Several technical and socio-economic tools for the operationalization of sustainable development (SD) are especially useful to businesses and cities in their decision-making process so that they remain profitable while avoiding the shift of environmental and social impacts over the entire life cycle of a product (investment, extraction of raw materials, production, transformation, distribution, use, end-of-life). All these tools have a role to play in the emergence and deployment of a social economy (SE), whether it concerns industrial ecology, SD analysis grids, life cycle analysis, information and communication technologies (ICT), circular economy, ecosystem approaches, urban ecology or other sectors. Researchers, SE businesses and municipal stakeholders will adopt a very interactive and participative approach in presenting how these different tools can optimize their activities while minimizing the scope of their ecological footprint, in addition to helping them align with their values and mission.

Networking workshop where social economy businesses, municipal stakeholders and researchers will be paired together as a user-researcher team to design a case study or application example that demonstrates how a tool can be integrated in an SE business or city. Each team will set up at a table focusing specifically on an SD operationalization tool. Led by a facilitator, workshop participants will be asked to discover these different tools by moving from table to table approximately every 20-30 minutes. For each round, the user-researcher team will present the benefits associated with the integration of a given tool in an SD business or municipality, and participants will be invited to ask the teams questions. The discussion between the teams and participants will be fuelled by facilitation techniques that stimulate collective intelligence.