Open Incet – Open Innovation Center Turin, in collaboration with the Giacomo Brodolini Foundation and its partners, thanks to the contribution of Compagnia di San Paolo, promote a program aimed at supporting the evolution of the Third Sector towards sustainable social innovation models : the Course on Competences for Social Innovation.

The objective is twofold, on the one hand creating a new professional figure, the Chief Social Innovation Officer (CSIO), on the other hand learning from the experiences and needs of the Third Sector to contribute to increase their impact through the construction of new competences and organization skills. It is necessary for the Third Sector too to invest in human capital to generate new ideas and possible applications of new technologies, to overcome management difficulties and to progress in the evolution towards sustainable social innovation models.

The program provides a joint training of a selected group of young talents from the territory together with the representatives of Third Sector organizations that want to experiment with models of social innovation service; the combination of a young talent with one of the organizations participating in the program to co-design these new models together; the accompaniment of these innovations so that they “take root” within the host organizations; the creation of a community of social innovators that can feed a virtuous circuit of projects on the territory. Specifically, the program intends to:

• define and train a new professional figure, the Chief Social Innovation Officer (CSIO), who can work on changing the models of the third sector “from within”;
• to facilitate the meeting between this new professional figure and local organizations that intend to innovate their business and service models; support the work of the first CSIO group through mentoring and organizing “peer learning” moments;
• to connect the CSIO group to the international circuit of social innovation to accelerate learning and the construction of a network of support and exchange.The program is aimed at:

  – young people aged between 23 and 35 years, interested in working in the Third Sector or in starting their own entrepreneurial activity in the field of social innovation;

  – various types of Third Sector organizations (Associations, Cooperatives, Consortia, Social Enterprises, etc.) that intend to start an innovation path that will lead them to experiment with new business and service models and to the application of new technologies.

  The course will start with a first part of classroom training, which will have an estimated duration of 160h in three months. The 60 individual participants and 30 representatives of the organizations involved will participate in the training. Participants will be provided with training aimed at understanding social innovation processes intended as a response to the need to satisfy emerging social needs with economically sustainable models, and at understanding the levers of organizational change. The training will have an experiential slant, to encourage active participation and learning based on the study of cases, visits, witnesses, simulations, group work, project work and workshops.

  The classroom training part will be followed a 3 months period of project work.At the end of this phase, through a process of evaluation (in two phases), conducted by the project team with the support of the mentors, the 5 most mature solutions will be identified to continue with a path of “accompaniment to growth”, which will consist of activities of :• support for focusing on the service and / or business model;• support in the preparation of a feasibility study that integrates all the dimensions (organizational, market, technological and economic) necessary for growth;• scouting for funding opportunities and supporting the drafting of proposals for candidates;• meeting with potential investors and lenders and supporting the investment / financing request.