Programme & Abstracts

14:00 Reception and registration of participants

14:15 Opening session

Social innovation: A response to market and State failures

João Paulo Dias, Executive Director of CES (Centre for Social Studies)
Carlos Garea, Joint Secretariat Atlantic Area Programme
Geoff Whittam, Glasgow School for Business & Society, Glasgow Caledonian University, representing the ASL partnership
Hugo Pinto, Local Organizer and PI of the Atlantic-Social-Lab at CES

14:30 Plenary session: Keynote Speakers

Surveillance as predator and State as prey
Phil Cooke, Mohn Center for Innovation & Regional Development Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen, Norway

The quest for public value: Regional innovation and the role of the State
Elvira Uyarra, University of Manchester

Moderator: José Reis, CES & Tiago Santos Pereira, CES

16:00 - 16:30 Coffee Break

16:30 Round table: Dynamics of Social Innovation and the Role of the State

Carlota Quintão, Director of the Association A3S
Filipe Almeida, President of the Executive Committee of the Portuguese Social Innovation Initiative
Jorge Brandão, Representative of the Regional Coordination and Development Committee of the Centro
Liliana Simões, Coordinator and Founder of Microninho_Incubadora Social
Vera Soares, Representative of the Ave Intermunicipal Community
Moderator: Sílvia Ferreira, CES | Rapporteur: Carla Nogueira, University of Algarve

18:00 End of the workshop.

Abstracts:

Social innovation: A response to market and State failures
This welcome address takes a critical approach to the understanding of social innovation. It provides case study evidence of what can be regarded as social innovation by analysing to what extent they benefit society. There is a problem with social innovation standard definitions or is it the harsh reality of hybrid organisations whereby the tension between market realities and social mission that create unintended consequences?

Surveillance as predator and State as prey
This talk will highlight the way the UK State has been "hollowed out" by privatisation, outsourcing and sub-contracting of public services. Now a new stage has been reached where "Surveillance Capitalism" has targeted the confidential UK State healthcare and other official citizen records to feed the Big Data machine-advertising algorithms of the "surveillance oligopolists" (notably Google and Facebook, but also IBM, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon). The dangers of social media surveillance innovations have recently been widely explained (Zuboff, 2019). The imperative is to constrain their freedom to undermine democratic and social justice principles by draconian, internationally effective regulation.

The quest for public value: Regional innovation and the role of the State.
This presentation will interrogate the recent evolution in the literature on innovation policy towards grand challenges and what may mean for regional policy. It will discuss key issues such as the lack of institutional capacity for implementation and the ability to articulate public demand for transformative change.