For European projects
The European Social Fund Plus backs socially innovative projects across Europe, and asks them to prove what actually works. That proof, independent, field-based evidence of what a social experiment does to the people it serves, is what the Lab provides.
The European Social Fund Plus (ESF+) is one of the EU's principal instruments for investing in people. Alongside employment and inclusion, it supports social innovation: new ideas, practices, and policies that address social challenges, from helping young people who are not in employment, education, or training into the labour market, to housing, to reshaping how care is delivered for an ageing population.
Social innovation only works if the genuinely better ideas can be told apart from the merely new ones, and then scaled. That is an evidence problem, and it is the Lab's core competence.
The ESF Social Innovation+ Initiative, with a budget in the region of €197 million, funds EU-wide, transnational projects to develop, replicate, and scale up innovative solutions, through calls for proposals run by the European Competence Centre for Social Innovation. It is complemented by social experimentation calls under the EaSI strand of the ESF+, and by a network of National Competence Centres for Social Innovation across the Member States.
Two things run through all of it. First, these are experiments: the point is to test whether a new approach works, not to assume it. Second, the Commission expects that testing to be rigorous. Its own guidance on social experimentation and on scaling up social innovation makes methodology central: a social experiment is only worth scaling if there is credible evidence that it produced the outcome, for whom, and why.
That is precisely the gap the Lab fills. An innovative idea and a research design are different skills, and the teams with the best social innovations are rarely the teams best placed to measure them independently.
The Lab acts as the independent measurement and evidence partner on a social-innovation project, from proposal to final report.
A credible experimentation design. A theory of change and an indicator framework built at the start, with a baseline captured before the intervention, so that any later claim of change rests on evidence rather than assertion. This is the discipline the Commission's social-experimentation guide calls for.
Field-based measurement, read across three dimensions. The Lab reaches the people a project serves directly, and reads impact across reach (who is affected, and who is left out), depth (how materially lives change), and experience (what the change feels like from the inside). Distribution and equity, central to social innovation, are built into the method rather than bolted on.
An honest scaling judgement. Scaling a social innovation that does not actually work wastes public money and trust. The Lab's independence is the point: it reports what the evidence says, including when the finding is that an approach should not be scaled as-is.
This connects directly to the Lab's wider Monitoring, Evaluation & Dissemination offer and its European Impact Tracking service.
ESF+ social innovation is deliberately transnational: solutions are developed, tested, and transferred across Member States, and partners find each other through the Social Innovation Match database and call-specific partner searches. That cross-border character is a natural fit for the Lab.
A consistent measurement framework applied across several countries is exactly what makes a transnational result credible and comparable, rather than a set of local anecdotes that cannot be pooled. The Lab designs the instrument once, adapts it faithfully to each context, and reads the results across the whole project, so a coordinator can say, with evidence, that an approach worked in three countries and why it did not in a fourth.
For a consortium forming around an ESF+ Social Innovation+ or EaSI call, the Lab is the named independent partner for the work package that funders scrutinise most and coordinators find hardest to fill credibly: measuring what the innovation actually did.
The strongest time to bring in an independent measurement partner is at the proposal stage, not the final year. Designed in from the start, the evidence framework strengthens the proposal itself, and then delivers a result that holds up at evaluation.
If you are preparing a proposal under the ESF Social Innovation+ Initiative, an EaSI social-experimentation call, or an ESF+ national or regional social-innovation call, and you need a credible, independent partner to measure and evidence the social impact, the Lab is glad to talk it through.
See the Lab's European Impact Tracking service, Research & Development Support for the R&D-stage evidence that feeds an SRL claim on socially-innovative products, and Monitoring, Evaluation & Dissemination for the full three-part loop. To discuss a consortium role, see Contact. For the ESF+ social innovation programme itself, see the European Commission's page.