One of the keys to promoting social innovation is to develop its theoretical and methodological framework. At the Observatory we have tried to contribute our small grain of sand to advance along this path. In this sense, in 2021 we published the Guide to Social Innovation in Social Services, whose main objective was to define the theoretical framework. As a logical continuation of that first academic publication, we have now grounded the abstract concepts in a methodology that facilitates implementation in practice.

In this first landing exercise, we have focused our efforts on an aspect that we consider to be a priority: the evaluation of projects, by drawing up a guide made up of two complementary elements:

• A conceptual guide, which explains how to evaluate social innovation, what elements to take into account.
• An office tool that follows the same conceptual structure and facilitates the implementation of these concepts. We have called it HELIX (Evaluation Tool for Social Innovation). It allows to evaluate a project in a very simple way and provides rich visual and quantitative information about the evaluated projects to improve decision making.

We have tried to create a guide-tool that is useful for those who have to assess the social innovation component of projects. We also believe that it is also a very valid resource for those who want to do a self-test of their project.