In all V4 countries Social Innovation (SI) is not treated with due seriousness. Innovation is rather attached to technology or business than to solving social problems. Us and all our partner-organisations are trying to change this attitude among key stakeholders in our everyday work and we know very well that we need diverse and effective tools to work with in order to achieve our goals. Within V4 cooperation and with Visegrad support we will establish a new tool for rising SI importance – Social Innovation Ecosystem Index (SIEI) which as well will give us (and other NGO/public entities) a package of new arguments and signposts – why SI is important and where in the specific country we need to focus its actions Partly thanks to IVS support we have collected a map of SI barriers in 3 of V4 countries: CZ, PL, SK.

Our project results pointed out that the situation in the field of social innovations is quite similar in all countries in the Visegrad region. According to various indexes used in research, Visegrad countries are prepared for social innovation, but in various stages. The problem of the Visegrad countries, is that predispositions showed in other indexes are not showing the real state of social innovation. Our assumption was to design such index, which will be able to measure the real state of Visegrad countries towards social innovation and fill in the gaps in all selected areas of interest – 1) Policy and institutional framework, 2) Financing, 3) Entrepreneurship and 4) Society. Our intention was to find and measure social, cultural and socio-psychological behavior, views and expectations of the society, professionals and public actors and to uncover regional specific, that are crucial and have greater impact on the countries potential (readiness /implementation stage) in social innovation.