Areas of expertise:

Katri-Liis Lepik is an Associate Professor of Management at Tallinn University. She is a head of the global Master’s programme of Social Entrepreneurship and a mentor in the online Social Entrepreneurship Incubation Program. She is the Chair of the international COST network “Multi-disciplinary innovation for social change” covering 40 countries. She has a social enterprise dedicated to the employment of young ex-offenders by providing environmental maintenance services in the UK. Her research interests are rooted in practice focusing on social entrepreneurship and inter-sectoral collaboration.

Previous and ongoing projects:

"Co-creation of service innovation in Europe" - the goal of the international project was to improve citizens' involvement in the creation of public services and create opportunities for co-creation with the help of innovative practices. As part of the pilot project in Estonia, opportunities were sought to create practices for co-creating services in sparsely populated rural areas. The concept of the social hackathon and its guidelines were developed. https://cosie.turkuamk.fi/ , www.vunkimano.ee

Cost Action “Multi-disciplinary Innovation for Social Change” aims at bringing together social enterprise leaders, researchers, public sector representatives and policy makers to analyze how we can adopt Multi-Disciplinary Innovation Methods and respond to social problems with a design-led approach which has a problem-oriented ethos, supporting positive social change and the development of international public policy discourse. https://socialchangelab.eu

Kick-starting the nascent social finance market in Estonia - the project contributed significantly to the development and signing of a broader agreement of cooperation in social entrepreneurship and innovation in Estonia. The project reached a Memorandum of Understanding for the future creation of a new social finance instrument The Feasibility Study and the research on SEs investment readiness and private investor readiness gave an understanding of the best form and design of future social finance instruments in Estonia. The social incubation program format was piloted successfully. https://www.tlu.ee/en/yti/researchrd-projects/sofima

"Creating a Social Innovation Competence Center" - the goal of the project is to plan an Estonian Social Innovation Competence Center in order to reduce the fragmentation of the field and improve the cooperation between the parties and the exchange of information. During the project, the current situation of social innovation is mapped and the concept and action plan of the competence center is created. The project is part of the trend of the European Commission to create institutions and activities promoting social innovation in the member states and connect them into a pan-European network. https://www.kysk.ee/sikk

KNowledgE alliance for Social Innovation in Shrinking villages - The project aims are: i) revitalising depopulated areas by stimulating entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial skills; ii) creating local living laboratories, shared at European level, in which the exchange of knowledge, best practices, experiences can help promote social inclusion and entrepreneurial development;iii) experimenting new, innovative and multidisciplinary approaches in teaching and learning; iv) facilitating the exchange, flow and co-creation of knowledge at a local and global level. https://www.kinesis-network.eu/homesite/1/1/home-page.html