On May 4th and 5th, we at Casa Netural traveled to Bucharest to meet with our partners for the INSPIRE PA project meeting, hosted by Fundatia Ashoka.
It was an intense two days of co-design, networking, and strategic exchange. These sessions reminded us how the informal conversations that happen in the corridors between workshops are often just as valuable as official presentations when it comes to driving institutional change.
Who Was There and Why: Creating the Social Innovation Officer
INSPIRE PA is an Erasmus+ funded project that has chosen to wager on a very concrete goal: training a new professional figure capable of driving social innovation within public administrations. Not from the outside as external consultants, but from within—armed with the tools, the vocabulary, and the patience that institutional transformation truly demands. This profile is the Social Innovation Officer.
We are building this path alongside a high-level European consortium spanning three countries and diverse administrative cultures:
Italy: Intellera Consulting S.p.A., Ashoka Italia and us at Casa Netural APS.
Greece: ACTA SA and Dimitra Education & Consulting SA.
Romania: Asociatia Municipiilor din Romania and Fundatia Ashoka.
While our organizations come from different backgrounds and contexts, we share a deep conviction: public administrations can—and must—become hubs for experimentation, collaboration, and collective learning.
Project Milestones: The Pilot Training and European Certification
In the weeks leading up to the Bucharest meeting, we reached a major milestone: the successful completion of our pilot training program. The numbers and the overall impact of this phase underscore that we are moving in the right direction:
90 public servants involved from ministries, municipalities, national agencies, and regional bodies across Italy, Greece, and Romania.
90 public servants involved from ministries, municipalities, national agencies, and regional bodies across Italy, Greece, and Romania.
Cross-border networking: Participants exchanged real-world experiences with European peers they would have otherwise never met in their daily careers.
Many of these public servants shared that the most unexpected value of the program was having a dedicated, safe space to reflect together on the challenges of institutional change, what works (and what doesn't) within public bodies, and how to champion innovation when bureaucratic routines seem unshakeable.
An ISO Certification for Social Innovation in the Public Sector
In addition to this educational success, the project has delivered a concrete, lasting framework: the definition of a European certification scheme for the Social Innovation Officer profile, built in strict alignment with ISO/IEC 17024 standards. This is not just a certificate of attendance; it is the formal recognition of skills that, until recently, did not even have an official name in the public sector job market.
The Bucharest Meeting: Assessing Progress and Looking Ahead
The May meeting was the perfect opportunity to sit around the table—in person this time—and ask ourselves honestly: What have we learned? What worked well, and where can we improve? How do we make this experience accessible to everyone, from a small provincial municipality to a large national agency?
The answers we gathered will shape our upcoming steps. Over the next few months, we will work to translate the insights gained from this pilot into:
Practical policy recommendations for decision-makers.
Replicable toolkits and guidelines for other European administrations.
Professional development models to embed social innovation into standard public sector capacity building.
An Erasmus+ project proves its true worth when the impact it generates travels far beyond the original circle of its partners.
Next Stop: The Creative Bureaucracy Festival (June 2026)
Our journey is far from over. The next public milestone for INSPIRE PA will take place at the Creative Bureaucracy Festival in June 2026, the premier international event that proves bureaucracy and creativity are not contradictory terms.
This will be the perfect stage to bring the stories from our pilot program—the challenges, the surprises, the small and large triumphs—into a broader global conversation with professionals, researchers, and policymakers from across Europe.
The pilot phase has wrapped up, but the story of innovation we are writing together is just getting started.
Want to know more about Casa Netural’s role in EU projects and social innovation? Follow our blog, sign up for our newsletter or write us to info@inspirepa.eu
The INSPIRE PA project – INtroducing Social Practices to Improve the REsilience of Public Administration – is a project co-funded by the European Union under the Erasmus+ program. It aims to empower public administrations to become facilitators and implementers of social innovation by strengthening their capacity to design and develop new ideas that respond more effectively to social needs. Furthermore, the project enhances their ability to renew existing mechanisms of cooperation with the non-profit private sector through a holistic and ecosystemic approach.
