Hello! Welcome to the EIT Climate-KIC Social Activation and Experimentation website!
The Social Activation and Experimentation team works to tackle climate change in deliberately untraditional ways. Leveraging our community, we are creating the conditions for serendipity and innovation to occur, and helping to shape and scale movements in an effort to drive massive systemic change. There are three key things we are doing to achieve this:
1. Experimenting with our community
We are running a portfolio of cutting-edge projects and experiments with our community of partners, friends and collaborators. We have a particular focus on working with actors and organisations that bring new voices into our community. We believe that an open, vibrant and diverse community is the only way to make the change we need. For example, we are working with museums, artists, comedians, humanitarians, journalists, sports, graphic designers and more, to explore and bring attention to the many and varied actors in the climate action space.
Find out more about our current projects
2. Building a movement
We are working to build a cascade of moments that matter, connected by a collective narrative of transformation. Built with people who, like us, want to act to change the system. We are using the principles of movement building, social innovation and community activation. Our approach is experimental, non-violent, experiential and about creating hope (not fear).
Find out more about the movement
3. Staying connected
We understand that connectedness is key to the success of any community, and over the past year we have been exploring different ways to create new and unexpected connections within and across our community, as well as how we can empower them to self-organise and self-match-make. One of our main initiatives in this area, Exaptive, explores whether we can leverage a digital platform and machine learning to augment our community, and to create new opportunities for our community to work together to unlock systemic change.
How are we doing this?
The mission of the Social Activation and Experimentation team is to find and foster the diverse community we need to deliver on EIT Climate-KIC’s strategy, Transformation, in Time. To do this we have three key principles that guide what we do, how we make decisions and who we prioritise working with.
- Firstly, difference matters. We believe that transformative innovation requires genuine diversity and multiple actors from across the system to imagine, think and create together.
- Secondly, creating glue. What exactly are the attributes of a community? What brings them together? What keeps them together? We call this the glue and we are working to understand the different types of conditions (glue) that make communities successful.
- Thirdly, we need more happy accidents! True transformation happens when the right people are in the right place at the right time. We call this serendipity, or a happy accident. It’s not possible to predict or control serendipity, but we do think it’s possible to create opportunities for happy accidents to occur more often.