Lessons Learned under Lockdown in the Region of Emilia Romagna

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Lessons Learned under Lockdown in the Region of Emilia Romagna

In the Region of Emilia-Romagna in Italy, their transformative experiment plans to focus first and foremost on the RRI key of governance and the RRI dimension of inclusivity. The partners there plan to intend to include RRI dimensions in their Smart Specialisation Strategy (S3) to make the territory more anticipative, reflective, and responsive to public needs, among other things. Their transformative experiment will also make use of Public Engagement, a key of RRI, to involve a broader cross-section of society. That is to say, they will engage not only with clusters, higher education, and industry, but also with civil society and the non-profit sector. Additionally, they plan to harness Science Education to provide new frameworks for involving more educational institutions and those who work directly with Science Education.

The territorial partners in Emilia-Romagna started their co-creation activities with a conference on the 28th of January focusing on RRI and the social impacts of R&I policies. This activated the entire regional cluster on in an event titled “Responsible Research and social impact: an idea of a long path”.

Their subsequent plan was to organise participatory workshops around the region to inspire public engagement. On the 11th of March though, all activities were stopped in order to re-calibrate and they have instead started analysing how to engage the public in online participatory processes by means of various online tools.

Besides having to adapt by starting to think about moving activities online, the partners have also made an important pivot in the actors they choose to focus on. Early on, they planned to focus on the creative and cultural industries, health actors, and science education actors. Since March, however, they have considered the social innovation approach to be a more interesting policy approach to focus on.


Article written by Giacomo Frisanco – EURADA.

Giacomo joined EURADA in 2019 as Project and Communication officer. He deals with Communication, Dissemination, and Exploitation task for both Interreg Europe and Horizon 2020 projects.

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