“Slow Dating for Innovation”With Giuseppe De Nicola, Director of the Ampioraggio Foundation
With the Jazz'inn format, you were the first to launch the concept of slow dating. How did this idea come about? "Jazz'Inn was born to save a Jazz Festival in 2017 in Pietrelcina. To save this Jazz Festival we came up with a dating format using the World Café methodology, thus based on working tables away from big cities, side by side with convivial moments. At the end of the first edition we discovered that having the participants stay for 24-48 hours, moving them from the sort of comfort zone that only allowed them to exchange a few notes, allowed them to be protagonists and put them in a position to confront each other and participate actively. This first edition brought out a whole series of needs, and an initiative born for other purposes turned out to be a perfect model of Open Innovation, an occasion in which people had a way to confront each other and overcome the barriers typical of events on startups and innovation innovation. The first collaborations and synergies began to emerge at that point. That's when we coined the term "Slow Dating for Innovation." What is the current focus of the foundation? Last year, in September, after seven years of activity we have obtained legal recognition as a participatory foundation and research organization from the Ministry this led us on the one hand to make a kind of stocktaking of what we have done in these years and on the other hand also to figure out what is the way forward. As a foundation we have focused on five thematic areas: hamlets and inland areas, as far as their regeneration is concerned; open innovation, with the goal of helping companies meet innovation; capacity building and the topic of skills training; Smart City and Smart Citizen,…
