“It’s been a truly amazing experience that has come at the right time.” 25 social entrepreneurs from nine impact ventures benefited from the Social Innovation Tournament (SIT) Scaling Impact Executive Programme, which ended on Saturday 11 September 2021 in Lisbon.
The programme “has been an insightful and transformative experience led by an excellent faculty team and shared with inspiring change-making social entrepreneurs from across Europe,” said Edilia Gänz, Director of FEDORA – The European Circle of Philanthropists of Opera and Ballet.
“I found the programme perfectly built to make us understand what scaling means while providing proven tools to decide on and play out our next-stage moves,” added Sandy Bekky (HeHop). “The vast experience of the social innovation landscape brought in by the professors and speakers as well as the sharing from other teams are a powerful amplifier of the whole experience.” For Sevim Aydin Kotil (Fazla Gida) “The network we built with other social innovators from all around Europe opens up new opportunities for future collaborations. The knowledge we gained will accelerate and strengthen our venture’s scaling plans while the tools we were given will be used to go bigger and better.”
The Scaling Impact Executive Programme is a full-time executive training course designed to help participants develop a scaling plan adapted to the needs of their initiatives, prepare an investment case for its financing, fine-tune their strategy of engagement with key stakeholders, develop their marketing and communication plans, and, finally, prepare to pitch their scaling plan to an audience of investors.
This fifth edition was organised jointly with Católica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics at its Lisbon campus and welcomed SIT finalists Brake-Out (Belgium), Fazla Gida (Turkey), Health Chefs (Portugal), HeHop (France), More than one perspective (Austria) and Omoguru (Croatia).
Other participants included Oficina Criativa do Futuro (Portugal), one of the winners of the first Acceleration Programme organised by IRIS, the Social Incubator, and Ticket for change (France), a social entrepreneur finalist of the Degroof Petercam Foundation (DPF) social competition, thanks to a partnership with DPF.
Also selected was the management team of FEDORA, the European platform supporting innovation in opera and ballet, of which the Institute was a Major Corporate Donor in 2020.
The programme is led by Professor Filipe Santos, Dean of Católica-Lisbon and Full Professor and Chair of Social Entrepreneurship, and Visiting Professor of Social Entrepreneurship at INSEAD.