GSI Centre
Governance & Social Innovation

The Centre and its mission

With unprecedented rapidity, in recent years we are witnessing epochal changes strongly impacting society, organizations, and everyone's life. While acknowledging positive effects for many, there are worrying aspects such as increasing inequalities, both in terms of income and health, or increasing fragility of different population groups. Welfare policies and systems seem to be failing to meet these new challenges. Solutions then can only be found in a logic of innovation, and specifically Social Innovation.

Public agencies and organizations are now forced to change roles. If in the past these have seen themselves transformed from service providers (even monopolistic) to regulators of services, today they must take on additional and different Governance roles, as activators, facilitators, and promoters of innovation.  In this complex context, the Ca’ Foscari University has equipped itself with an additional tool to further expand activity in the field beyond research and education: the Governance & Social Innovation Center (GSI) established at Fondazione Università Ca’ Foscari. In addition to developing its own technical assistance projects, the GSI plays an important role in providing operational support and project management to both training and research facilities. 

Goals and areas of intervention

The Governance & Social Innovation Centre is a project by Fondazione Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia aimed at the strengthening and enhancement of the competencies acquired over years of cooperation with relevant institutions a local, national and international level

The Center's mission is to foster innovation processes in social work in a service governance logic that includes all stakeholders. 

The main areas of intervention of the Governance & Social Innovation Center - GSI are the promotion and design of innovative actions of applied research, technical assistance and/or consulting aimed at Public Administration, intermediary representative organizations and businesses to support governance and social innovation processes.

Goals, means and aims of the GSI Centre are: 

  • the promotion and design of innovative actions of applied research, technical assistance and/or consulting aimed at the Public Administration, intermediary representative organizations and businesses to support the governance of social innovation processes;
  • the coordination, in rapporto con l’Ufficio Ricerca di Ateneo, i Dipartimenti, i gruppi inter-dipartimentali e gli altri centri di Ateneo, delle iniziative di ricerca, assistenza tecnica, consulenza riferibili alle aree di interesse del GSI;
  • the monitoring and reporting of projects financed from regional, national, European funds;
  • support to Departments in the management of complex projects in which applied research and/or consulting activities are involved
  • Dissemination of research results and best practices through conferences and events and specific training activities.