A contribution from: Elena Como, Dario Marmo and Andrea Rapisardi

Signs of social innovation in Italy – Small experiments, major challenges

Social innovation (SI) in Italy is emerging in respose to a number of complex social and economic challenges for which appropriate policies and solutions have not been identified or effectively implemented yet. These include for example the ageing of the population, the growth of poverty and social exclusion, the increase in youth unemployment, and the recent acceleration and transformation of immigration flows. In the past decades and years, these challenges have not always been tackled with effective structural policies, but rather they have been managed through scattered and fragmented emergency measures. This situation, while showing the overall weakness of national public policies, incentivised the emergence of innovative solutions coming mainly from a bottom-up dynamic, and facilitated the spread of SI and sharing economy initiatives. The sharing economy in particular has seen a rapid spread in the past few years, thanks to its capacity to mobilise distributed community resources and improve the accessibility of certain assets, such as accommodation, transport, second-hand items, or specific knowledge and skills that can be directly shared by citizens at low cost and with little or no intermediation. The sharing economy is also becoming an inspiration for public institutions to re-design local services in a more efficient and sustainable way, and to re-think the overall relationship between citizens and administrations towards a more collaborative model.

Some interesting SI may be found in the area of health and social care, most particularly in welfare services and solutions targeting the weakest and most disadvantaged groups in society. Some examples are:

1. Co-care and co-housing solutions for the elderly, where groups of families decide to share the costs of housing, health care, and social assistance for elderly people.
2. Task shifting and re-organisation of services for chronic diseases. For example, some Italian regions are experimenting the so-called ‘chronic care model’, where multidisciplinary teams of professionals are mobilised on the territory to optimise the implementation of prevention and care activities, through better coordination of services, better information systems, direct support to patients’ self-management, and mobilisation of community resources for building more healthy and age-friendly environments.

In the employment field, one of the consequences of the economic crises has been the increase in community-led resilience initiatives, as demonstrated for example by the multiplication of initiatives of workers’ buyouts. In the workers buyouts, former employees of a company facing financial difficulties decide to collectively acquire and manage the entrepreneurial activity, often giving birth to a new cooperative company with a fully renovated, shared and inclusive governance structure.

Interesting examples of SI may be found also in the energy and environment field.

The economic incentives conferred by Italian governments in the last fifteen years have convinced many citizens and enterprises to change their energy supply strategies, increasing the use of renewable sources. These incentive policies, now concluded, contributed to the creation of a fertile ground for the birth of SI-projects, showing bottom-up and top-down dynamics.

Some significant examples:

1. The Cooperative Community of Melpignano is an innovative form of cooperative company owned by the local community. Through the cooperative, the citizens of Melpignano (a town in Apulia Region) could collectively buy solar panels using state incentives for renewable sources. The panels were installed on the roofs of Melpignano’s houses, generating large savings on power bills and additional resources derived by the on-grid sale of energy shares in excess. Thanks to the economic resources generated by the initiative, the cooperative had also the possibility to install 50 ‘water houses’ (public fountains providing micro filtered high-quality water) in the Region, which contributed to reducing local consumption of plastic bottles by 240.000 units every year.
2. ‘Smart Polygeneration Microgrid (SPM)’ is a micro-electric network managed by a smart system which connects together several generation plants and smart meters in a local university district. It has been designed by the University of Genova and realised by Siemens in the Savona Campus. The intervention has been co-financed by the Italian Ministry of Education, and leveraged other European funds from Smart Cities and EU CIPS programmes.

At policy level, SI has not yet found its structured place in Italy, despite some attempts by the previous governments to take initiative in this sense. Political instability has been the main barrier: since 2011, Italy has seen four different national governments, with different structures and different agendas. It is difficult to describe in a unified way their attitudes towards SI, and to predict what will come in the next years. In general terms, social innovation appeared the national agendas only in 2012, when the technical government led by Mario Monti set up a dedicated task force for SI under the Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR, also in charge of innovation in the Public Administration). In 2013, the task force produced a first document towards the Italian SI-Agenda, and at the same time, MIUR started issuing bids for smart cities and SI-projects, giving specific attention to the southern regions and to the projects presented by the youth. A bid to form ‘SI clusters’ was also issued in 2013. In the same year, a task force on social enterprise and SI was established under the DG Third Sector of the Ministry of Labour and Social Policies. Despite these interesting steps, due to the overall political instability mentioned above, and the general low priority given to this issue, SI did never really reach the core or top of the national agendas. Nonetheless, some elements that may favour SI are present in specific sectoral policies, such as in the recent health policies, established by the renewed Patto per la Salute. SI is more debated at local and micro levels, although this still occurs in a fragmented way.

Looking at the future, the biggest challenge for SI in Italy will be the re-definition a more sustainable and equitable society, with higher engagement of citizens and a new emphasis on social inclusion and universal rights.
The new tools and models proposed by the sharing economy movement may represent an important opportunity towards this goal, and in Italy there is a lively debate on the role and potential of the sharing economy for SI. The key challenges for the future seem to be the strengthening and democratisation of ownership and governance models of the sharing economy, which need to ensure more openness, transparency, and most importantly a fairer distribution of benefits between platform users and owners. The idea of a cooperative ownership structure for the sharing economy platforms is also raising some interest, as highlighted by a recent research promoted by Generazioni-Legacoop and Unipolis Foundation (coordinated by LAMA Agency and realised in collaboration with Social Seed) and by a recent article published on the journal “Impresa Sociale”. This shows once again how important it will be to put always citizens at the centre, to mobilise community resources, and to improve participation, in order to have full ownership and sustainability of development processes.

LAMA Agency, partner of the SI-DRIVE project, works to support SI activities and projects, helping public, private, and not for profit actors, and building new partnership to increase positive social impact. In 2013, LAMA co-founded Impact Hub Florence (part of the global Impact Hub Network), which is now a well-recognised hub for SI in the region of Tuscany. Impact Hub Florence wants to empower the local SI community, and to promote a culture of continuous innovation and active citizenship.

Authors:

Elena Como
Dario Marmo
Andrea Rapisardi