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IIPP contributes to first position paper launched for Emilia-Romagna’s Just Transition mission
24 August 2020
The UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) worked with ART-ER, the innovation agency of the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy, on a ‘position paper’ for a climate-oriented ‘Just Transition’-led recovery from the COVID-19 crisis.
IIPP team members George Dibb, Martha McPherson and Antonio Andreoni have been working with ART-ER, the regional innovation agency of the Italian Emilia-Romagna region, on a brand-new ‘position paper’ for a climate-oriented ‘Just Transition’-led recovery from the COVID-19 crisis. IIPP’s contribution to the paper takes up the argument for mission-oriented innovation for a fair and equitable ‘just’ green transition in the region, to take on the climate crisis.
Started before the pandemic hit, the project is part of EIT Climate-KIC’s ‘Deep Demonstrations’, medium-long-term and large-scale experimentation paths with the aim of taking on the climate emergency in a place-based, systems-thinking approach. Working with regional actors across Europe, IIPP has been developing the ‘iParadigm’ project to map innovation patterns and frame conversations around new innovation paradigms across all eight of the Deep Demonstration regions. The project draws on several strands of IIPP’s path-breaking thought leadership and research – rethinking the role of the state as a market-shaping actor, with the potential to lead on co-creating missions and moonshots towards the most important societal challenges of our time.
Emilia-Romagna is a region famous for its manufacturing industry, with a long-standing tradition of automotive manufacturing – home to Ferrari and Maserati – an industry which expects to find the green transition perilous, as policies are moving to embrace electric vehicles and shift away from the internal combustion engine. At the same time, industrial air pollution is impacting the lives of citizens in the region, and public transport faces its own challenges around capacity in the midst of coronavirus. The idea of developing a mission around mobility, and taking up IIPP’s mission-oriented innovation approach to climate change challenges, is addressed in this position paper, which is the first to be developed as part of this collaborative project.
In Emilia-Romagna, the IIPP team is working closely with the Fondazione Innovazione Urbana as well as ART-ER to develop a mission in support of regional change. A close bond is being developed with many sectors and actors in the region. IIPP founder and Director Professor Mariana Mazzucato was a guest at the recent Emilia-Romagna Research to Business Live, where she spoke with Vice President Elly Schlein and Enrico Giovannini, an economist, former Minister and member of the Club of Rome, about the need for innovative economic approaches to the role of the ‘entrepreneurial state’ in the post-COVID green economic renewal.
It was also fantastic to welcome Elly Schlein as a guest at our recent COVID-19 webinar series, to join London Camden Councillor Georgia Gould to discuss ‘Rebuilding from the Bottom Up’. Her insights into the role of the public sector to access the rapidly changing needs of different social groups. In particular, Elly was clear on the role to be played by mobility - that access to healthcare cannot depend on how far a citizen lives from a big city like Bologna, and that ‘people in the mountains should have the same rights to access good healthcare as in the city’. We are working at IIPP with regional and national governments from across the world on ‘Building Back Better’ – creating a more inclusive, innovation-led economy after the COVID-19 crisis, including with Camden in London, Greater Manchester, the Biscay Government, the Vatican, South Africa, and many more.
Watch Rebuilding from the Bottom Up
This project is funded by EIT Climate-KIC