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Support and guidance for the digitalisation of Walloon social enterprises
Olivier Brolis
Expert Skills & Labour Market
"This project is the symbol of a long-term collaboration mobilising complementary expertise, with the aim of transforming academic/theoretical knowledge into concrete tools, services and products by testing them for improvement in the field. In concrete terms, we are proud to say that we have made a major contribution to the development of the content of the DigitalEES support programme, available via this link: https://digitalwallonia.be/ees/. As a result of this project, in 2023 and on the basis of an international benchmark, we again had the opportunity to propose a public support strategy for the digitalisation of social enterprises in the Walloon Region to be implemented over the period 2024-2029."
The challenge
In collaboration with the Lentic and CES research centres at the University of Liège, and on behalf of the Walloon Region’s Agence du Numérique, we carried out a major study on the digital maturity and digitisation of companies in the personal services sector. Building on this experience, the same consortium was asked to contribute to and build a programme of support and guidance for the digitalisation of social enterprises as part of the Digital Wallonia strategy. The aim of this project was to support social economy enterprises in their journey towards meaningful digitalisation, enabling them to enhance the social impact they generate and well-being in the workplace.
The process & results
In this context, the role of IDEA Consult and its partners was threefold:
Firstly, we had to adapt the digitalisation tools already made available to enterprises by the Region to the reality of social enterprises. For example, one of our most important tasks was to adapt the vocabulary used in the self-assessment tools (DIGISCORE) and the regional survey (le Baromètre) of the digital maturity of Walloon businesses to the reality of the social economy. We also included additional response options to take account of the diversity of the realities of social enterprises.
Secondly, our aim was to prepare and support 15 social enterprise digitalisation projects. In concrete terms, we first built up a content and support programme before drafting and publishing a call for tenders to select the 15 projects and then support them, in collaboration with technical experts and over a period of one year, through a combination of individual work (per project) and collective work (with all the project leaders during 1 or 2-day seminars run by our teams).
Thirdly, our final objective was to capitalise on our experience of supporting these 15 projects to build useful content and tools for the digitalisation of social enterprises. In particular, we were able to develop the DigiProject (https://www.digitalwallonia.be/ees/se-lancer/), a practical guide designed to help social enterprises build and manage a digitalisation project step by step.
Partners in this project
