The InSPIRES project offers training through both face to face and online mentoring activities facilitated by experts and stakeholders from inside and outside the consortium. The face to face mentoring is being implemented through summer schools. These summer schools will take advantage of synergies with existing network events in order to maximise impact, and draw on participants’ initiatives in their own countries in order to ensure mutual learning and feed into the InSPIRES models. Also, InSPIRES pays attention to local languages in order to facilitate the training during summer schools and maximise the participation of community members in the training activities.

The online training is facilitated through webinars, targeted to consortium members primarily, offering training either on methodologies such as RRI, open science, participatory research, participatory governance…or on specific inspiring practices and research projects, both implemented within the consortium Science Shops or outside the consortium. In addition, to keep the mentoring programme interactive and inclusive some of the webinars are open to external stakeholders working on Inspires SS projects. To strengthen the different communities of practice, acting in the partner’s countries with shared languages, InSPIRES organizes webinars in their own languages, reaching countries and stakeholders for whom English might be a barrier. If you would like to be informed on our training activities, you can subscribe to our newsletter.

InSPIRES webinars and summer schools aim to be be crucial in building capacity among existing networks of Science Shops as well as in spreading out the concept of participatory research and innovation via Science Shops to new players.