Responsible Innovators Award
About this good practice
The Emilia-Romagna Region has promoted an initiative, called Responsible Innovators Award, to reward significant experiences about sustainable development including the social responsibility and circular economy in the regional territory by different categories of subjects including enterprises. The objective is to promote good practices, to encourage processes of replicability of experiences.
The innovation experiences selected must contribute to the achievement of the objectives of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, through an integrated vision of sustainability in terms of innovation of processes and products.
The award is aimed at different categories of participants including the companies:
-with up to 20 employees
-with up to 250 employees
-over 250 employees.
There are prizes for each category of subjects and special mentions are also provided for the most original projects and consistent with the objectives of the 2030 Agenda.
The category of Covid-19 Resilience award has been added in the 2020 edition to reward the experiences able to face the Covid-19 emergency.
In this edition the prizes for each category of participants were:
-the Responsible Innovators Award
-the covid-19 resilience award
-other awards(eg:Ged award).
The edition 2020 has included a first phase in which good practices are identified, rewarded and published in a report. In a second phase the regional administration gave some grants for the development of the projects that participated.
Resources needed
In the edition 2020 the regional fund for the development and implementation of the projects was € 90,000.00 , of which 50,000 for private entities. For each beneficiary the maximum amount of the contribution could not exceed € 5,000.00.
Evidence of success
It can be considered a successful experience by examining the growing number of candidate projects and awards awarded. In the first edition, 43 projects were nominated and the Region awarded 10 projects and 10 special mentions to good practice developed, while in the edition 2020 there were 145 project applications and 38 prizes were awarded.
In the 2020 report there are experiences of companies that have developed projects about the circular economy and the COVID19 resilience capacity.
Potential for learning or transfer
The responsible innovators award not only gives a prize to the most deserving projects, but also promotes the visibility of good practices in the area. This second aspect also reinforces the educational value of this experience, which becomes replicable and imitable for countless contexts.
In the edition 2020, the initiative has allowed to bring out worthy and replicable experiences related to circular economy or covid 19 resilience. By way of example, one of these is the experience of Staff Jersey, company belonging to the textile sector, has presented a project to convert its production to face the environmental impact due to the intensive use of masks due to the covid-19 epidemic. Thanks to research activities they want to develop a new generation of masks made with environmentally friendly and recycled materials that allows a reduction of environmental impact.