Ca' Foscari Research Hub for Global Challenges

Social Innovation

Research Institute for Social Innovation

Public governance, welfare and social innovation

Addressing social exclusion, discrimination and various forms of inequalities is a crucial challenge for the future of Europe and its citizens. The understanding of rapidly changing multicultural and multilingual societies requires a cross-disciplinary approach, spanning across the social sciences and humanities, and including law and ICT, to address issues such as gender equity and diversity, access to education, accessibility and disability rights, health and social welfare, labour markets, active ageing, demographic change, family and children protection, consumer protection, and sustainable company law.
Research on these themes benefits from innovative tools such as social innovation, a trans-disciplinary concept increasingly applied  to a range of fields with the ultimate goal of removing barriers to participation in society, reducing inequalities, and promoting integration, inclusion and justice and healthcare by means of well designed public policies.

Keywords

Accessibility for inclusion, Active ageing and demographic change, Active citizenship, Agent-based models, Behavioural economics, Collective identities, Decision sciences, Education policy, Gender equality, Health economics, Inclusion and fairness, Inequalities, Integration, Intercultural relations, Long term care, Policy evaluation, Protection of rights, Smart cities and communities, Social innovation, Translation studies, Transnational history, User-driven innovation, Well-being

Join the Research Institute 

Coordinator

Francesco Moscone

Research facilitators

Fulvio Grassadonio
Elena Grandi

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High-impact and award-winning projects

Families_Share: bottom-up solutions to work/life balance

Families_Share offers a bottom-up solution to work/life balance by supporting families with childcare, parenting advice and after-school activities. The project is developed in 6 Pilot Cities in 4 countries and involves parents of children aged 3-11 that live in the same neighbourhoods in the 6 Pilot cities (Bologna, Gyor, Kortrijk, Thessaloniki, Trento, Venice). Besides the initial pilot cities, Families_Share application is also being used by Families in Rome, Pescara. In addition, Families_Share application has been adopted by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice as a way to support the personnel families taking care of their children in the emergency situation due to Covid-19.

Project website / EU Cordis database
Researcher: Agostino Cortesi
Duration: 01/01/2018 - 31/10/2020
Funding: Horizon 2020 Industrial Leadership: Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

SIGN-HUb: Preserving European Deaf Signing Communities

The project SIGN‐HUB ‐ Preserving, Researching and Fostering the Linguistic, Historical and Cultural Heritage of European Deaf Signing Communities with an Integral Resource ‐ aims to provide the first comprehensive response to the societal and scientific challenge resulting from generalized neglect of the cultural and linguistic identity of signing Deaf communities in Europe.
This Horizon 2020 project will provide an innovative and inclusive resource hub for the linguistic, historical and cultural documentation of the Deaf communities' heritage and for sign language assessment in clinical intervention and school settings.
To this end, it will create an open state‐of‐the‐art digital platform with customized accessible interfaces.

Project website / EU Cordis database
Researcher: Chiara Branchini
Duration: 01/04/2016 - 30/04/2020
Funding: Horizon 2020 Societal Challenges - Europe In A Changing World

Making the Most of Social Science to Build Better Policies - Knowledge for Use

Knowledge For Use (K4U) is an ERC Advanced grant hosted by the University of Durham, involving Ca' Foscari researchers.
The project will construct a radically new picture of how to use social science to build better social policies and it will launch an entire new field in philosophy: the philosophy of social technology.
K4U will provide not just a theoretical but a practical understanding‐ for users: intelligible and practically helpful to those who need to estimate and balance the effectiveness, the evidence, the chances of success, the costs, the benefits, the winners and losers, and the social, moral, political and cultural acceptability of proposed policies.

Project website / EU Cordis database
Researcher: Eleonora Montuschi
Duration: 01/11/2015 - 30/10/2020
Funding: European Research Council