Norway is, like the rest of Europe, facing societal challenges linked to an increase in the fall out of employment from people in the economically active population. The welfare services need innovation to be able to meet these challenges. This project will provide research based knowledge, but also innovation of welfare services, creating welfare organizations better able to optimize limited resources, as well as meet the increasingly complex needs of our welfare society. The project integrates traditional political science research on policymaking and implementation with more (micro) sociological research on the interaction between front line workers in the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV) and vulnerable users. Researchers, front line workers in NAV, employees’ organizations and NAV users will cooperate in producing both research and innovations, working together to better the work life inclusion of vulnerable groups. Using an interdisciplinary, multimethod approach will make it possible to identify the relation between organizational models, and the ability to increase the optimization of design, content, quality, and cost of NAVs services to the long-term unemployed. Close cooperation with selected NAV offices will ensure the development of new innovative solutions that can be successfully integrated in the implementation of services afterwards.  Importantly, the research and innovation of the project will have an even broader scope than the welfare services of NAV, as the project will not only be conducted with researchers, front line workers and users in Norway, but involve an extensive comparison with a similar research project being conducted in Denmark in the same project period as INNOWEL, namely the project Local Innovation in Social and Employment Services (LISES), managed by Aalborg University. The welfare services in Norway and Denmark have different organizational structure and somewhat different political accentuations – most prominently represented by the more explicit flexicurity policy in Denmark than in Norway – but are facing the same societal challenges, thus making INNOWEL a unique research based arena of both comparison and mutual learning. The project is a joint venture, between The Work Research Institute (WRI) at Oslo and Akershus University College for Applied Sciences (HiOA), Aalborg University in Denmark and the newly established Competence Centre for Work Inclusion (KAI), also at HiOA. KAI is the result of a joint effort between HiOA and NAV and is providing research based planning, implementation and evaluation of specific measures taken to include more people into the work life, and how institutions that work with unemployed people or people at the risk of unemployment are organized and managed. KAIs involvement in the project is important as it both provides the project with expert competence on NAV, a unique channel into the NAV system, organization and its local offices, and by providing the project with extra resources for an additional Ph.D.-student if it obtains funding by the Research Council of Norway.