Croatia

Introduction

The Croatian SIKE unit has a goal to educate our community about social innovation and to develop social innovation projects through knowledge and idea exchange.

2020 update:

  • Croatia’s SIKE Unit has been focused in the last 6 months on tasks regarding workshops and training programs as well as design on training materials for participants.
  • Workshops were oriented on students mostly, given that the goal of Croatia SIKE unit is to enhance, promote and develop ecosystem of social innovation of Croatia. It is our UNIT’s goal to educated students and teachers about social innovation concepts and possibilities.
  • SIKE Unit will be running its incubation space in the future as well as soon as University repones, allowing everyone interested to collaborate, design and develop social solutions in Croatia. 

The Unit

The space of the SIKE unit will be set up at VERN University of Applied Sciences which is based in Zagreb.

Cases

The two SIKE cases in Croatia are Radiona Makerspace and Humana Nova

Radiona Makerspace – Association for Development of ‘do-it-yourself’ Culture has been founded in order to enhance the visibility of makers’ open-source culture and self-sustainable production, as well as with an aim of connecting all possible fields of art, science and technology.

Radiona.org focuses its activities on education, research processes, artistic projects, curatorial practices, international and domestic inter-sector collaborations, renewable systems and social awareness related issues. (https://radiona.org/)

Social cooperative Humana Nova is a social enterprise dedicated to finding solutions for the social, ecological and economic problems in several ways, such as:

  • Reduction of textile waste:
  • Employment of the marginalised groups in the labour market
  • Creating a positive social impact in the community

Site visit

The site visit to Croatia took place in May 2019, with 15 project partners from partner organisations. The experience included many different elements, with deep dives into the Croatian partners – a private university VERN’ and a nonprofit organisation Social Innovation Lab (SIL) and how both have been promoting and supporting social innovations for many years now.

For a full debrief on the Croatian SIKE site visit, please read this article on ‘Experiencing the social innovation ecosystem in Croatia‘.