After Paris, Marseille and Lille, Wave – How collective ingenuity is changing the world, a project of the BNP Paribas group, comes to Milan. The Italian event is directed by Trivioquadrivio with the collaboration of the Giannino Bassetti Foundation.
The protagonists of innovation, selected from within five “currents” – co-creation, sharing, inclusion, circularity and the makers movement – tell their stories through exhibitions, workshops, installations and debates. A calendar of 23 events, distributed across 9 sites, and brought to life by more than 80 presenters. (Here the program)

Wave is a map upon which we can plot the most interesting developments within each current throughout the month of June 2015… before it continues its journey beyond Europe.

The 5 Currents of Collective Ingenuity.

The Bassetti Foundation has been promoting responsibility in innovation for more than 15 years, and we are pleased to see Wave make what is possibly the first ever real organic attempt to take a snapshot of the link between knowledge and power – the key to change – to evaluate the collective strength of such meeting.

We intend to profoundly reflect upon the five currents generated by this wave of collective ingenuity.

Today, the relationships between innovation and participation, and innovation and democracy, are based upon radically new foundations. Not only because we have ‘equipment’ that allows us to affect reality, from genetics to the 3D printer, but above all because the necessary resources are available, accessible, distributed and contestable, to a degree that history has never before seen.

Frugality in innovation does not merely consist in creating with less; it also consists in having generalized access to instruments that were historically the patrimony of the few (and as such, jealously guarded). The sharing economy, the inclusive economy, and co-creation all mean this: the innovation deposit box is open, we must wear the hat of our new found ability responsibly.

Several years ago, Bruno Latour described modern society as a huge collective laboratory, within which there can be no innovation without representation. In promoting a month of meetings within the Wave framework, BNP Paribas and BNL offer us the opportunity to immerse ourselves in the rooms of this laboratory, to have access to the instruments and methods, and to mix with those whose intention is to co-create a future that is so close that we can already touch it with our own hands.

As in all laboratories, there is always the risk run by the sorcerer’s apprentice. We must reflect upon responsibility in the knowledge that innovation can change history, but also agree upon the advantages when many have access and work is conducted in everyone’s interests.

We like to think Wave arrives in Milan because a historical tie between innovation and humanism, technology and beauty was formed here. The genius loci that unites the Virtruvian man, designed by Leonardo Da Vinci within this very neighborhood, to the Promethean man, possessed by creative curiosity and the desire to discover.

Welcome to Wave, a giant collective ingenuity experiment.

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