A Year of Celebration

2025 was a year of great celebration at the Bassetti Foundation, as President Piero Bassetti was awarded the 22nd International Vittorino Colombo Award, the Foundation opened its Digital Documentation Centre and developed its Metaverse!

Vittorino Colombo Prize

The Vittorino Colombo Prize which bears the name of the late President of the senate (and is awarded by the homonymous foundation) was presented to President Bassetti for his contribution in supporting political actions aimed at building solidarity and collaboration between populations.

Previous winners include Romano Prodi, Emilio Colombo, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Andrea Riccardi and Lucio Magri.

Digital Documentation Centre

The Bassetti Foundation Digital Documentation Centre gives permanent free public access to a lifetime of President Piero Bassetti’s work and  thinking regarding the importance of the relationships between knowledge, politics, institutions and innovations.

Dario Baldini has been working on the project, who after making several hundred documents available and searchable (for example these relating to the Regional radio and television reforms) has been developing a new Topic Modeling section that has integrated a suite of unsupervised machine learning techniques to automatically surface latent thematic patterns within text collections. This is achieved through frequency analysis and co-occurrence of individual terms and groups of words that appear together, without pre-labeling.

Poiesis Intensive Innovation with the Metaverse

A further focus of investigation has been framed within the Foundation concept of poiesis intensive innovation, a form of innovation that does not come from scientific methodology or protocol, but from knowing how to do things. With a focus on art and music, the centrepiece was the development of the Foundation’s Metaverse gallery in Spatial. Alongside hosting the homepage’s cover stories, the gallery was also the space for a series of events that included dialogues with musician/artist Lorenzo Brusci and music producer Luca Severino, who alongside Jonathan Hankins and Lisa Mos talked about their series of Error0XHUMAN performances.

Projects and Collaborations

The Foundation participated in and collaborated with a broad range of long-term projects this year, the following being a selection.

2025 saw the successful conclusion of both the IRGIE and ENLIGHT projects. IRGIE was coordinated by the INGV in collaboration with the Regional Government of Siccily to study the geothermal potential of the Aeolian archipelago, while ENLIGHT analyzed the socio-ethical implications raised by the 3D printing of miniature human organs. The Foundation’s involvement resulted in a series of recommendations for responsible R&I practices in this sector.

The CO-VALUE project running in Emilia Romagna began its co-creation of an app for the remote monitoring of people with chronic conditions. The co-creation process was designed by The Foundation’s Angela Simone and Anna Pellizzone in collaboration with REMEDY, and ART-ER as an experiment in co-enhancement processes.

The first phase of the participatory process coordinated by the Bassetti Foundation within the GINEVRA project, an international initiative coordinated by CISE (Center for Innovation and Economic Development, a Special Agency of the Chamber of Commerce of Romagna – Forlì-Cesena and Rimini), concluded this year. GINEVRA aims to test new models of responsible governance for the introduction of transformative innovations in small and medium-sized cities, including through the use of technology demonstrators.

The REINFORCING project is coordinated by the Bassetti Foundation and aims to build Europe’s central  for Open Responsible Research Innovation (ORRI). The project published three open calls across 2025 in addition to those from the previous year, inviting consortium to propose projects that develop practical responsible innovation methods.

Throughout the year, the Bassetti Foundation collaborated with the Lombardy Regional Forum for Innovation to bring discussion about responsibility in innovation to secondary schools. Forum member Cristina Grasseni alongside Jonathan Hankins and Tommaso Correale conducted a series of workshops in schools across the region, each containing an introduction to the concept of responsible innovation a theatre presentation and critical design workshop.

The year also saw the fourth edition of Politiké, Confcooperative Lombardia’s School of Politics for which the Foundation is once again providing scientific support and faculty selection. Featuring residential modules, in-person meetings, thematic seminars, and “futures literacy” workshops, the project addresses topics such as artificial intelligence, social economy, digital inequalities, new forms of governance, and the repopulation of inland areas.

The Foundation’s involvement in the Place Based Circular Society Innovations project continued, with Jonathan Hankins holding a seat on the Advisory Board. This project aims to explore how places can become more equitable, inclusive and environmentally sustainable by developing, implementing and scaling circular society innovations. The team are interested in how different and varied initiatives are shaped by the conditions and people present in the places and spaces in which they happen, and in turn how they shape those places.

The year also saw our collaboration in the Follow the Food: Levering Geographical Indications for Sustainability and Fairness project. This project aims to challenge the globalized, unsustainable and unfair agri-food system (especially for smallholders and subsistence farmers) by studying and enhancing the potential of Geographical Indications (GIs). The study hopes to challenge and improve one purported alternative to the dominant market-based globalized food system: Geographical Indications (GIs). The key question is: “How can GIs enable and empower smallholders and subsistence farmers to realize sustainable agriculture and transform the current system?”

Publications, Interviews and reviews

AI was not only to be found in practice within the Digital Documentation centre, but again this year discussion around Artificial Intelligence took centre stage with the publication of a Foundation White Paper For Responsibility in Artificial Intelligence.  In his Preface, President Bassetti explains how AI raises questions about knowledge, to use his own words ‘not so much a question about more knowledge, but of different knowledge’ and also of power, born from the necessity for new norms and rights, educational needs, understanding and familiarity with the technology, and citizenship.

The release was supported by a review of how the development of AI has been addressed from a host of different perspectives and points of view in the Journal of Responsible Innovation, our participation in an international workshop on shaping visual futures, a discussion between Ricardo Fedriga, Davide Picca and Alberto Romele and a dialogue between philosophy and governance, all to be found in the live-archive. Angelo Hankins also contributed a student’s testimony on studying with AI to the website and live-archive, while Francesco Samoré co-authored Neuralink’s brain-computer interfaces: medical innovations and ethical challenges, an open access journal publication.

The Foundation also joined forces with Rivoluzioni.ai, a new portal which is dedicated to innovation with AI. The portal aims to become an inclusive reference point for anyone intending to adopt a sustainable and responsible approach to AI use.

Our seat in Milan hosted a series of publication-based workshops and seminars related to AI, including a discussion with Gabriele Giacomini , author of ‘Il trilemma della libertà: Stati, cittadini e compagnie digitali’ and Stefano Epifani, author of ‘The Theater of Thinking Machines. 10 False Myths about Artificial Intelligence and How to Overcome Them’. We were also privilidged to host Lucia Dal Negro, founder of De-Lab promoter of The Rookie campaign, Sabrina Bartolotta, expert in digital learning, and  Iolanda Romano, expert in participatory design methodologies and conflict management and Founder of Avventura Urbana.

A busy year indeed. We very much look forward to 2026.