LabInRes. Workshop on Responsible Innovation in the Public Authorities

The Giannino Bassetti Foundation and the Milan University master’s decree course on Public Authorities and Policy, in conjunction with the Icona Interdepartmental Centre, have devised a joint training project, the Workshop on Responsible Innovation in the Public Authorities.
The project is born of the conviction that innovation in and by the public authorities – in the sense of change in their structures, processes, relations, and allocation and use of existing and new resources – is a crucial factor for acquiring more effective public sector policies and more efficient markets.
At the same time, this conviction is accompanied by an awareness that the paths to innovation can lead to results that may well be far distant from those envisaged at the outset, thus requiring further changes, overhauls and measures. This is where the responsibility factor comes in: a tangible innovation is also responsible if it adopts consultative, feedback and corrective mechanisms that ensure that it is monitored and honed. If, indeed, innovation “is the ability to achieve the improbable,” it will by definition be at least partly unpredictable in its impact.
This conviction and this awareness, which the Bassetti Foundation by now regards as consolidated capital, are the two complementary aspects that the project intends to develop as integral components of the new public sector managers’ professional skills.
In practice, the LabInRes sets out to offer a select group of students on the master’s decree course the chance to meet the players in public sector innovation in Italy, outside the bounds of the conventional student/teacher relationship, bringing them up against direct accounts of the strategies and difficulties inherent in these processes of change.
The follow-up debate, conducted by the students in the form of a call for comments launched on the Bassetti Foundation’s website, will be a major aspect of their encounter with the guest speakers.
The seminars, which set out to involve academics and practitioners in a position to address the topic of responsible innovation in the public authorities from new angles, will be introduced and moderated by members of the Bassetti Foundation jointly with a number of Icona lecturers and research workers.

In relation to LabInRes: a new Call for Comments by FGB site will be opened.

Read on meeting with Lucio Stanca (in Italian).

Read on meeting with Fabrizio Barca (in Italian).