Developing Labs to Facilitate Home Care Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Danube Region

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In the Danube Region (DR), fundamental needs of home care beneficiaries are not satisfied by current social service providers. There are extensive requirements to fulfill needs e.g. as proper medical therapies and support for body hygiene (basic needs), provision of adequate home facilities to prevent falls (security needs) and measures to enable social inclusion of needy people into the local community (social needs). In AT/D, especially poor people and rural areas lack of proper services. In CEE countries, even essential services are often not provided. Staff shortages, financial restrictions and insufficient use of new digital technologies are part of the problem in the whole DR. Social entrepreneurial trainings and few recently established social innovation labs aim to facilitate innovation of new services/products in the DR to tackle such societal challenges. Building upon these approaches, the project aims to establish specialized macro-regional D-Care Lab innovation structures to enable social service providers, product developers and social start-ups to design and implement better and innovative home care services and products for elderly persons, people with disabilities and children with special needs. Therefore, it contributes to the implementation of SPO 1.2 (developing innovative social services) in the domain of home care. The Transnational Lab Strategy is based on analysis of beneficiary needs (incl. needs caused by the Corona virus), innovation potentials/logjams and intends to identify complementary interregional resources (WPT1). The Transnational Lab of the Labs (WPT2) offers a framework for the incubation of the Regional Labs (WPT4) and a community of practice to increase mutual learning and transnational co-creation. The setup of Ecosystems of Social Investment (WPT3) creates financial and entrepreneurial support structures. During the pilot actions of 9 regional labs innovation structures are tested and improved (WPT4).

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