The “future.coop” research project was created with the aim of enhancing the many innovation experiences carried out by social cooperatives throughout the national territory by identifying opportunities and possible development drivers for cooperation.
The project is based on the idea of promoting widespread innovation among social cooperatives according to the “open source” approach by developing the open innovation paradigm.
In particular, the operational objectives are:
create a national mapping of the innovative experiences of social cooperatives, verify whether the specific characteristics of cooperatives can represent competitive advantages in specific sectors of intervention, experiment with the open source model for the dissemination of innovative experiences, carry out some pilot actions related to the development of specific supply chains productive.
Three channels were used for the national mapping of good practices:
the first is represented by the Regional Representatives of Legacoopsociali who have reported the good practices in the field of social innovation, and the references of the managers of the innovation project, present in their Region. In this way it was possible to send the project managers a form to fill in where they were asked to describe the cooperative and the case of social innovation.
The second channel used is represented by the call for paper published on the Legacoopsociali Nazionale website to collect innovative companies and ideas.
The third channel is represented by all the authoritative interlocutors of Legacoop who have reported cases of social innovation, subsequently analyzed and included in the mapping that provides for the selection and analysis of good practices by making a division, by sector of intervention and by Region.
The areas identified are four: local development, social agriculture, participatory welfare and regeneration of urban spaces.
The Macro-areas of intervention, for the identification of good practices, are identified in the North-West (Liguria, Lombardy Piedmont), North-East (Emilia Romagna, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Trentino Alto Adige, Veneto), Center (Lazio, Umbria, Tuscany), South (Abruzzo, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Molise, Puglia) and Islands.
The last step of the research consists in developing an analysis that brings out in which sector of intervention the good practices of social innovation are concentrated, crossing the intervention sector with the reference macro-areas and analyzing the relationship between cooperatives and innovation. .
