This paper investigates how public sector institutions change their form and approach to achieve a socially innovative urban governance. The “Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics” (MONUM) in Boston, Massachusetts (USA) proves a representative case of innovation in the public sector. As a new type of government agency, it is essentially an open innovation lab dedicated to innovative evidence-based policymaking. Following a new dynamic organizational pattern in urban governance, MONUM is conducive to project-oriented social innovation practices and horizontal multi-sectoral collaboration among the three societal sectors: public, private, and civil. Its results suggest that first, the peculiarity of MONUM lies in its hybrid and boundary-blurring nature. Second, new institutional forms that experiment with urban governance can rely on multi-sectoral collaboration. Third, MONUM has experimented with a systemic approach to social innovation following the “design thinking theory.” The MONUM case can contribute to the current debate in Europe on the need to harmonize EU policies for an effective social inclusion by promoting the application of the place-sensitive approach.
The paper proposes that the issue related to an emerging inequality in advanced democracies due to the knowledge-based economy is partially argued in literature. Despite the political approaches traditionally grounded on the opposition of equality-oriented capitalism to efficiency-oriented capitalism, the shocks of technology produce results that tend to skew towards income and wealth polarization. The ongoing results of the new technologically driven economy reveal an increasing need for alternative ways to ensure an equitable distribution of the competitive advantages among the whole population. To strive against this polarization, the authors illustrated an example of multi-sectoral communitybased institution, which can collaborate to construct economic democracy by empowering the civil society with the decision-making power in the economic sphere. The study stands out from the existing empirical studies by taking the Boston ujima Project (BuP) as an analytical framework with the aim of looking at the extent to which a place-based and multi-stakeholder innovation ecosystem promotes economic democratization and helps to address socioeconomic inequality. The paper defines an analytical tool based on a comparison of literature review and the organizational structure of BuP. The literature review allows to look into the economic impact of social innovation, focusing on the economic democratization process and 'system thinking' embedded in social innovation. Then, the BuP grounded in the systematization of literature review is described as an innovation ecosystem based on the multi-stakeholder collaborative mechanism, a novel ecosystem-based innovation approach to address socioeconomic inequality. It is found that by incorporating 'ecosystem' into social innovation process, the BuP has created a holistic, integrated approach that joins place, capital and relationships to address socioeconomic inequality.
The widening of regional disparities remains a critical concern in the political and academic debate at global scale. Given the scope of the phenomenon, recent evidence indicates how growing regional divergences are increasingly jeopardizing social cohesion, fueling inequalities even within regions. The dichotomy between less developed and core regions seems to lose the centrality in the political agenda. An example is provided by the new geography of knowledge that is giving rise to a complex divergence that rests also on the different internal regional contexts' conditions. Regions are exposed to multidimensional shocks and stresses questioning territories' resilience and their ability to manage the transition process. The paper argues that regions need to enhance their resilience to transition-induced shock (dynamics) understanding this internal complex divergence. The paper introduces the multiscale approach as a dynamic factor in the policy-making process to capture the sensitiveness of places to adaptation, resilience-oriented performance, and the disruption of path dependency -which may be considered as the main obstacle for an equitable distribution of competitive advantage derived from innovation -and lead the post-carbon transition required by the European Green Deal. The analysis conducted rests on the conceptual framework of the Open Access Toolkit conceived for the TREnD Research Project funded by the Horizon 2020 Program. The conceptual framework adopted, underpinned by sets of indicators that couple context conditions with innovation performance, can be used to explore and identify in further studies EU settings that are more exposed to systemic risks associated with the transition process.
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