From Pilot to Policy: Lessons from Social Innovation Forum 2025
Europe is home to thousands of social innovations – local experiments that help people find work, build skills, or access essential services in new ways. Yet few of these reach the scale needed to influence national systems or EU-wide policy.
At the Social Innovation Forum 2025, organised by the European Commission and the European Competence Centre for Social Innovation, held in Brussels on 1-2 October, the message from policymakers and practitioners was clear: Europe already has the ideas and capacity to transform its welfare and social systems; what it needs now is a coherent strategy to mainstream social innovation into the core of policymaking.
Scaling Through Policy, not Projects
Speakers across the Forum agreed that scaling is not simply about replicating successful initiatives – it is about changing how policies are designed and implemented.
Several interventions emphasised that innovation must become a standard feature of public administration, not a side experiment. This requires flexible funding, regulatory openness, and the ability to test and adapt ideas at multiple levels of governance. The European Social Fund Plus (ESF+) is already supporting this shift by embedding social innovation into its operational framework. Yet, as European Commission representatives stressed, the Fund’s full potential will only be realised when social innovation becomes a routine, strategic choice for Managing Authorities, rather than an exceptional one.
From Experiments to Systems
A recurring theme throughout the Forum was that successful pilots alone do not create transformation. Many projects have demonstrated impact in small settings – from reducing long-term unemployment to improving youth skills – but their lessons often remain localised.
To bridge that gap, Europe needs stronger mechanisms to identify what works, evaluate it rigorously, and integrate it into national and EU-level programmes.
Speakers highlighted that systemic change is not legislation; it’s a new equilibrium of people’s expectations. This shift in thinking moves the focus from compliance to learning, from controlling projects to nurturing ecosystems.
These ecosystems include governments, civil society, social enterprises, and citizens themselves. Mainstreaming social innovation means aligning their efforts under shared missions – for example, ensuring access to quality jobs, inclusion for persons with disabilities, or resilience in the face of demographic and climate transitions.
Policy as Partnership
Another major thread in the discussion was the role of governments as partners in scaling. Social innovation rarely succeeds when it operates in isolation from public institutions. Scaling is only possible because you partner with governments.
Participants agreed that governments should be co-creators, not just funders. This means adopting successful models into public delivery systems and aligning regulatory and financial frameworks to sustain them.
Such partnerships require trust and long-term engagement. National Competence Centres for Social Innovation (NCCS), supported by the European Commission, are emerging as crucial intermediaries helping public authorities identify, test, and adopt innovative approaches.
Panellists also pointed to the need for new financing mechanisms – from social impact investment to mission-oriented public funding – that can combine flexibility with accountability. This blend of public and private capital is already helping countries such as Portugal and Spain move social innovation into the mainstream.
A Welfare Model Fit for Transformation
A central policy question ran throughout the Forum: How must Europe’s welfare state evolve to remain competitive and fair?
Experts argued that Europe’s traditional welfare model, built for an industrial economy, must adapt to the realities of the 21st century: technological disruption, ageing populations, and new forms of inequality. But they cautioned that reform should not mean retreat.
Instead, the future of the welfare state lies in investing in people – in education, skills, and community-based solutions that strengthen resilience. The message was that competitiveness and social protection are not opposites; they are mutually reinforcing. A society that empowers its citizens is also more innovative and adaptable.
Participants also called for welfare systems that are mission-driven – tackling interconnected challenges such as green transition, housing, and health in integrated ways rather than through isolated programmes.
Building a Culture of Collaboration
Policy innovation depends not only on structures and funding but also on culture. Speakers repeatedly returned to the idea that collaboration is both a value and a method.
Effective collaboration means bridging administrative silos, connecting sectors, and creating safe spaces for experimentation. It also means recognising the expertise of those closest to social challenges – people with lived experience, front-line practitioners, and local communities.
This approach is already visible in several EU-supported initiatives that link cities, regions, and NGOs in peer-learning networks. The European Competence Centre for Social Innovation plays a central role here, building a common language of social innovation across Member States and providing tools for scaling what works.
Participants underlined that this shared knowledge base embodied in the Social Innovation Match platform, which now includes more than 350 documented cases. It is helping policymakers and practitioners identify transferable solutions and learn from one another’s experiences.
Towards Systemic Resilience
The discussions also reflected a broader policy moment for Europe. As the EU prepares its next Multiannual Financial Framework, many speakers called for social innovation to become a pillar of Europe’s resilience strategy – on par with digital and green transitions.
This would mean embedding innovation practices across all policy areas, from employment and health to migration and climate. It would also require investing in new capacities, such as data-driven policymaking, participatory foresight, and agile governance.
Scaling What Works
The Social Innovation Forum 2025 reaffirmed that Europe has the knowledge, tools, and partnerships needed to scale social innovation. The task now is to use them strategically, ensuring that proven solutions reach the people and communities who need them most.
Participants left with a shared conviction: scaling is not an abstract policy goal but a practical pathway to make Europe more resilient, fair, and competitive.
Social innovation, once seen as peripheral, is becoming a central driver of policy transformation. And as the Forum showed, Europe is ready to move from pilots to policy, from experiments to systems, and from promise to impact.
