Samenvatting

Change agent capacity-building compendium.Due to increasing globalization, technological advances and sociological changes, the world is becoming more complex than ever. Complexity has gone from large systems, to organizational and individual levels. Today it concerns all aspects of society. The will to take up these complex global challenges, from a sense of agency, requires a mindshift from individual to organisational levels, accompanied by fundamental systemic changes in societal regimes conceptualised in sustainability transition.It calls to think and work consistently from a complex ontology which we define as a complexity-orientated approach. We need to rethink what we learn and how we learn to tackle the grand societal challenges of today and to build the future we want. In this perspective, new forms of real-life learning environments and combined complexity based learning approaches need to be implemented to allow for social change through social innovation.In our context, social change determines the learning pathway towards tackling the complex challenge of a healthier society. It refers to mid- to long-term developments in society at large that are often accompanied by disruption. This includes more citizensenjoying a (more) healthy lifestyle but also their social environment holding (greater) capacity to enable and value healthy aging.For us, social innovation is then the process of commonly developing and deploying novel ideas and effective solutions. This includes out-of-the-box-thinking to meet social needs, create social relationships and implement co-creation towards healthy lifestyles.Such social innovations can be products, services, programmes, or models addressing unmet complex societal challenges more effectively. From our experience, social innovation requires an ecosystem in which all stakeholders collaborate from a multi-actor approach. This innovation ecosystem must have a special emphasize towards collective ownership and active involvement of the end users in all phases of the social innovation process.In this regard, we have experienced that communities of practice (COP) are one valuable enabler and accelerator to facilitate and drive social innovation. It builds a suitable social innovation ecosystem to enable social change. It means that communities of practice describe a social learning pathway where people voluntary commit to improve a common concern around a complex social challenge, like thehealth of citizens. Its members interact regularly to learn and to co-create innovative solutions towards the local community.For it, the COP is determined by an active and open learning environment that allows for eye-level exchange and a participatory approach. It leads to action towards social innovation that is openly shared and can be applied in practice. It means that the COPbecomes an instrument for education to anticipate contemporary challenges and gives a structure for lifelong learning.To exploit the full potential of the community of practice approach, social innovators need not only to understand the grand societal challenges but also how to create a Change agent capacity-building compendium, functioning and sustainable social innovation ecosystem through the communities of practice approach. This is where the Yanuz change agents step in. It means that our change agents are persons who are skilled to establish, facilitate and sustain change processes through communities of practice and who can encourage people to engage in successful change assignments that lead to local impact.