The Power of Collaboration: What Happens in Celje Won’t Stay in Celje

If you ask the members of the Local Alliance what innovation means, you’ll hear as many answers as there are partners. For the City Municipality of Celje, it’s about connecting departments, aligning visions, and creating the conditions for creative risk-taking. For the Business Incubator of the Savinjska Region it’s about helping entrepreneurs imagine new products, test ideas, and reach international markets. For Real Estate Celje, it’s about rethinking housing — making it affordable, sustainable, and community-focused.

At the Youth Centre, innovation means participation — helping young people discover that their ideas matter. “We’re investing in young people because we believe in them,” says Tadej, the centre’s director. “They just need space to connect, share ideas, and make things happen.”

Across town, in the business zone, ETRA — a family-run business in robotics and automation — represents another face of innovation. Here, technology meets tradition: parents and young engineers working side by side, blending industrial know-how with digital design. It’s a company that prizes creativity but also balance — the ability to raise a family and live well in a city that’s big enough to inspire, yet small enough to breathe.

Together, these organisations reveal something deeper: innovation isn’t one idea or method — it’s a collective act of belief.

That belief begins with place.

Lucija, from the Municipality of Prebold, tells me that when she and her husband married in Celje Castle in 2008, they knew they wanted to make their lives here. A veterinary surgeon and researcher who had spent years studying ecotoxicology and animal health, she returned to the valley because she saw not just home, but possibility.

Now she's co-creating a mini-hub in Prebold — a space that will primarily engage young people, while also welcoming other residents who are already actively involved in the thriving Prebold Intergenerational Centre. “It’s not just about services,” she says. “It’s about belonging — about giving people a sense of purpose and participation.”

Meanwhile, Klara, a young professional working with the Institute for Economic Democracy, brings another layer of meaning. Having studied in Ljubljana before returning to Celje, she sees her work on employee ownership as part of a bigger story: building a fairer, more resilient local economy. “It’s about creating workplaces where people feel agency,” she says, “where they can shape the future of their company and their city.”

For both Lucija and Klara, innovation isn’t abstract — it’s intertwined with their daily lives, their hopes, and their sense of belonging. It’s about improving the city not just because it’s a job, but because it’s home.

Like many mid-sized European cities, Celje and its surrounding municipalities are working to address several intertwined urban challenges — from affordable and accessible housing, to economic development, to creating vibrant public spaces that keep people of all ages engaged in community life. Each partner experiences these issues differently, and their priorities naturally vary. Yet these differences have become an asset rather than a barrier, helping the alliance see challenges from multiple angles and shape more complete, shared solutions.

MAG-NET gives structure to this energy. Its innovation blocks provide a shared framework for experimentation, helping partners identify how their initiatives connect and complement each other. The innovation blocks are MAG-NET’s practical framework for organising experimentation — a flexible set of lenses (governance, participation, creativity, digital capacity, economic development and more) that help partners understand how their initiatives connect and where collaboration can unlock new value.

When I visited Celje earlier this year, the project was in its early stages — the ideas were there, but the momentum was still gathering. Returning in October, the change was palpable. The city felt more animated and confident. Cafés were fuller, new restaurants had opened, and people lingered outside to talk and laugh in the autumn sun.

Inside meeting rooms, the energy was just as visible — discussions between municipal teams and researchers, entrepreneurs sketching concepts on flipcharts, the hum of cross-sector collaboration. Innovation, in Celje, feels like movement.

That sense of movement grew stronger when Celje hosted the Opening Site Visit in October. The Transfer Partners — from Croatia, Italy, and Slovakia — gathered to see first-hand, the local alliance showcase their progress and urban challenges.

Seeing the alliance in action made the project tangible — not just a plan on paper, but a living collaboration. Inspired by what they observed, all three transfer partners chose to work on the City Vibe and Housing challenges in their own cities. Košice will also explore energy communities, and Nardò will focus on creative hubs.

It was a perfect demonstration of the project’s potential: the local becoming transferable, the particular becoming universal. What happens in Celje doesn’t stay in Celje.

What makes this story special is that it isn’t only about results — it’s about relationships. Celje doesn’t see itself in competition with Ljubljana; instead, it benefits from proximity. The Institute for Innovation and Development at the University of Ljubljana, Poligon Institute for the Development of Creative Industries, and Institute for Spatial Policies (IPoP) make the short journey to Celje regularly for workshops and fieldwork, working side by side with the municipality and local partners.

The result is an easy partnership culture — professional but friendly, ambitious but grounded. You can sense it in the busy rooms and shared lunches: people genuinely enjoy working together. Collaboration here feels human, not institutional.

This, perhaps, is Celje’s quiet innovation — the emergence of a civic culture where cooperation is no longer exceptional, but expected.

As MAG-NET evolves, one truth becomes clearer with each visit: Celje’s greatest resource isn’t its infrastructure or institutions — it’s its people and the way they care about their city.

From the municipal offices to the workshops of ETRA, from the Youth Centre to the Prebold mini-hub, you hear the same refrain — we want to make life better here. Quality of life isn’t a backdrop to innovation; it’s the driver of it.

When change grows from affection — from people who love where they live and want others to thrive there too — it has staying power.

An as with any ambitious urban experiment, the story is still unfolding. Of course, sustaining this momentum will bring its own challenges. As the partnership grows, the city will need to balance diverse perspectives, ensure that all voices — including the quieter or more vulnerable ones — influence decisions, and make sure that ideas from different sectors lead to real, lasting change rather than token participation. Yet the openness and trust already visible among the partners suggests that Celje is well placed to navigate these next steps with honesty and ambition.

Celje’s story is, in many ways, a European one. Small and mid-sized cities across the continent are looking for new ways to harness creativity, strengthen community, and retain talent. Celje’s experience shows that the answer doesn’t lie in any single project or policy, but in the connections between them — in the willingness of people to collaborate across boundaries and share what they learn.

In that sense, MAG-NET is already succeeding. It’s building not just solutions, but relationships that ripple outward — from Celje to Prebold, to Varaždin, to Košice, to Nardò, and beyond.

Because in Celje, innovation isn’t a competition of ideas. It’s a shared act of care.
And that’s why what happens here won’t stay here.