Based on the results of the EU funded Social Innovation – Driving Force of Social Change (SI-DRIVE) project the major challenges and needs of education and lifelong learning worldwide are revealed, focusing on solutions via new educational practices delivered by social innovations and embedding civil society. Against this background, a more learner-oriented approach instead of institutional improvements is presented. Based on the results of SI-DRIVE’s global mapping of more than 200 innovative education initiatives and 18 in-depth case studies, the article spotlights the relevant settings and success factors of social innovations in education, leading to a system related typology of social innovation. New ways of repairing, modernising and transforming education as well as separated approaches are illustrated showing the underdeveloped, unexploited and unrecognised potential of this kind of innovation. For setting up a more innovation friendly environment, it is particularly important to realise a paradigm shift towards a learner perspective and rationality. More leeway and new governance structures for integrating and fostering social innovations and unfolding the potential of all societal sectors for enhancing education are necessary. This especially includes a more active and new role of universities in enabling, exchanging, moderating and researching social innovation.

Citizen science is becoming increasingly important as a new and participative mode of knowledge production. An essential element of citizen science is co-creation. Co-creation is by no means limited to a modus operandi for participatory science, but introduces a form of collaborative way of working with society in the sense of citizen science. Results from the H2020 SISCODE project show that co-creation is located inside and between different sectors of society. This article focuses on the question of how co-creation can be better understood in different contexts, and presents a heuristic model that has already been used for case study analyses in the SISCODE project. After an introduction to the field of co-creation and a brief description of the heuristic model, its capability is exemplarily demonstratedviaapplication to two selected cases, followed by a discussion of central learnings and implications for further research on co-creation.

Fostering entrepreneurship and inclusive societies are on top of EU policy agenda. This article is bringing together both aims by discussing a social innovation framework for inclusive entrepreneurial education for persons with disabilities. Similar to other disadvantaged groups, persons with disabilities can benefit from entrepreneurial skills for self-management or, on a next level, for starting own, opportunity-driven businesses. The framework suggests several building blocks considered necessary for successful entrepreneurial education for the beneficiaries. First, it is approaching the framework through a social innovation perspective. In doing so, it suggests a social innovation ecosystem perspective to operationalize all relevant stakeholders and contextual aspects relevant for the framework. Second, it suggests to build on socially innovative, hence novel, practices by starting from co-creation and co-production in order to meet individual demands and needs of learners. Furthermore, it takes the concept of universal design into account as it holds major implications for inclusive entrepreneurial education for persons with disabilities and underlines the need of different, more suitable practices in entrepreneurship education and beyond, toward an inclusive learning ecosystem.