For the third year, entrepreneurial world and students of the Politecnico di Torino and the University of Turin together to generate impact

The 2022 – 2023 edition of IP Labs begins, a program aimed at SMEs in Piedmont who want to discover their potential for social impact and create innovative solutions that combine market opportunities and sustainability.

The previous editions of IP Labs have collected the candidacy of over 60 companies, selected 31 companies, involved 130 students of the Politecnico di Torino.

The integration of intentional social impact objectives into traditional market objectives stimulates the innovative capacity of enterprises, aimed at finding solutions that hold together the generation of market opportunities with an active role in sustainable transformation.

Indeed, in every area of the operating model of a company and its markets there are areas of potential social value creation. These must be discovered and valued as starting points of a distinctive strategic challenge and as drivers of innovation to attract new categories of customers, create new skills, imagine new products and services.

What is IP Labs?

A collective learning program, in which companies and students acquire a new perspective, creative and constructive on the opportunities offered by the sustainable transition, as well as the basic tools to seize these opportunities.

A path of entrepreneurial discovery of its potential social impact, from which to generate insights, new visions, innovative trajectories, prototyping ideas, opportunities for the development of new products and services, ways of reorganising processes and extending competences

Why participate in IP Labs?

The benefits for businesses:

• Understand the key challenges of global environmental and social transformations.
• Identify and qualify social impact innovation opportunities for the company
• Prototyping an innovation project from social impact through IP Labs
• Know and connect with other companies, dealing with profit and not-for-profit realities, and with financial market players most interested in sustainability and impact investments
• Meet and work with young people with high potential interested in innovation and social impact, to draw on their freshness of vision and their multidisciplinary skills, in a process of inter-comparisongenerational with the best students of the two important universities of Turin
• Receive dedicated training on social impact and sustainability issues by Cottino Social Impact Campus and IP Labs partners

Benefits for students:

• To acquire skills on innovation and social impact
• To get in touch with local companies and important partners and open up to internship opportunities and work at participating companies
• To learn how to manage a complex innovation project by working in a team
• To have the opportunity to analyze and develop a real business case
• To have a tutor to support project management
• To have the opportunity to develop the project also in a master’s thesis
• To have the recognition of curricular or extra-curricular credits

Challenges, areas of impact and sectors

IP Labs is the laboratory in which to experiment ideas that aim to propose solutions for important social problems such as inequalities, discrimination, fragility, educational poverty. Through innovative interventions in sectors such as digital technologies, health and well-being, housing, food, raw materials, sustainable production, urban mobility, renewable energy, fashion. The projects will cover 4 possible areas of development: product, process, skills, business models.

HOW IT WORKS

IP Labs is a systemic path in different stages that sees the involvement of many actors.

1) Selection
Among the companies that will respond to the call will be selected the most innovative and consistent with the vision of impact promoted by IP Labs (intentionality, measurability, additionality). The selection will be carried out by the team of experts of the Cottino Social Impact Campus, the Politecnico di Torino and the University of Turin on the basis of their presented projects or projects that can be defined with the help of experts.

2) Qualification
The selected companies will access the qualification phase which consists of a workshop, dedicated to groups of companies similar in characteristics, geographical origin or type of challenge, and will aim to specify the purpose of the project and identify the main criteria for measuring the expected impact. At this stage, the company will be associated with the group of students participating in the innovation project and a tutor.

3) Training
The collective training phase, aimed at learning, sharing and comparison, will involve all the selected companies, tutors and students. This will be the time to align the vision, acquire concepts and models on sustainability and impact, share goals and resolutions.

4) Implementation of projects
The groups thus composed, each led by a company contact and a tutor, will lead the development phase to deepen the idea and prepare all the elements that will allow the company to evaluate the real feasibility of the project and possibly realize it

5) Evaluation and final award
A jury composed of experts, entrepreneurs, representatives of institutions and partners will define the best projects according to innovation and impact criteria. The award-winning ideas will be given wide visibility during the final Impact Day event and through media.

The winning company will access a dedicated accompanying phase, aimed at the measurement and reporting of the impact generated by the Competence Center for the assessment and measurement of social impact, created by the Turin Chamber of Commerce and Cottino Social Impact Campus.

The partners

The 2022-2023 edition is based on an ecosystem of skills and reputation: the Cottino Social Impact Campus, the Politecnico di Torino, the University of Turin and the Renato Einaudi College, with the Turin Chamber of Commerce, Unicredit, Unigens, Unione Industriale Torino, API Torino, Confindustria Canavese, Yes4To and Torino Social Impact take up the challenge of the impact economy and accompany the development of Piedmontese companies.

SMEs applications must be received no later than 20 December 2022.

For more information, visit the dedicated page on the Cottino Social Impact Campus website.