which social economy actors could have a defining influence if they rise up to the task. However, it should be noted that the budgetary constraints faced by most social economy enterprises is a clear barrier as they tend to struggle more than other enterprises in their uptake of new technologies.

Slawomir Tokarski – Director Innovation & Advanced Manufacturing – DG GROW (European Commission)

 Social innovators and social entrepreneurs must be at the heart of digitalisation and pioneer new usages of technologies. Disruptive technologies can inspire the social economy and vice versa – for instance, the blockchain carries an intrinsic decentralisation approach that could have many implications for services and generate a high social added value.

 It is the role of public authorities to make sure that the environment in which social economy enterprises operate is fit for them. This year's ongoing European Social Innovation Competition[5] (whose winners are to be announced in October) is focused on the potentialities of digitalisation for equity, and gave way to over 800 entries from 40 countries, providing good examples of the relevance and implications of digital practices and solutions for social innovators. The EU is at the forefront of this wave: indeed, we have just inaugurated our Social Challenges Innovation Platform[6], which will be live this summer and will serve as a matchmaker between providers and recipients of social challenges and distribute grants amounting to 30.000 euros to selected projects.

Introduction: What can be expected from the event?

Peter Baeck – Head of Collaborative Economy Research – Nesta[7]

 Technologies are undeniably transforming everything about our habits. This workshop provides a unique opportunity to discuss the implications for the social economy with all the components of the ecosystem: traditional social economy enterprises, up-and-coming social start-ups, public administration…

 Through its Collaborative Economy Research Unit, Nesta conducts research but also operates a grant system geared towards social economy actors who have a digital platform, and assists them in their search for funding opportunities - whether private or public. We also run the Digital Social Innovation (DSI4EU) initiative[8], financed by the European Commission under the Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation (CAPS) programme, in the framework of Horizon 2020.

 Our vast research and experience in the field show that there is in Europe a huge amount of small and scattered, but very innovative activities going on mainly in cities (as their occurrence matches with the presence of intense mainstream digital activity), concentrated in South-West Europe, and mainly run by newer organisations, whereas established social economy actors struggle with digitalisation. We are witnessing the emergence of fascinating new phenomena, such as the potential offered by open data for a more transparent world (the obvious example being OpenCorporates[9], which thrived after Lehman Brothers collapsed); the power of citizen science and crowdsourcing for harnessing the power of crowds to conduct scientific analyses; the rise of open hardware; the boom of digital democracy; the new linkages being established between migration and tech (with opportunities in terms of training and education and training, donating, and volunteering); and game-changing innovations that are turning the sectors of health, care, waste management or education on their heads. However, we are yet to scale up these advances and turn them into large-scale opportunities.

 Four main challenges lie ahead of us:

• Bridging the large gap in terms of the current digital skills and capacity of social economy enterprises (many of whom do not even have any digital strategy) and what would actually be needed;
• The lack of efficient and systematic knowledge-sharing between social innovators and between public authorities;
• The lack of data and research about the specific impact of digitalisation on the governance, models and strategies of social enterprises;
• The lack of appropriate funding streams to answer these challenges.

Panel 1: State of play

Gaia Marcus – Project Manager - Centrepoint Youth Homelessness Databank[10]

 Centrepoint is a charity that provided housing to 18,000 young homeless people and supported 9,000 others in another way than housing in 2016. Our model is data-driven, digitally-enabled and user-centric; our team comprises frontline workers, data specialists and service designers.

 We have three main activities: a dashboard that compares the numbers of homeless young people in an area according to data provided by the government, local government and charities – showing that open data is not the be-end be-all, and that public data also needs to be challenged; an online community of former Centrepoint users; an online/phone helpline for homeless young people.

 Our experience shows that digitalisation is not about technology but rather about people: indeed, it can change the entire operational model of a charity/firm and an in-depth strategy taking account of that is essential. Culture eats strategy for breakfast: you cannot digitise a habit that doesn't exist. For instance, the online forum that we launched failed because it was not backed by habits grounded in charities' work, they do not follow their ex-beneficiaries. Digitalisation can have incredibly positive impacts, but they have to answer real needs: for instance, our online helpline did wonders in terms of accessibility for the people who refuse to face-to-face or phone contacts for various reasons.

François Durollet - CEO – Simplon.co[11]

 Simplon.co is a 4-year old initiative seeking to solve a paradox: youth unemployment rates have skyrocketed over the past years, but at the same time job offers related to data and app development go unanswered. Simplon attempts to bridge this gap by offering free 6-month coding trainings to NEETs. There are now 40 Simplon "fabrics" which have trained over 1000 "digital blue collars". Simplon is also one of the leaders of the movement in Europe: indeed, we provide tech support and methodology to other organisations through partnerships, which has led to the emergence of similar initiatives in Belgium, Italia, Romania and Spain. We have also created a web development agency with a specific focus on non-profit actors and on the social economy, offering services designed for their digital needs; several former trainees went on to join these structures as employees.

 We seized the opportunities offered by digitalisation to react to concrete existing problems: solving the aforementioned job paradox, integrating refugees and vulnerable young people, and helping the non-profit sector and the social economy close the gap in terms of digitalisation regarding technology, skills and strategy.

Anna Sienicka – Vice-President - Tech Soup Europe[12]

 TechSoup Europe was founded in 2008, has its headquarters in Warsaw and operates in 48 European countries. It provides technological software and hardware solutions to NGOs and serves as an intermediary with the rest of the ecosystem (government, hackers, corporate donors and activists) that is willing to offer support in terms of digital capacities, funding or time. We have a large impact in Europe, as we targeted 250+ NGOs and enabled them to save over 914 million euros in costs.

 We also have a community programme which develops and scales solutions, such as Save The Night (not yet in Europe), an app that provides hotel rooms for domestic abuse victims through partnership with hotels; webinars for NGOs; or a Polish open-source platform helping citizens to hold local governments accountable and allowing them to submit their own ideas regarding the use of open data.

 We believe digitalisation is essentially about empowering people.

Alain Coheur – Member of the European Economic and Social Committee and Director for European and International Affairs - Solidaris[13]

 The EESC is currently working on the impact of digitalisation on health and social protection. Europe is lagging behind in terms of e-health and we need a European agenda to tackle digitalisation across the continent. There are also important variations in health systems and degree of digitalisation across Europe, with Estonia being the first example of a digital state with integrated e-healthcare services.

 E-health apps are soaring: there were worth 2.4 billion euros in 2013; in 2018, they will be worth 21 billion. There over 40,000 existing apps – however, not all of them will succeed as they need to answer a real need and to provide practically applicable solutions.

 The health ecosystem is complex and structured with many public and private actors. Health data is very sensitive, and does not only contain medical but also financial information about one's social protection situation or medical expenses. Yet, e-health apps are not regulated and the data generally ends up within the remit of the GAFAs.

 The medical profession itself is also at risk seeing as algorithms are getter better at diagnosing – maybe even better than doctors themselves. Systems of direct reimbursement by the State (such as the "tiers-payant") will also be modernised and impact the ways in which healthcare services are provided.

Jean-Claude Mizzi – Co-Founder and Co-Manager - Association HopHopFood[14]

 HopHopFood is an association creating zones of food solidarity while reducing food waste via a digital platform. It operates at the crossroads between the social and solidarity economy, the circular economy and the collaborative/platform/sharing economy.

 Food vulnerability caused by food prices touches 24% of citizens in Europe, and 90 million tons of food are wasted every year, 53% of which by private individuals and 60% that are still edible/drinkable. HopHopFood strives to solve this paradox by fostering solidarity through an app (at the end of 2014 over 40% of the French public have said they would use this app if it existed). The beneficiaries would be students, migrants and refugees, lonely women and vulnerable people in need in general, who are in structural food insecurity. The aim of the association is to go beyond the platform itself and to create effective solidarity – digitalisation is a means and not an end!

 Benchmarking French actors in the food waste management sector we found that most of them are B2B or B2C, and that there is not yet anything available in C2C or CtoA. We have calculated that if 1% of the French use the app for 10% of their waste, more food will be saved than is currently being managed by French food banks. The potential of digitalisation here is scale.

 Digitalisation also has implications for funding: we plan on using crowdfunding to raise money to develop the association (beyond the 30 000 euros the co-founders invested in the platform to develop the iOS, Android and PC versions).

 Finally, digitalisation is also extremely valuable for the social economy as it helps enterprises to measure their impact precisely and reliably, thus solving a recurrent crucial problem for social economy enterprises. This could also help strengthen social finance markets, which suffer from lack of information.

Questions and remarks

- Harry Robbins - Founder - Outlandish / Co-operative Technologists: Digitalisation only works if the people using it are ready for it – so how can we get organisations that work for positive social change culturally ready for digitalisation?

 Gaia Marcus – Project Manager - Centrepoint Youth Homelessness Databank: We notice that digitally upskilling senior management is a big trend, but that frontline workers tend to be forgotten – but they are often the main implementers of any digital strategy! The products need to work for them and be designed with their experience specifically in mind for any kind of culture change to happen. There also needs to be more ties with the middle management level and horizontal ties between workers for digital tools to succeed.

 Anna Sienicka – Vice-President - Tech Soup Europe: On digital-readiness, there is not really a choice: communication is key and if social economy enterprises fail to realise the power of social media, they are likely to fail. The concentration of exchanges within a few networks (such as Facebook or Twitter) needs to be accounted with and these networks need to be brought on board, as their support is invaluable in terms of impact.

- Angelos Charlaftis – Consultant - e-Paphos Advisors Teamwork: What makes young people more prone to homelessness than others? Why do food waste solutions not target the homeless enough?

 Gaia Marcus – Project Manager - Centrepoint Youth Homelessness Databank: First, homelessness is not just about street homelessness, but there is also a big problem around "sex for rent", which tends to concern young people more than others. Young people are often vulnerable and lack a stable financial situation, which makes them more prone to homelessness, and the danger is that it can have serious repercussions on the rest of their lives. But homelessness is just a symptom of other roots – poverty, or a housing crisis. Centrepoint provides counselling, training, housing and encourages people to get the support they are entitled to. But we realise that many apps are more about benefitting the user/donator (and making them feel good about themselves) rather than the beneficiary because they do not address root causes - there is no point in only solving the surface.

 Jean-Claude Mizzi – Co-Founder and Co-Manager - Association HopHopFood: Entourage is an association and an app that allows Parisians to geolocate homeless people in their area so as to know where to go to help, and association Le Carillon is a network of shops that have explicitly accepted to support the homeless through free food or other supplies.

 Anna Sienicka – Vice-President - Tech Soup Europe: Let us not forget that there are many layers to innovation and technology – 1/3rd of children in the Silicon Valley are homeless!

- Salvatore Vetro – Treasurer- ENSIE asbl: Many work integration social enterprises (WISEs) perform recycling and upcycling activities, and they feel threatened by the recent trendiness of the circular economy, as it looks like an occasion for capitalist multinationals to capture the market that was previously only occupied by social enterprises.

 Jean-Claude Mizzi: There is indeed a real resistance from some established social enterprises, but not only towards capitalistic enterprises. We are discussing with big charities and some are very reluctant to approach digital solutions such as the ones we offer, some having refused to cooperate with HopHopFood as they view it as a "market stealer".

 François Durollet - CEO – Simplon.co: Traditional social economy actors are going to have to modernise their strategy and include digitalisation because services tend to become disintermediated (meaning that they provide direct contact between users and producers) and because they offer many possibilities for cross-domain actions, whereas many social economy enterprises are very specialised and act as intermediaries/middlemen.

- Mounia El Kotni, Fabrique des Territoires Innovants: Do social enterprises who collect sensitive data through apps do what is needed secure them (notably in fields like health or support to victims of violence)?