Social innovations are social practices that address novel solutions in response to transformative processes in the economy and society, which are hardly or not at all taken into account solely through technical innovation perspectives. How they emerge and are experimentally implemented in all areas of (co)life, in business and work, education and politics, is being scientifically investigated from the research perspective of "real laboratories".
The TRAWOS-Institute investigates among other things:
- the development of creative milieus and networks
- the strengthening civic activity and civil society actors in and through social innovation
- the development and testing of new forms of regional self-organisation, e.g. a regional sustainability council consisting of representatives from science, business and civil society
- the potential of senior citizens for regional perspectives
Cultural and creative industries are becoming increasingly important both as an economic factor and as an attractor for demography and regional development. Both economic and social, cultural and ultimately ecological innovations, transformations and developments of a city or region increasingly depend on the existence of "creative atmospheres and milieus" or the so-called "creative class".
The TRAWOS-Institute deals with the following research questions:
- Which social, cultural and economic factors encourage the establishment and strengthening of creative and co-creative milieus and atmospheres?
- How can rural regions or networked medium-sized cities develop creative atmospheres and milieus that are at least qualitatively similar to those of large cities?
- Which sources of creativity enable (single and intentionally connected) human individuals to transcend up to now dominant but no longer sustainable social norms/values/expectations and to develop new, sustainable ones?
- What forms of mutual encouragement, inspiration and co-creativity are capable of producing sustainable forms of economy, society and culture and of persisting and enforcing them even in the face of expected inertial forces and resistance from previous paradigms or systems?
