Purpose:

The municipality launched the Diversity Lab programme to explore the advantages of cultural diversity, with reference to new plural economies and open innovation processes.

An intercultural society needs to enhance and bring out its potential in relation to new plural economies and innovation processes.

The Diversity Lab was thus created in response to this need, as a place for social innovation, to offer opportunities for confrontation, as well as tools for interpreting the different needs that an intercultural society generates, both for companies and businesses in the area, and for the city's collaborative spaces.

Stimulus/Rationale:

The programme, implemented by the Foundation Mondinsieme, aims to disseminate a renewed vision on Diversity Management, able to effectively combine inclusion and valorisation efforts (overcoming its simple reparative function).

Its activities follow two main lines:

• Diversity Management, if they take place within individual organisational contexts.
• Diversity Marketing, if they bring together different actors to offer diverse products and services in response to different needs.

Process:

A key strategy to reach this goal consists in integrating Diversity Management and Diversity Marketing strategies.

These strategies offer different local actors (businesses and commercial organisations, start-ups, public institutions, collaborative spaces etc.) both customised training opportunities, as well as the possibility of participating in awareness-raising events and collaborative initiatives.

The programme is three-stranded and includes diversity management initiatives targeting:

1. Private organisations
2. Public institutions
3. The setting-up of a new innovative and intercultural startup ecosystem

The Diversity Lab is connected to places of innovation in the Reggio Emilia area: the Urban Open Laboratory of the Cloisters of San Pietro, the Innovation Park, La Polveriera, Impact Hub, etc.

In addition to the promotion of training courses, research and support for the business world, the Diversity Lab will have the function of creating a sort of Think Tank, made up of young people with different backgrounds, which can develop ideas for innovative solutions for public and private actors.

The Diversity Lab will specifically:

• Accompany companies in the area in the creation of inclusive working environments favourable to the expression of diversity, as a possible competitive advantage, supporting them, where required, in the development of Diversity Management policies and practices.
• Mapping the diversity present in the services to citizens and the public of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia and/or its subsidiaries/controlled companies, and/or in other public organisations, such as the AUSL of Reggio Emilia, in order to become more aware of how diversity is configured in these workplaces and how it can be an additional indirect service offered to citizens.
• Activate a path to enhance the city's public and private places, including commercial ones, such as the activation of community and neighbourhood tourism routes.

Impact:

Key reference documents: https://www.mondinsieme.org/diversity-lab.html