The social impact of MUSA: the vision of Prof. Luisa Zecca

The event with MUSA – The paths of sustainable innovation on December 3rd and 4th is approaching, and the program for the first day will kick off with three parallel sessions dedicated to the ecosystem’s main work axes. Today we delve into one of these three themes: social innovation, which is the focus of the session coordinated by Professor Luisa Zecca, Full Professor in the Department of Human Sciences at the University of Milan-Bicocca.

In view of the event, the professor guides us through the models born within MUSA that have generated the greatest impact in the territories, explaining how to communicate the value of social innovation to new investors, what role collaborations between universities, institutions, and communities have played, and which priorities emerge for the next development cycle.

Which social innovation models born within MUSA have shown the greatest impact on local communities?

The emerging models integrate consolidated principles of social innovation: they are contextualized (place-based), collaborative (multi-stakeholder), enabling (capability-oriented), and experimental (living lab). This mix has generated public value in the most vulnerable territories and laid the groundwork for more stable social infrastructures. They produced tangible short-term effects right from the start, alongside the development of guidelines, methodologies, and new datasets with a more structural prospective impact. Their effectiveness stems from adopting approaches recognized as particularly suitable for complex urban contexts: co-production, place-based innovation, collaborative ecosystems, and socio-technical living labs. Territorial living labs represented one of the most significant elements: public, institutional, or community spaces are transformed into permanent laboratories capable of integrating experimentation, civic participation, and joint knowledge production. Within this framework, the combination of on-field data collection, training activities, and community involvement initiatives generated forms of knowledge co-production between universities, local services, schools, and families, giving rise to distributed learning ecosystems consistent with what is defined as place-based social innovation. In parallel, the adoption of data-driven social innovation models allowed for the analysis of complex social phenomena—such as inequalities, vulnerabilities, or educational needs—on multiple levels (macro, meso, micro), integrating databases, territorial networks, and co-design processes. This approach reflects the logic of joined-up governance, where institutional, scientific, and community actors collaborate to address social problems that cannot be solved by single subjects. A third trajectory concerns innovations oriented towards the capability approach, which enhances the capacity of individuals and communities to access resources, develop skills, and expand their margin of autonomy. In this sense, the developed models do not merely provide services but seek to consolidate individual and collective capabilities, aligning with the concept of capability expansion on equity and social cohesion. Finally, participatory models aimed at young people utilized youth participatory action research (YPAR) methodologies, recognized for their impact in terms of engagement, agency, and the promotion of civic sense. Through narration, orientation, and co-design activities, these pathways contributed to strengthening youth leadership in processes of social and urban transformation.

At a time when MUSA wants to open up to new investors, how can the concrete value of social innovation, which is often less immediately measurable, be communicated?

Social innovation is a broad and heterogeneous field, lacking a univocal definition and characterized by marked multidisciplinarity. It stems from the intersection of sociology, public policy, management, pedagogy, community psychology, urban studies, social entrepreneurship, and other disciplines, each with its own methods and priorities. The challenge is therefore to build transdisciplinary approaches capable of integrating basic research and transformative research, individual activation, interprofessional collaboration, and relations between organizations. The impacts produced on cohesion, capacity building, empowerment, social capital, community well-being, and institutional changes are qualitative, multidimensional, and often systemic. These effects are diffuse, not concentrated on a single actor, and require longitudinal approaches and qualitative or mixed methods. Measurement cannot be reduced to a universal set of indicators, as there is no dominant paradigm. For this reason, impact communication must combine storytelling, evidence-based communication, and public engagement. On the one hand, it is necessary to make the social, scientific, and territorial value visible through accessible narratives; on the other hand, it is essential to support these narratives with evidence: data, surveys, observatories, pre-post evaluations, and structured databases. The most effective communication strategy is multimodal: it integrates podcasts, videos, audiovisual products, exhibitions, public events, and participatory forms of co-narration, where the community actively contributes to the account of the impact. By combining different languages, data, experiences, images, stories, and participatory practices, one can communicate not only what MUSA does but the public value it generates for society and the territories.

What has been the role of collaboration between universities, institutions, and the territory in generating new social services or solutions?

Collaboration between universities, institutions, and the territory has been the enabling condition that allowed for the birth of new social services and solutions. Every innovation has emerged from multi-actor co-design processes that involved academic bodies, public administrations, service networks, third sector organizations, schools, businesses, and local communities. This cooperation allowed research to be translated into concrete interventions, rooted in the territories and responsive to the real needs of complex urban contexts. The synergy between institutional, professional, and community levels has made it possible to address issues such as vulnerability, social justice, inclusion, educational guidance, health, and environmental sustainability according to a concretely intersectoral approach. Collaboration has served three fundamental functions: translating scientific knowledge into operational services and solutions, rooting the interventions in the territories through stable relationships, and building the conditions to ensure sustainability and the possibility of continuity beyond the duration of the projects. In MUSA, therefore, cooperation does not represent a methodological strategy among others, but the generative infrastructure upon which the very possibility of creating lasting social impact depends.

What priorities do you see for MUSA’s next development cycle in the social and educational spheres?

The priorities are strictly connected to the analysis we will be able to produce from now on regarding the critical issues encountered. MUSA’s critical issues for social innovation are typical of large multi-actor innovation ecosystems, in complex contexts with high social and institutional density. These are structural tensions that emerge when universities, institutions, businesses, and the territory jointly innovate. Points of attention are the administrative and procedural capacity of the system. The process of generating links between actors requires long lead times, a phase of understanding the resources and constraints of each entity, and sharing languages before being able to move on to constructing “manageable” specific common objectives, and then, secondly, a strong coordination effort. The “operational interdependence” between nodes of the system involves high coordination costs and a slower capacity for intervention, while research proceeds. The complexity of inter-institutional governance has important repercussions on the alignment capacity, which increases as actors, goals, and interdependencies increase. The transition from the “prototype,” or pilot study, to systemic change requires the capacity to modify the values, norms, standards, procedures, and organizational conditions of all actors involved. To return to your question, future priorities involve a reflection on strategies for consolidating models, protocols, and tools to allow solutions, from labs to social models, to be tested in analogous contexts, adapted, and institutionalized. This process corresponds to the embedding phase of social innovation, where solutions must be incorporated into institutional routines. Essentially, we are in the phase where we must, first and foremost, strengthen and enhance co-governance capacity and perhaps devise new ones.

In view of the awards ceremony on December 4th, what significance do opportunities like poster awards have for students and researchers?

Participation in poster sessions, conferences, workshops, and exhibitions is a typical way to share knowledge, give visibility to research, achieve professional legitimization, facilitate discussion, and networking, and it can also have an educational value. The possibility of being awarded for these contributions can signal to participants that the scientific community recognizes the quality and relevance of their research, represented through a certain specific type of scientific communication, but I believe the main value is the dissemination of knowledge through direct encounters between research groups and actors who participated in the realization of the interventions and intervention-research projects. For the rest, there are interesting studies that highlight the limits of awarding prizes, such as aesthetic bias or evaluation biases, and much will depend on the process of constructing criteria and indicators, as well as the type of review, consistent with the objectives, project methodologies, and especially the general scope of the project, which is to generate social transformations with ameliorative goals, in line with Agenda 2030, where research, intervention, and policy models are present and as integrated and integrable as possible.