The top 9 takeaways from DANDELION Thematic Workshop at SSH2016 event in Bratislava

“DANDELION Thematic Workshop” was held in Bratislava on 14^th of November 2016. The workshop was held as a side-event of the international conference "Social Sciences and the Humanities: A New Agenda for Europe's Challenges" held in the frame of Slovakia’s EU Council Presidency.

The workshop was organised by the DANDELION project to offer a discussion forum where relevant key players explored the dissemination and communication practices of Inclusive, Innovative and Reflective Societies (IIRS) projects in order to increase their uptake and valorisation by citizens, policy makers, businesses and civil society.

The workshop was organised in 3 discussion tables around the following topics:

- Migration & refugee integration in the EU

- EU identities, extremism and radicalization

- Social Innovation and reform of EU public services

37 stakeholders from Policymakers/Public Authorities, Academia/Research and Civil Society/ NGOs participated in the discussion.

The TOP 9 takeaways from the thematic workshop are:

Communication/Exploitation strategy:

1. Have a clear communication and exploitation strategy from the beginning of the project

2. Produce and offer knowledge to all stakeholders and package the knowledge in a way that it is useful, comprehensive and actionable for all of them

3. Provide researchers more information/training/awareness on how and why to efficiently communicate the results of the project

Engagement of Stakeholders:

4. There is a need to have multistakeholder settings in the projects. It is beneficial to have lateral cooperation (between research fields and between players – academia, NGOs, policy makers, businesses), as well as, vertical cooperation (from European Commission to first-in-line practitioners) in projects

5. Engage stakeholders already in the planning phase of the project/research, involve them in the project activities and offer suitable results in suitable formats for them

6. For reaching out to policy makers sometimes it is useful to engage intermediaries like NGOs in the process.

Achieving Impact:

7. Have a clear sustainability strategy from the beginning of the project

8. Do not lose knowledge after the project is over. There are repositories of projects and data that may be used to store produced results and data over the lifetime of project.

9. Consider transfer ownership of results to stakeholders during the process to ensure sustainability after the termination of the project.

 

Watch the video of the event HERE