The future of the Designscapes community

Speakers meeting link: https://bit.ly/36uVRwF | Meeting attendants: Facebook live at https://www.facebook.com/designscapesproject/

10:00-10:15 Welcome and introduction
Francesco Molinari, ANCI Toscana
Paulo Alves, Smart Value Consulting, Porto (Session Chair)
10:15-10:45 Scaling Up
Tomas Matraia, The AdWisers (PL)
Armando Massimiliano Sirolla, SmartKhokha (PK)
10:45-11:00 Q&A
11:00-11:30 Scaling Out
Georges Mercier, ADTConsult (FR)
Tasos Vasileiadis, IED/Joist (EL)
11:30-11:45 Q&A
11:45-12:15 Scaling Deep
Francesco Filippi, Fundación MUSOL (ES)
Kari Mikkela, Urban Mill – Espoo Innovation Garden (FI)
12:15-12:30 Q&A
12:30-12:45 Wrap up and conclusion
Jeff Israely, Worldcrunch

The Designscapes project has dealt with “design enabled innovation in urban environments” starting from the intuition – largely verified now in practical terms, as argued below – that the City dimension can and should make a difference in transforming innovation activities started as “little local niches” into promising pathways of transition towards a brave new world where solutions to small and/or localized problems also manage to tackle global challenges successfully.

While our EU funded activities are coming to an end soon – September 30 being the official deadline of Designscapes – we as a consortium are now reflecting on how to capitalize and further valorize a vital and active EU wide community composed of the 99 winners of a cascade funding call we coordinated during 2018-2020 and that saw the participation, across three consecutive rounds, of 5-6 times more numerous applicants of the public and private sectors from all over Europe and overseas.

More than 20% of the call winners – more than 40% if we only consider the 51 of them who released prototypes or proofs of concept of transferability of design enabled innovation from City to City, rather than mere feasibility studies – have accepted to present their results during 20+ 1-hour sessions of this “un conference”, held across July, August and September.

But there is more: as other sessions from Bulgaria, Greece, Italy and Portugal have also shown, not to mention the success story of Valencia World Design Capital 2022, Designscapes has also managed to embed its intuition into the real practice of public sector organisations – notably Municipalities and their umbrella associations – who are now redesigning their local policies in accordance with the principles of diffuse design, stakeholder participation and co-creation.

This legacy must not be dissolved after the end of the granted period and how to achieve this is one of the topics of the workshop, which will bring international examples of “scaling up”, “scaling out” and “scaling deep” to take inspiration from.

These presentations from outside Designscapes will be compared against the evidence our project is putting forward, that the local/urban networks created across 4 years of work have not only been significantly involved (despite the Covid19 crisis) in making design enabled innovation possible but also in procuring new sources of complementary funding for the scaling up, out and deep of many initiatives.

The results of the workshop will be presented during the final panel session of September 30 together with other ideas emerged in previous sessions such as:

– putting the Designscapes community at the service of the New European Bauhaus and the challenge of 100 Climate neutral Cities by 2030;

– ditto, but for the new KIC on cultural and creative industries that will materialise in 2022 onwards;

– up to the creation of a pan-European business operating in the “market” of start up support services, based on an alternative financing model for innovative micro initiatives, leveraging the capacity of local networks to bring additional private finance in the post-start up phase of the new ventures.

Our speakers

Francesco Molinari is an international researcher and policy advisor with a 20-years working experience in R&D and innovation projects and programmes at European, national and regional levels – notably on such topics as eParticipation, eGovernment and Smart Cities. Formerly he has been engaged for about 12 years in territorial marketing and the delivery of financial services to SMEs – including support to EU grants access for their green and brown field investments. For 5 years he has served in a top managerial position at a middle-sized Municipality in Italy. He holds a track record of successful collaborations with local/regional authorities and ministries on such topics as Pre-Commercial Public Procurement, Living Labs and Smart Specialisation.

Paulo Alves is a consultant and facilitator with a wider experience in entrepreneurship promotion, social Innovation, territorial planning and regenerative development, and has more than 20 years experience working with public authorities, non-profit orgs, companies and entrepreneurs on innovation and cooperation projects. He’s the founder and managing partner of Smart Value Consulting Lda, and has an education background in Economics, Marketing, Innovation, Service Design, Systems Change and Team Coaching.

Tomas Matraia is the CEO of the strategic advisory group The AdWisers www.theadwisers.com specialised in internationalisation, innovation, capacity building and assistance for the private and public sector. Having worked for more than 15 years within the United Nations, European Commission, Academia and the private sector, Tomas is a seasoned international policy expert and business negotiator, with a focus on Innovation, Partnership, Private Sector, Digitalisation, SDGs. He advanced the high-level policy dialogue between the EU and the rest of the world, including international ministerial agreements and designed and managed multimillion programmes, projects and facilitated strategic initiatives. His current efforts include re-inventing how innovation, investments, sustainability, climate change and development related challenges can be symbiotically applied to offer: new actionable and replicable models, evidence-based policies, business opportunities and social impact. Among his latest achievements is the strategy design and implementation of a pioneering project for USAID redefining the public-private model in the Covid-19 economy through the private sector mobilisation (VCs, BA, alternative funding, access to finance), catalytic capital and technical assistance. The project is an unprecedented USAID effort on EU territory, supporting innovative companies and startups. In 2020 he was appointed ad personam by the EU agency ENISA for cybersecurity to their prestigious Advisory Board.

Armando Massimiliano Sirolla is a senior executive with over 20 years of experience in finance, policy and digital transformation, including more than 10 years in C-Suite positions at financial institutions in Afghanistan, Madagascar, Tanzania and Zambia. Armando brings together both his financial expertise in emerging markets and a strong business development track-record in Europe and Eastern/Southern Africa. He is multilingual and in addition to his native Italian speaks, English, French and Portuguese. Armando is now launching the startup company named SmartKhokha, which specializes in micro credit lending services.

Georges Mercier is a senior consultant specialised in the implementation of European cohesion policy programmes and projects (regional programmes, European territorial cooperation, thematic programmes). His activities consist in supporting managing authorities in the preparation of programmes (diagnosis, strategy, drafting of programming documents, etc.), their implementation and evaluation (monitoring, impact evaluation, mainstreaming and transfer activities). He also supports beneficiaries in the drafting of application files. The focus put during the last years on governance and mainstreaming activities in the Mediterranean area has been the occasion to develop projects involving regional, national and transnational bodies (South Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur Region, Conference of Peripheral Maritime Regions, WestMed initiative…).

Tasos Vasileiadis is the founder of the Institute of Entrepreneurship Development, a European Center of Excellence in Entrepreneurship. He is also the founder of Joist Innovation Park, a connecting hub of innovation and learning.
Since 1994 he has been working in startups, business development, education, and entrepreneurship while simultaneously acting as a member of research teams of many European projects. In addition, he was a lecturer at the Aegean University in entrepre-neurship and has acquired vast experience over the years in implementing national and EU projects, with a particular focus on entrepreneurship.

Francesco Filippi is Director of international projects and consultancy services for public, private and no profit management at the MUSOL Foundation in Valencia, Spain. He is experienced in the design and implementation of integrated quality management systems as well as training and capacity building facilities for public administration. He has more than 10 years experience in European Union funded projects, particularly in the domain of international cooperation with Spanish speaking countries.

Kari Mikkela has over 30 years academic, corporate and NGO experience of learning, innovation and business services. He has worked in and for several organisations in a variety of capacities specialized to innovation orchestration, user-driven RDI and digitally enabled services co-creation. He has overseen well over 200 successful initiatives. Kari has worked as an in/out-sourced external advisor, coach, executive producer and entrepreneur. He is Co-founder and Executive Producer of Urban Mill, a privately-run public-private-people co-working and co-creation platform for urban innovations co-initiated by the City of Espoo and Aalto University.

Jeff Israely is the co-founder and editor of Worldcrunch, a Paris-based anglophone media and content agency, and DESIGNSCAPES’ Communication & Dissemination partner. A former TIME magazine bureau chief in Rome and Paris, he has also been a correspondent for the Associated Press, Boston Globe and Oakland Tribune. He teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism of the Institut d’Etudes politiques de Paris (Sciences Po).