From ideas to pilot and practice: The WIN Social Innovation Booklet is now available

The WIN Social Innovation Booklet is now available, documenting the social innovations developed, tested, and implemented across seven peripheral industrial regions in the Danube area.

The booklet tells the story of what WIN made possible across seven regions and seven countries. It gathers the ideas that local stakeholders co-created, the innovations that were selected for piloting, and the practical lessons that emerged when those ideas were tested in real communities – with real constraints, local cultures, and uneven opportunity structures.

What the booklet covers

Across the project, 26 social innovation ideas were co-developed through the WIN Innovation Groups, and 13 were tested as pilot actions. The implemented innovations demonstrate several complementary pathways to change: some focused on shifting attitudes and stereotypes in male-dominated industrial contexts; others strengthened women's employability and entrepreneurial readiness through practical learning formats; and a third strand built community and networks, creating trusted spaces where women can meet, learn, and support each other.

The booklet presents each regional story in detail – from Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Serbia, and Slovenia – alongside cross-regional learnings, voices of participants and stakeholders, transferable approaches and good practices, and recommendations for practitioners and regional changemakers who want to drive lasting change in their own contexts.

Who it is written for

The booklet is written for a wider public of practitioners and regional changemakers. If you work in municipalities, employment services, employer organisations, education and youth institutions, NGOs, or regional development bodies, you will find concrete examples, realistic lessons learned, and approaches that can be adapted to your own context. The approaches presented are not recipes to copy – they are living practices that invite adaptation, experimentation, and learning.

A companion to the WIN Methodological Toolkit

The booklet complements the previously published WIN Methodological Toolkit, which describes the process behind the work – how the partnership developed, tested, and reflected on social innovations across the seven pilot regions. Where the toolkit explains how to build the process, this booklet shows what that process can produce.

The publication is available in eight languages:

ENGLISH BOOK
SLOVENIAN BOOK
AUSTRIAN BOOK
BOSNIAN AND HERZEGOVINIAN BOOK
BULGARIAN BOOK
CZECH REPUBLIC BOOK
HUNGARIAN BOOK
SERBIAN BOOK