Category: Insights

Economic, social and environmental structures, employment, education, training insertion, guidance in a universe in constant and incredibly fast change lead to imagine new routes for everyone to create their own place in this ecosystem.

Work, what it represents, the way it happens, put in action a set of values, codes, attitudes, knowledge, abilities which are dependent of the context and, at the same time, constitute a platform for the person to position themselves in the society. Some are well prepared to that, well adapted, feel at ease and are able to flourish day after day. Some, for many diverse reasons, have greater difficulties. It may come from a discrepancy due to language, education, culture, competences, or to a drastic change of context (e.g. migration); but it may also result from a desire to change their own codes, to contribute more collectively, to be more creative and more opened.
What is happening in working situations is more and more a complex mix of knowledge, know-hows, attitudes, behaviours, emotions, cultural components and technical job skills. Everybody possesses some of these fusion skills, but it is sometimes difficult to evidence, valorise, enhance them in the classical training and qualification systems.
Beyond institutional systems, Education, Enterprise, actors of inclusion and guidance, plenty of experiments have evidence both the desire and the possibility to develop places that enable people to find themselves and meet with others, to define their own journeys, their own values, together with others, though cooperation, co-creation, co-learning. This may even lead to the creation of common working structures as entrepreneurial cooperatives. Scattered examples already exist. It is particularly interesting to understand what the key strong points of these ecosystems are and how to develop them in a more systematic way.

The territorial dimension plays a key role in the notion of “Places-3T places”. The ecosystem at stake here is before all a local environment, be it in a urban, semi-urban or rural area. But these ecosystems are not meant to be isolated microcosms. Linking them into networks would allow them to benefit from a European dimension, accordingly to different recommendations of the European Institutions. The span of the consortium is a first key success factor in this sense.

They are remarkable, anchored in their context, their territorial environment, and their cultural history; but also opened to radical innovations, willing to change the rules, to open new routes. At the start of the place, there is an envy, a feeling that it is possible to do something new for oneself and with the others.

They tend to enable and support people in developing new ways of learning, creating, making value, taking into account new criterion of “success”: trust – in yourself, in others, in the future-; respect –of people, resources and the planet-; valorisation of abilities – prior ones and those developed in the cooperation and collaboration ; valorisation of positive and flip thinking, etc.

They enable to express desires, wishes, envies to modify sustainably the relation with the future of work, sustain visions, that are more optimistic, more inclusive, more egalitarian, non-discriminating; and to imagine and create the ways to start this journey.

What is innovative, is the way they have to create themselves and to function, the relations between the people, the mixing between concerns; no separation between work, learning, creation, individual and collective, method and content, etc., but a permanent complementarity; the way they enable to identify, design and promote other ways towards knowledge, other kinds of productive work, other social and societal relations.

Creativity is a central element, with the presence of creative cultural actors, artists and also by sustaining the creativity of the persons at large in the way they build their journey, their development, their project.

They are places for creating economic value; they may end in the creation of professional activities, activity that will give opportunities of work to other actors; not only self-employment, but rather collective forms of organisations, cooperatives, social economy, or others forms still to be invented.

The PLACES-3T project aims at:

• reflecting upon, studying, valorising, sustaining, …collaborative “laces-3T places that enable social, cultural and entrepreneurial innovation through support spaces, outside of institutional structures, where people may create new kinds of work ecosystems;
• imagining business models applicable to such places, with enough flexibility and sustainability, where everyone can contribute without constraints on resources, but in a supportive way;
• compiling and defining the key elements that support these implementations with reasonable chances of success;
• putting in place models, processes, tools to accompany the creators of PLACES-3T places throughout their life cycle, their evolution, their survival, in a continuous way.

reflecting upon, studying, valorising, sustaining, …collaborative “Places-3T places that enable social, cultural and entrepreneurial innovation through support spaces, outside of institutional structures, where people may create new kinds of work ecosystems;
imagining business models applicable to such places, with enough flexibility and sustainability, where everyone can contribute without constraints on resources, but in a supportive way;
compiling and defining the key elements that support these implementations with reasonable chances of success;
putting in place models, processes, tools to accompany the creators of PLACES-3T places throughout their life cycle, their evolution, their survival, in a continuous way.

The question here is not to promote a typical model, but to support different groups of actors in starting their own project with “tooling pieces” that ensure a possible positive evolution, with other references and examples, with the possibility to tie networks, and find inspiration.
The project does not intend to train specialized consultants, but to give the means and opportunities to the collective groups to invent their own modes of functioning, relying on their own aspirations, to create their own univers(es) and embark on the journeys thay will have chosen for themselves.