Gendered Responsive Smart Innovation and Entrepreneurship
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Women remain disproportionately under-represented among innovators and start-up entrepreneurs, while the integration of the gender dimension into product design, technologies and innovation in general, remains very limited despite its potential for opening new markets and for solving global challenges and European priorities. Moreover, the EU reports that a higher proportion of research organisations with a gender equality plan in a given country is similarly correlated with a higher innovation score.
In order to address this challenge, ENoLL is pleased to announce the launch of a Working Group (WG) on Gendered Responsive Smart Innovation and Entrepreneurship. This new WG aims to increase gendered innovation in the EU, and benefits from ongoing research and practice of the Gendered Innovation Living Labs (GILL) project. Preliminary findings highlight that there is a notable absence of in-depth analysis regarding the diversity among female entrepreneurs, as well as a lag of AI and digital transition research related to gender in term of trends, as opposed to the fields of health and green transition; a lack of gender-responsive policies and plans in regulatory instruments and decision-making processes; or cultural barriers stemming from unconscious bias and stereotypes.
Potential stakeholders from the quadruple helix, members of the ENoLL community as well as externals, are invited to submit their interest to join the WG on Gendered Innovation. Members of the WG will have the mission to consolidate and align the Living Labs in the gender and innovation sectors across Europe, share best practices, methods and tools and develop new ones, raise standards and inspire others to include gendered innovations in their Living Labs initiatives as well as establish a space for collaboration and open innovation.
The WG on Gendered Innovation intends to kick-off soon and will boost cooperation among their members for peer-to-peer capacity building, organization of regular seminars, consortium building and proposal writing for short-, medium-, and long-term EU funding opportunities, joint publications, and mentorships. Please submit your interest by registering here. ENoLL team will get into contact to explore the suitability of the profiles, ensuring this way a diverse group with balanced representation from academia, industry, policy and civil society.
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GILL, coordinated by ENoLL, the largest network of Living Labs (LL), will develop a pan-European collaboration and learning hub based on the LL principles to become the open innovation framework for all European actors for open gendered innovation. The GILL “LL” will co-create sustainable mechanisms to increase gender-responsive smart innovation and entrepreneurship (GRISE) by fixing practices and culture across the European ecosystems.GILL will focus on 4 macro-objectives: a) to enable the organisational and cultural changes, b) to enhance professional development, c) to increase the integration of gender and diversity into product design, technologies and innovation, and d) to allow gendered educational practices. In parallel, GILL actions will act along a matrix of horizontal spheres of innovation (individual & team, tools & methods, innovation & products, societal processes) and three vertical priorities(Health and resilience, Green & Digital transition).GILL will be implemented through an iterative co-creation approach structured on a four-phase cycle – understand,co-design, implement, evaluate – repeated twice to incorporate the feedback and evaluation results in fine-tuned and validated results. 15 Action-Oriented Experimentations in 8 European countries will develop new approaches to GRSIE, test, evaluate the changes, and thereby validate GILL’s outputs in real-life open ecosystems. Through this cycle, GILL will deliver a systemic review of barriers to GRSIE leading to the co-design of proven methodologies, services, and tools for GRSIE to be made available on a sustainable and easy-to-use platform. In line with the LL methodology, co-creation and open innovation will be fostered among the main actors of the QuadrupleHelix model – citizens, government, industry, and academia – who will be engaged all along the project through different participatory activities.