Silicon Vilstal Experience Festival 20th -22nd September 2024
Silicon Vilstal Initiative
Home to new ideas. Silicon Vilstal is a non-profit initiative from Lower Bavaria. We promote open social innovation and make digital opportunities in rural regions tangible. Our activities are possible thanks to a broad societal network. Silicon Vilstal has been awarded as one of the ten best entrepreneurship initiatives in Germany and is a learning example for rural entrepreneurs from Asia and Africa. Currently, Silicon Vilstal is a partner of the New European Bauhaus initiative.
Activities
Experience Festival
The 8th Silicon Vilstal Experience Festival will be from 20th – 22nd September 2024 in Vilsbiburg. It will offer a wide range of exciting workshops, lectures, performances and interactive activities for all ages with the focus on innovation, entrepreneurial spirit and creativity. The annual Silicon Vilstal Experience Festival has been awarded by the EU as a „European Social Economy Region“ event in 2019 – 2021.
Virtual Makerspace
We experience that STEM offerings for children are not available to a sufficient extent in rural areas. We have been practicing the basic principle of the „Virtual Makerspace“ for years, now we are developing a software platform. With the „Virtual Makerspace“, children’s creative designs (e.g. sketches), which they do e.g. in STEM workshops, are digitally forwarded to production companies in the region, where physical objects are produced based on the children’s designs. Thus, digital innovation is combined with social innovation (network of rural STEM initiatives and supporting companies). The project is scaleable on a national and European level. The „Virtual Makerspace“ creates access to innovative STEM-Education for children in rural areas, where they have no physical makerspaces.
Ideas Workshop
The Silicon Vilstal Ideas Workshop creative digital learning and hands-on opportunities for children, teenagers and adults.
The „Virtual Makerspace“ is based on the partners‘ existing production capacities combined with age-appropriate learning software. Silicon Vilstal’s regional STEM and innovator activities are an active building block for future larger regional networks.
Farmer seeks start-up
„Farmer seeks start-up“ is Silicon Vilstal’s year-round, cross-sector coaching and coworking programme for start-ups. Hosts provide rooms to live and work free of charge for a limited period of time. Perfect for crucial workshops or normal business: conceive, design, develop in Vilstal. Silicon Vilstal organises „reality checks“ and pilot projects with people, companies and institutions, on request.
SocialTech4EU
The SocialTech for Europe for Resilient and Responsible Ecosystems, SocialTech4EU, is a two-year project that kicked off in September 2022 and is funded by the European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA) through the Joint Cluster Initiatives (EUROCLUSTERS) for Europe’s recovery.
Applications for the Open Call for Training for SocialTech4EU is closed. We received many great applications and are reviewing them at the moment.
The registry of stakeholder and providers for social economy is still open. More information here.
One significant milestone was the Social Impact Hackathon, which took place from September 22 to 24, 2023, as part of the SocialTech4EU project.
News
A recent milestone of the international SocialTech4EU program was the „Social Innovation Hackathon“ in September 2023.
At the Social Innovation Hackathon, 16 social enterprises from across Europe, a squad of experienced team coaches and 40 Bavarian sparring partners from creative industries came together for a weekend on a historic farm in the Lower Bavarian countryside. Together they worked on their projects and developed them further within a design thinking framework
The surrounding rural region supported the missions of the teams as a „living lab“ with all kinds of practicioners (citizens and enterprises). The impact missions of the social enterprises included the novel aproach of elderly care on farms, tenant services for social housing, STEM offerings for children etc.
Click here to see the Aftermovie of the Event.
Creative Space
The Silicon Vilstal Creative Space is an alternating venue for artists and creatives’ workshops and exhibitions, where we combine the traditional and modern. The Creative Space has been in old barns in Vilstal, at the Internat. Green Week Berlin, at Munich Creative Business Week or at THEARTS+ / Frankfurt Book Fair. The Silicon Vilstal Creative Space in the Alte Akademie Munich was part of the creative project „SP CE„.
Dates 2023
Contact us
Silicon Vilstal gemeinnützige UG
(haftungsbeschränkt)
Hauptstraße 15
84144 Geisenhausen, Germany
Managing Directors: Albert Fischer, Helmut Ramsauer