MEDLAB Sicilia Le occasioni per l’innovazione sociale e territoriale MEDLAB in Sicily An opportunity for social and territorial innovation

Abstract

The volume contains written in italian and english language on the reflections and the final results of international partnership experience by Medlab (project promoted by European Commission, MED Program) concerning the case of Living Labs in Sicily. Gelardi and Salemi showed the action of the regional innovation instruments of urban and regional planning at institutional regional level and in particular the role of experience of international cooperation in the comparison of experiences of different kind of territorial innovation in the Euro-Mediterranean area. Marsh shows as the MedLab project has been to examine the current and potential role of Living Labs within regional development policy and the questions thrown up by considering Living Labs as a policy tool. This means looking at issues of development policy and linking their relevance to broader territorial innovation strategies. In addition, governance issues arise for coordinating different Living Lab initiatives within a territorial domain, with the aim of maximising benefits not only to ICT-based innovation and the local knowledge economy, but also to the fields of application that Living Labs address: the environment, the economy, social and government services, etc. The process has thus involved first looking at how these questions can be addressed from the standpoints of different types of actors and how they can engage in reciprocal learning processes. The idea is to develop a model of “innovation literacy” for local authorities and policy makers, namely the capacity to structure the demand for and supply of ICT-based innovation in order to maximise the concrete benefits to specific policies and initiatives. The ultimate vision is of a virtuous circle whereby regional development authorities apply the Living Lab model in an increasing array of fields and the ICT industry increasingly recognises the value proposition of engaging in co-design processes in concrete local and regional development initiatives. In the following pages, we explore the experiences developed in the MedLab project according to three issues: a) a first exploration of the concept of “territorial innovation” at the basis of the MedLab hypothesis, and its potential impact on policy and governance; b) The case story of the formation of the original TLL-Sicily partnership in 2007 and how that experience shaped the MedLab workplan; c) The summative conclusions of the MedLab project, exploring the concept of an emergent macro-regional Living Lab. Giambalvo e Lucido involved the analysis of urban change in a social and economic context particularly full of difficulties as the town of Favara. Their contribution tries to define the processes of social innovation when they born and move the first steps, this contribution aims to collect the challenge born inside the Medlab project – Mediterranean Living Lab for the Territorial Innovation to reflect on some of the outcomes of the Living Lab approach to support territorial innovation in the geographical areas of Sicily concerned by the pilot cases of MedLab (the spatial planning of the province of Ragusa and the strategic plan of the municipality of Favara). More specifically, the remark starts from a work of research on the field and facilitation of communicative processes aimed to identify what dynamics of social innovation, such as transactions among the social actors and what new micro-economic ecosystems are developing in the municipality of Favara, whose background has been explored and treated as territorial Living Lab. Di Bono e Parisi describe the way of the Province of Ragusa tried to initiate arrangements to create a Living Lab from experience of local planning and addressing to the involvement of the local firm to obtain a dinamic digital mapping of local creativity. In the contribution the autors try to show that the concept of innovation is still evolving and the market is