The Innovation Week (Sep. 27 – Oct. 5) and the Maker Faire (3-5 Oct.) “Will make Rome an Innovation and Youth Enterprise Gym,” explains Mayor Ignazio Marino, who announced a call to turn over 50 unused areas in the city to the new generations to transform them into centres for progress and development.
Over the course of the coming day, we will tell you more about the FMD’s activities at the Maker Faire, from labs for children to a fashion show developed for Project Maker Fashion.
In the meantime, the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research has kicked off a public consultation on the “La buona scuola” (The Good School) document which includes a section on “laboratories as innovation gyms,” an idea launched by Alfonso Molina, developer of the Phyrtual Innovation Gym model, at the inauguration of the Phyrtual Fab Lab, the first digital manufacturing lab in Rome based on MIT’s Centre for Bits and Atoms.
Alfonso Molina, Professor of Technology Strategy at the University of Edinburgh and Scientific Director of the Fondazione Mondo Digitale, believes the Innovation Gym is a strategic model for developing education as it provides a place in which to experiment with Life Education (knowledge, competences and values). It is a place where to practice open innovation and plan change based on the principles of social innovation to address the crucial challenges of the 21st Century, from youth unemployment to the NEET phenomenon.
And the Innovation Gym buzz has reached Europe …
The YouTube channel of the Global Brain Institute has uploaded Alfonso Molina’s presentation at the Ecco Seminar entitled: "Theories and Practice in an Emerging Physical/Virtual Environment for Social Innovation and Education for Life".
In fact, Alfonso Molina presented the Phyrtual Platform, the Life Education Model and the Phyrtual Innovation Gym, last June in Brussels.
Last Friday, Alfonso Molina was in London to illustrate the Innovation Gym at the annual ELIG Conference, a news item that was also reported on by the AdnKronos News Agency: Scuola: in Europa il modello italiano di 'palestra innovazione'. (in Italian)
