Competing for Naples – plenty of problems, plenty solutions (submitted by Euclid Network)

By Lucas Fülling

In early 2011 Euclid Network launched its second international social innovation competition – Naples 2.0 –, this time with a completely new focus. The idea of the competition was not to reward existing initiatives but use social innovation as a tool that can be applied to concrete problems in one of the most challenging environments of Europe: Naples to find new ideas to solve those problems. We wanted to drift away from definitions of the concept of social innovation but move forward and see how people can use their creative potential to come up with innovative and sustainable ideas to bring along social change.

Together with our partners UniCredit Foundation and Project Ahead we were exploring particular challenges in Naples where state and market had little success in solving them. They ranged from the use of public assets, to unsustainable business models of civil society organisations, to new methodologies for social problems, as for example the integration of Roma. The challenges were concrete but there was no prescription of how to solve the challenge. This led to a very diversified portfolio of solutions, from ‘Scamping’ – Camping with the Roma in Scampia (a very deprived district of Naples) to sustainable tourism in a confiscated Camorra (Naples’ Mafia).

© Euclid Network

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CC - Image courtesy of Robert Voors from Flickr