On the path carved out by the past co-creative meetings, the event “Data Driven Economy and Territorial Growth”, that took place from the 5th to the 7th of September, tried to give the possibility to the partners not only to know, but also to practice what open and social innovation is in Trentino.   

During the co-creative workshops, partners and stakeholders shared ideas and potential solutions in order to improve the awareness of the importance of a data culture in current business and research, trying to identify some actions to strengthen the collaboration between data providers (mainly the public administration) and data users (enterprises, research centers, citizens etc.).

The debates, the study visits and the selection of the stakeholders were designed with a particular focus on the framework delimited by the experience of the Trentino innovation ecosystem, on one side, and the partners’ specific interests, on the other, trying constantly to stress the intersections between these two areas.

The visits to a Science Museum (MUSE), a research foundation (FBK) a european digital innovation and entrepreneurial education organisation (EIT Digital), a development agency (Trentino Sviluppo), and a museum devoted to a language minority (Mocheno Cultural Institute) were not simple walks through rooms and machines, but an attempt to absorb the spirit of those places, their genius loci, interacting with the actors that “practise” them as well as using those spaces as venues for the co-creative workshops and inviting other local stakeholders to enrich these contexts with their experiences.

For the Trentino team, this event represented the possibility to collect many suggestions, from very different point of view, useful for the creation of an Action Plan aimed to develop and support the data driven economy of the territory. It was also the possibility to see the territory through the eyes of the other partners, moving the point of view from a local to a european frame, realising that there is still a lot of work to do but the path is the right one.


Photo credit: Michaela Gil