Italy urgently needs social and economic innovation. The South has an even more pressing need.
It is now common knowledge that one of the biggest difficulties that young people with innovative ideas and projects encounter in the process of realizing their intuitions is the lack of work spaces, contacts and relationships with people who share the same skills and experiences, the possibility of communicating with the network of companies already operating on the market, as well as, of course, capital to face the costs inherent in every startup.
It is now common knowledge that one of the biggest difficulties that young people with innovative ideas and projects encounter in the process of realizing their intuitions is the lack of work spaces, contacts and relationships with people who share the same skills and experiences, the possibility of communicating with the network of companies already operating on the market, as well as, of course, capital to face the costs inherent in every startup.
Today we have new and revolutionary tools to encourage contacts and the exchange of skills (social networks), develop products collectively (crowdsourcing) and obtain financing through non-traditional channels (crowdfunding). Yet, sometimes, these tools risk excessively virtualizing the knowledge of the protagonists of innovation - who also require physical exchanges, direct knowledge, workplaces real to share, of incubators of ideas and relationships (as well as of businesses) - weakening their effectiveness.
Starting from these simple premises, but also from a careful analysis of the situation facing a part of the country, Southern Italy, we thought of giving life to an initiative that brings together ideas, skills, innovative tools and above all young and very young people who want to (r)innovate the South.
We have established a joint-stock company (with 70 founders, professionals, creatives, small and medium-sized enterprises, researchers, teachers, innovators, young graduates) whose main corporate name is innovation in the sense of such as the ability, ability, strength to understand, analyze, address and resolve socio-environmental problems and improve the quality of life, realizing product or process innovations, the impact of which primarily benefits the community rather than the individual promoters or communities of reference.
A spa, HUBspa, with three peculiar and innovative characteristics:
- crowdfunding: 200,000 euros of share capital with equal shares for each partner;
- crowdsourcing: each member has specialist skills in different sectors; in most cases he does another job with passion, dedication and success, but he wants to make a contribution to the innovation of Southern Italy, by networking, making his knowledge available, his energy for change which, evidently, could only become critical mass together with others;
- the name, HUB, which could tell in one word what we want to do; HUB as an attractor, multiplier of ideas, resources, desire to do things together.
To overcome excessive virtualization we also wanted a physical space where you can look each other in the eye, team up, experiment with ways of working and living together, doing research and experimentation: we have chosen an ancient 16th century building where we are setting up hundreds of square meters with fast internet, laboratories, workstations.
it wants to be a model of new entrepreneurship, with a pragmatic attitude towards the market, which places environmental sustainability and respect for future generations at the foundation of every product, service, methodology, process or, more generally, system it intends to propose.
Only in this way, we believe, will man and nature be able to direct technology and profit, and prevent the opposite from happening.
Our HUB therefore wants to be an incubator of ideas and hubbers (professionals, researchers, creatives, entrepreneurs, innovators, proponents, associations and businesses, etc.) who work for the improvement of the social and economic context in which they operate, and who experiment with forms of completely unprecedented in the South.
which arises from an innovation laboratory that has already been underway for some time, and which brings together a vast network of national and international relationships, as well as individual and collective experiences, to make others, new and unimaginable today, germinate in these difficult territories.
HUBspa was born in one of the most polluted areas with the highest criminal density in Italy, in the province north of Naples and south of Caserta, in Giugliano in Campania, third city in Campania, second metropolitan area in Italy after Milan and eighth in Europe, with approximately 5,000,000 inhabitants and the highest population density (2.63 inhabitants/km, source CENSIS).
HUBspa's challenge is to combine and germinate the principles inspired by social innovation, al coworking and to entrepreneurship financed from below, with the indispensable principles of legality and responsibility which in the South must be an inalienable prerequisite for any public or private activity.
The project has the ambition of helping to bring the South out of the cultural, social and economic stagnation to which, for too long, it seems to have been accustomed and to internationalize its best products and ideas.
We ask all the innovators, the organizations that are inspired by the same principles, the other Italian incubators for help, because we too want to be able to bet on the smart cities, to promote a better quality of life, but also on those we have defined smart district, the provinces, the places on the margins of large metropolitan areas and on smart buildings, to regenerate and redesign buildings while also thinking about new forms of coexistence in a difficult and complex reality with a thousand problems.
We are investing economic and human resources in a difficult economic moment and in an area far from the great cultural and social transformations that are shaking the North of the country; HUBspa is a sign that we are here too, that the South is vigilant and wants to contribute to the relaunch of Italy. We are certain that together with all of you, when the crisis is over, we will be ahead of those who didn't believe in us.
Giugliano in Campania, 10 February 2013
FRANCESCO RUSSO and ARMANDO DI NARDO