A circle of small places that refuse to be peripheral

The network grew out of practical project work. In 2002 a group of municipalities, schools and organisations began cooperating on youth participation and local development in the PIPE project. The Interreg IIIB project Innovation Circle followed, and when it ended in 2007 the partners decided they did not want the cooperation to stop. The Innovation Circle Network was registered the same year in Warsaw.

Since then the network has initiated and run more than twenty transnational projects, funded through Interreg, Erasmus+, the EEA and Norway Grants, ESPON, Nordic programmes and national schemes. The projects differ, but the ambition is constant: give smaller places access to the same knowledge, methods and international networks that larger cities take for granted.

Members are municipalities, regional councils, universities, schools, NGOs, enterprises and individuals. The network is deliberately light: a small secretariat, an elected board, an annual gathering hosted by a member town, and a lot of direct contact between people who trust each other after years of working together.