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On October 24 , 2013, the European Commission organised a workshop on Horizon 2020 “Building Inclusive Societies in Times of Crisis: evidence and future research needs”. The workshop was first of all a stocktaking exercise on the Seven Framework projects – Socio-economic sciences and Humanities Programme – which are currently going on. The workshop concentrated on three thematic areas, important to build inclusive societies: social services; social and employment policies; education, learning and skills to tackle social exclusion and unemployment. The project leaders also identified some research needs that might be relevant for the future Horizon 2020 programme, in the frame of the “societal challenges” pillar.

The first session focused on modernising social services. Four projects were presented: INNOSERV, WILCO, IMPROVE, and NEWJOBS. The INNOSERV project focuses on how users’ involvement in services brings innovation: does users’ involvement bring new forms of coordination (between different actors, on the role and functions of professionals)? Do patterns of allocation of public funds support user centered services?   What is the effect of user’s involvement on health outcomes and on inequalities? The project also investigates innovation in institutional development: who is responsible for initiating change? What kinds of resources are necessary for institutionalising innovative projects?

The WILCO project highlighted how civil society is an essential actor in the rethinking of welfare systems: in fact it is interesting to see how many similarities in innovation in social services have been detected in 20 cities from 10 countries analysed. To give an example, there is more and more a tendency towards working by contracts with users rather than fixed entitlements and towards units that operate in more networked ways. This project identifies as a future research area the need to investigate on more intensive forms of public debate and opinion building on prior challenges, to give new concerns and groups a voice in public debates.

The IMPROVE project looked at the links between social services, social investment, social redistribution and social innovation. It gathered evidence on the failure of the Lisbon strategy to fight poverty. The problem is how to solve the household work poverty and especially how to tackle poverty in poor countries.  You need to have a glass ceiling of minimum income protection which is at least at the level of the poverty threshold. But there are huge differences between countries. For instance, raising minimum income in Romania to the Romanian poverty threshold will cost Romania 8% of their GDP, while in Belgium 3-4%. A key challenge for EU policies is how to tackle huge inequalities between countries. For this, there is a need to put on the EU research agenda how to develop European policy instruments for this aim (minimum income, unemployment benefit, minimum wage at EU level), as well as how social investment can foster redistribution capacity of social protection systems.

Key questions raised by the NEWJOB project are how the social innovation agenda can support quality employment in social services and the differences between countries in employment rates growth of the social service and care sector.

A representative from EUROFOUND identified other challenges in future research on social innovation: how to ensure transferability of social innovations from one country to another; how to find the balance between the two extremes of leaving diffusion of social innovations to the market alone and scaling up all innovations; more and more projects collect case studies and go in depth: but where do we stop?; a big question for cohesion in Europe is how to involve those cities that never participate in research projects; also the effects of the working conditions of workers on users’ living conditions should be better explored.

The afternoon session on social and employment policies to fight against poverty identified the following possible areas of research: how to ensure better coordination between income support and activation measures in active inclusion policies; indicators on persistent poverty.

The concluding session on education and life-long learning policies highlighted these future research needs: deepen the analysis on the capabilities of the educational institutional level in being or not successful in improving the situation of the most vulnerable; how to make the EU more efficient in diffusing policy innovations to the local level; are social investment strategies an employment creating strategies?; the relation between in school and out of school learning; how public policies, including EU policies, can steer the market towards tacking social exclusion.