Here is this month’s interviewee: Francesco Samorè, secretary general of Fondazione Giannino Bassetti, Milan.
Fondazione Giannino Bassetti (FGB) has passed the 30-year mark: how, from your unique perspective, has the narrative of the concept of innovation in Italy changed?
Our mission has remained consistent: to promote responsible innovation, urging in all stakeholders (i.e., in civil society, business, places of knowledge, and institutions) an awareness that a plus of knowledge, when it meets a plus of implementation power, can transform society and in some cases make history. In 1994, the public discourse was all about the “mystique of innovation,” almost like a positivist reminiscence about “magnificent fates and progress.” Today, society debates the implications of life sciences or artificial intelligence and seems to grasp more widely the even controversial implications of powerful innovations. Hence the incorporation, even at the European level, of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in seven-year research and innovation funding programs such as Horizon Europe. By paradox, we could say that the need for accountability in innovation today is manifest because of what Paul Ricoeur called “bulimia of means, atrophy of ends”.
The role of foundations as productive actors within societies is the result of their changed conception: from mere spaces of preservation to environments of design and direct interaction with the territory and communities: how has FGB been able to renew itself in this sense?
Giannino Bassetti was a textile industrialist, an innovator in interwar and then after-War recovery in Italy (e.g., his company invented the colored bed-sheets and those with the elastic bends), whose relationship with the territory has been admirably studied by Alessandro Pizzorno in his book “Community and Rationalization,” i.e., the analysis of Company Town (Rescaldina), where the company operated. In contrast, our current president Piero, who thought up the foundation, has been a politician and institution man all his life: alderman, first president of Lombardy, deputy, president of IPALMO (to which we owe the first national legislation on development cooperation) and member of international fora such as the Trilateral commission, then again architect of reforms in the chambers of commerce… let’s say that static paradigms have never existed in the mind of Piero Bassetti, who was inclined to transcend the institutions he himself went through or (in the case of the Regions) helped to create. The Bassettian insight is that innovation contains power, but that the places where it manifests itself are constantly changing and must be “chased” if we are to direct it to the public good. This is why intermediate bodies, business associations and civil society organizations themselves carry responsibility as the protagonists of innovation. For example, the irruption of digital into traditional manufacturing, I am thinking of makers, has produced a traumatic twist for those who practiced classical modes of production. As a foundation, together with craft associations and institutions (from the Triennale to the Polytechnic, from the Lombardy Region to the City of Milan) we invented, more than a decade ago, international field-missions and exchanges to “digest” technology and direct it toward desirable ends.
The concept of Accountability is strongly connoted from the point of view of values and culture: how does FGB manage to enter into dialogue with the international actors with whom it collaborates, the latter characterized by different interpretations of what “Accountability” is?
As I mentioned earlier, Europe has thematized Responsibility for Innovation (RRI) by making it the subject of cross-cutting funding: projects whose common denominator has been a “Bottom-Up” conception of responsibility, aimed at involving citizens in the design of innovative policies at all levels, i.e., also in the strategic plans of cities and regions, through public consultations, consensus conferences, deliberative methods, citizens jury. Our foundation has established itself in this terrain, coordinating a number of projects, the main one of which, currently underway, is called REINFORCING: it is the European central hub of Open and Responsible Research and Innovation and works as a flywheel for other “cascading” projects in European territories that want to go down this path. In my view it is an antidote to the technocratic view of innovation and its risks to democracy, all the more so in the aftermath of the pandemic and the so-called “expert knowledge crisis.”
From the FGB perspective, what scares private companies the most when you talk to them about “Innovation and Research” and, then, “Responsible Innovation” and why?
If companies have not been scared off by the ESG paradigm, or impact investing, they will not be scared off by responsible innovation! All jokes aside, it is in everyone’s interest to “bring to the table” companies, civil society, institutions, and universities, that is, the quadruple helix involved in all such projects.
The classical paradigm of innovation has been enriched by other models including Social Innovation, Frugal Innovation, etc. What might be, to date, the most “contemporary” definition of innovation?
According to Bassetti Foundation, innovation is the “realization of the improbable”; certainly in recent years the barrier between techno-scientific and social innovation has fallen. Today, reflection on innovation is a reflection on power. That is, we must ask ourselves: to what knowledge does power go? The stage we have reached, including in terms of challenges to social cohesion-which does not seem to be safeguarded by the albeit astounding endowment of techno-scientific innovations demands the utmost in responsible innovation in the political dimension as well.
Could you recommend a book and a film to explore the concept of innovation or grasp some original aspects of it?
I would recommend the classic animated film “The Sword in the Rock,” for many reasons, but which I summarize in the final scene: the little Wart, after his “training journey” under the wing of wizard Merlin, has pulled out of the rock the sword that no knight could pull out: he has become king, but we see him alone in an immense hall, on a throne too big for him, with the crooked crown also too wide cast on his head. I see there the loneliness of the powerful man who becomes one in spite of himself, and seeks help in handling the responsibility that history has handed him.
As a book I would like to cite Carl Schmidt’s Dialogues on Power, from which widely used expressions have been derived, including “antechamber of power.” Well, in the passage in which the author states, “and to the powerless I would say: don’t think you are good just because you have no power,” one grasps the sense of collective responsibility that each of us has, even in the face of the temptation of delegation or populist recrimination. No one can say “…others decide on this anyway” unless they want to deliver power into the hands of a few, without control. Exactly as happens with big tech today.
