Harmonic Innovation: Super Smart Society 5.0 and Technological Humanism (Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems) 3030811891, 9783030811891

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Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems 282

Francesco Cicione Luigino Filice Domenico Marino

Harmonic Innovation Super Smart Society 5.0 and Technological Humanism

Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems Volume 282

Series Editor Janusz Kacprzyk, Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland Advisory Editors Fernando Gomide, Department of Computer Engineering and Automation—DCA, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering—FEEC, University of Campinas— UNICAMP, São Paulo, Brazil Okyay Kaynak, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey Derong Liu, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, USA Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China Witold Pedrycz, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Alberta, Canada Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland Marios M. Polycarpou, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, KIOS Research Center for Intelligent Systems and Networks, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus Imre J. Rudas, Óbuda University, Budapest, Hungary Jun Wang, Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong

The series “Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems” publishes the latest developments in Networks and Systems—quickly, informally and with high quality. Original research reported in proceedings and post-proceedings represents the core of LNNS. Volumes published in LNNS embrace all aspects and subfields of, as well as new challenges in, Networks and Systems. The series contains proceedings and edited volumes in systems and networks, spanning the areas of Cyber-Physical Systems, Autonomous Systems, Sensor Networks, Control Systems, Energy Systems, Automotive Systems, Biological Systems, Vehicular Networking and Connected Vehicles, Aerospace Systems, Automation, Manufacturing, Smart Grids, Nonlinear Systems, Power Systems, Robotics, Social Systems, Economic Systems and other. Of particular value to both the contributors and the readership are the short publication timeframe and the world-wide distribution and exposure which enable both a wide and rapid dissemination of research output. The series covers the theory, applications, and perspectives on the state of the art and future developments relevant to systems and networks, decision making, control, complex processes and related areas, as embedded in the fields of interdisciplinary and applied sciences, engineering, computer science, physics, economics, social, and life sciences, as well as the paradigms and methodologies behind them. Indexed by SCOPUS, INSPEC, WTI Frankfurt eG, zbMATH, SCImago. All books published in the series are submitted for consideration in Web of Science. For proposals from Asia please contact Aninda Bose (aninda.bose@springer. com).

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/15179

Francesco Cicione · Luigino Filice · Domenico Marino Editors

Harmonic Innovation Super Smart Society 5.0 and Technological Humanism

Editors Francesco Cicione Caraffa Di Catanzaro, Italy

Luigino Filice Castrolibero, Italy

Domenico Marino Reggio Calabria, Italy

ISSN 2367-3370 ISSN 2367-3389 (electronic) Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems ISBN 978-3-030-81189-1 ISBN 978-3-030-81190-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81190-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Harmony is in Truth CdB

Introduction

On 18 December 2020, the International Seminar Harmonic Innovation was held at Entopan, a dynamic Italian business network. If it were a novel, our story would begin with an impregnable castle, perched among the highest and most unreachable peaks. Inside, there would be a community intent on developing ever more sophisticated defence tools and weapons, useful on the one hand to defend its position, and on the other to conquer ever-larger territories. This perspective towards history and human relations has marked the secular journey of humanity, combined with the idea of a ‘closed world’ characterised gradually by different perimeters (tribes, peoples, nations, empires, states, municipalities, etc.) until, at the end of the last millennium, the emergence of globalisation, digital networks and the progress of the democratisation process gradually affirmed this new identity of an ‘open world’. The path of innovation is a path parallel to the novel of humanity. Since ancient times, innovation has been a closed concept, folded back on the competitive effort that each company produced towards the other company. The advent of the ‘open world’ coincided with the advent of the paradigm of open innovation, which marked the last twenty years and which still marks this sector. But if it is true, as it is, that the path of innovation runs parallel to the path of humanity, it is necessary to acknowledge that a process of further evolution is underway that will characterise the transition from the ‘open world’ to a ‘sustainable and harmonic’ world. This process, already underway, is contained in the framework of the most important world policies: UN Agenda 2030, Agenda Addis Ababa, the Green New Deal, Next Generation EU, Peace of Abraham, Laudato si’ and Fratelli tutti. It is the response to the obvious limitations and side effects that the ‘open world’ model has produced, which in some non-isolated cases is producing dangerous returns to the past, dangerous new boundaries and re-closures. The path of innovation cannot lag behind this process. This is why it is necessary to affirm a new paradigm capable of effectively interpreting the new horizon towards which humanity is reaching. vii

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The paradigm of open innovation is no longer enough, it is insufficient since it is the child of a world that no longer exists. From these considerations arises the need to engage in the construction of a new paradigm: the paradigm of harmonic innovation, a concept that requires some effort to be fully understood due to the existence of certain prejudices that slow down the introduction of new paradigms. The paradigm of harmonic innovation was systematised for the first time by Francesco Cicione, with the contribution of Luca De Biase, in the text “Innovazione Armonica. Un senso di futuro”, Rubettino 2021. In this book, the commitment of a large community of professors, researchers and professionals allowed us to develop, improve and share knowledge on state-ofthe-art harmonic innovation in different fields: economics, finance, law, operational techniques, management, production, human resources and business organisation. The level of some of the works presented and discussed in the forum on the Entopan Network’s teaching and research experiences provided the opportunity to build a book published by a globally recognised publishing house. The generous and intense work of Francesco Cicione, Luigi Filice and Domenico Marino, together with the dream vision, made this opportunity a reality. As a result, this is a multi-author book but not simply a collection of essays. In fact, although signed by different authors, all of the book’s chapters follow a developing line of thought which is traced in the first part of the book and delves into the various aspects in a logical order. Parts of the book explore the paradigm of harmonic innovation and analyse the implications of this new innovation policy for the institution, citizens and firms. Francesco Cicione begins the contribution by recalling the event that occurred on 24 December 1968, Christmas Eve, when the crew of Apollo 8 was orbiting the Moon. It represents the beginning of the journey within harmonic innovation. Francesco Cicione opens the book with ‘an initial, deliberately general and unsystematised (in some passages provocatively superficial, sketchy, messy and popularised) contribution of the perimeters of this new domain’. However, he sets some key points when underlining certain relevant aspects of harmonic innovation: • Ethical (unblemished, terse, inoffensive, good-loving, beneficent, free, untainted, holy) • Intelligent (subtle, sharp, human-friendly, stable, secure, useful, new) • Generative (performing, emanating creative power, both unique and multiple) • Pervasive (penetrating, mobile, agile, multidisciplinary) • Sustainable (circular, a reflection of longstanding balance). Nicola Rotundo is a theologian who tries to draw a path towards Harmonic Ethics, taking a sapiential theological look at harmonic innovation. He tries ‘to show how the term harmonic ethics should be understood in light of the Sacred Scriptures, when a natural vocation to harmony lies in the very depths of man’s being and of creation itself, to which, however, man cannot correspond without supernatural help. Luca De Biase drives our journey from cooperation to coevolution, depicting the plurality of futures that can be discovered in a harmonic view. What’s more, he

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describes this multidimensional approach to the current reading of history, which is open to a multiplicity of harmonies! Domenico Marino focuses his attention on the relationship between strategic altruism and harmonic innovation: looking at the human community, altruism can be studied as an economic behaviour, not only as a good thing for volunteers. Valentino Bobbio disserts on the growing injustice and poverty in the world which results in a society for the few, that is not harmonious. What can we do? It is likely that we can found a new economy, which moves from the dominance of those shareholders who want maximum profit over all other stakeholders to a market economy based on attention and dialogue with all stakeholders (shareholders, customers, workers, suppliers, environment and the local community). Ugo Biggeri asks himself a very crucial question: is finance today harmonious? Probably not, but this is a sort of prejudice. To avoid any superficial talk, he establishes ten questions to understand if finance ultimately has some harmonic factors. Saverio Mecca is the middle point between an architect and a philosopher. He tries to design a harmonic systemic organisation, describing activities, interactions and feelings. In his journey, on which everyone is welcome, he uncovers the cognitive process by which the spirit builds a ‘representation of the dissonance it perceives’ between behaviours and projects (the identification of the problem), tries to come up with some response or plan of action capable of restoring the desired consonance (the solution of the problem), and places it at the centre of his open conception of logic, not reducible to the formalisation of syllogistic deduction. Valerio Barberis would like to take us to the harmonic city. He has designed a new vision of Prato, a nice town in Tuscany, well known as the textile city. His vision has become an urban agenda and a tool for sustainable urban policies, making Prato an experiment on the relationships between man and nature. Giuseppe De Luca introduces harmonic space planning. He explains how the concept of harmony can be ‘diluted’ to that of vertical and horizontal conformity. He seeks the growth of a new school for planning culture that will merit further scientific, methodological and operational investigation, and in which, in one aspect, we could define (and name) harmonic space planning. Giuliano Muzio is a technologist and explains what technology can do to become harmonic technology. For instance, could Artificial Intelligence be AI for good? ‘In a world in which technological aids are becoming increasingly pervasive, it is important to have a very clear map of what these tools can do, as well as to identify the risks associated with their careless use.’ In the same corner is Giorgio Scarpelli’s contribution. He claims that harmonic innovation is the only possible strategy for sustainable growth. What’s more, ‘combining digital transformation with the imagination and creativity of different people will facilitate not only problem solving, but also value creation for the entire society and the planet’. Antonio Viscomi is not a technician but a lawyer and member of the Italian parliament, and therefore, he speaks about his business. ‘Every citizen’—as stated in Article 4 of the Italian Constitution—‘has the duty to carry out, according to his own possibilities and choice, an activity or a function that contributes to the material

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or spiritual progress of society’. From a constitutional perspective, a job is not only a technical activity, but also a human experience that becomes most significant if and when set in a wider dimension. This dimension is explained in the following phrase: from the ‘I’ to the ‘we’. This is the necessary paradigm shift that makes human experience, be it individual or collective, harmonic. Another valuable contribution is by Andrea Bonaccorsi: scholars of innovation are not at ease with the notion of Harmonic Innovation. He asks a key question: do we need harmonic innovation? To that, as a good engineer, he also gives an answer: harmonic innovation believes in work as a ‘vocation and civil duty’, oriented towards the construction of the common good and to the fulfilment of an inalienable moral obligation, thus enhancing, from this perspective, the need for everyone to be constantly engaged in paths of professional and moral growth. Leonardo Becchetti and Massimo Cermelli introduce the civil economy and the harmonic innovation paradigm. They talk about reforming the anthropological vision from homo-economicus to the superior social rationality of homo-cooperatives. They allude to the wish of establishing a corporate vision that is changing from the profit maximisation approach to the maximisation of stakeholder wellbeing, thus ‘introducing the fraternity principle into the debate and into social community and economic relationships’. Luigi Filice accompanies the reader along an industrial plan, asking how it is possible to build a harmonic industry even though firms are usually a sort of ‘evil’ we have to bear as a balance of our richness. He introduces a satisfactory function to take into account certain intangible issues, which can be added to salaries in order to form a sort of measure of worker happiness. Finally, Massimo Ruffolo contributed by describing the role of ethical AI in fostering harmonic innovations, supporting a human-centric digital transformation of economy and society. He claims that the development of ethical AI regulations can lead to trustworthy, explainable, interpretable and non-biased algorithms that improve our daily lives without configuring threats. This is one of the main challenges that researchers, governments, institutions, and companies worldwide will have to face in the next few years with the growing adoption of AI. As the editor of this book, we would like to conclude this introduction in a ‘circular’ way, by thinking about a circular orbit around the Moon, as described above. As the Apollo 8 crew, we want to wish you good luck, and ‘may God bless all of you on the good (and harmonic) Earth’.

Contents

About Harmonic Innovation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Francesco Cicione

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Harmonic Ethics. A Sapiential Theological Look at Harmonic Innovation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nicola Rotundo

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Scholars of Innovation Are not at Ease with the Notion of Harmonic Innovation. Do We Need Harmonic Innovation? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andrea Bonaccorsi

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Harmonious Future. Assumptions on the Correlation Between Cooperation and Coevolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Luca De Biase

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Strategic Altruism and Harmonic Innovation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Domenico Marino

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Civil Economy and the Harmonic Innovation Paradigm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leonardo Becchetti and Massimo Cermelli

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Harmonic Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Valentino Bobbio

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Harmonic Finance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ugo Biggeri

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Harmonic Systemic Organizations: Activities, Interactions and Feelings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Saverio Mecca Towards the Harmonic City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Valerio Barberis

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Towards Harmonic Space Planning? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Giuseppe De Luca xi

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The Role of Harmonic Innovation in Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 Massimo Roj Harmonic Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Giuliano Muzio Harmonious Innovation, the Only Possible Strategy for Sustainable Growth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Giorgio Scarpelli The Role of Ethical AI in Fostering Harmonic Innovations that Support a Human-Centric Digital Transformation of Economy and Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Massimo Ruffolo On the Harmonic Industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Luigino Filice Harmonic Innovation. The New Paradigm for Digital, Green and Social Transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Antonio Viscomi

Contributors

Valerio Barberis Prato, Italy Leonardo Becchetti Department of Economics and Finance, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy Luca De Biase Department of Architecture, University of Florence, Florence, Italy Ugo Biggeri Eticasgr, Banca Etica’s group, Milano, Italy Valentino Bobbio General Secretary, NeXt Nuova economia per Tutti (New Economy for All), Rome, Italy Andrea Bonaccorsi Department of Energy, Systems, Territory and Construction Engineering, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy Massimo Cermelli Department of Finance and Economics, University of Deusto, Bilbao, Spain Francesco Cicione Entopan Caraffa di Catanzaro, Italy Luigino Filice Dept. of Mechanical, Enegy and Management Engineering, The University of Calabria, Rende, CS, Italy Giuseppe De Luca Department of Architecture, University of Florence, Florence, Italy Domenico Marino Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria, Reggio Calabria, Italy Saverio Mecca Florence, Italy Giuliano Muzio Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy Massimo Roj Milan, Italy Nicola Rotundo Simeri Crichi (CZ), Italy

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Contributors

Massimo Ruffolo Altilia.Ai, Start-up incubator TechNest, University of Calabria, Rende, CS, Italy Giorgio Scarpelli Castrolibero, Italy Antonio Viscomi Faculty of Law, University of Catanzaro “Magna Graecia”, Campus “Salvatore Venuta”, Catanzaro, Italy; HiRe - Harmonic Innovation Research B-Corp, Arezzo, Italy

About Harmonic Innovation Francesco Cicione

On December 24, 1968, on Christmas Eve, the crew of Apollo 8 was orbiting the Moon. It was the first time in the history of mankind that a man left Earth’s orbit. It was the first time in the history of mankind that a man came so close to another astronomical body. Not only from a symbolic point of view, that moment represented the culmination of a journey marked by rapid and growing scientific discoveries and unprecedented technological innovations; for many it represented the triumph of human ingenuity and its “mirabili sorti e progressive”. However, for a singular contrapasso, the commander Frank Borman, the pilot of the command module James Lovell and the pilot of the lunar module William Anders, in those few hours so full of meaning and universal symbolism (literally) felt the need to send a message to humanity that, apparently, told a different story. “We are approaching the lunar sunrise, and for all the people of Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we want to send.” Then the three astronauts took turns reading the first 10 verses of the first chapter of Genesis, the one describing Creation. When they finished, the last astronaut concluded, “And on behalf of the Apollo 8 crew, we want to wish you: Good evening, good luck, and Merry Christmas! And may God bless you all on the good Earth.” Beyond the controversies and polemics that ensued and the different cultural positions regarding this initiative, we cannot but draw a fundamental lesson from it: Man always pushes himself beyond his limits and, after doing so, he always needs to recover the meaning of his constant progress. There are different ways and paths by which all this happens: what is certain (and important) is that it happens punctually, whether it is the result of kairos or chronos. F. Cicione (B) c/o Entopan, Via Padova 2, 88050 Caraffa di Catanzaro, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Cicione et al. (eds.), Harmonic Innovation, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems 282, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81190-7_1

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No matter how much Man, every man, repeatedly tries to stifle this ontological need of his own being, it always resurfaces overbearingly. No matter how much Man, every man, tries to emancipate himself from the roots of meaning written in his own natural code, they always reassert themselves as insuperable. No matter how much Man, every man, pursues the illusory dream of absolute freedom, the historical evidence of a fundamental and insuperable regulatory norm always returns. Several thinkers have reflected on this topic. Kant did so, reminding us how necessary and indispensable it is to recover a careful look at the “kingdom of ends” illustrated in the Critique of Pure Reason, bringing out the existence of a “world in itself” that is conquered by obeying absolute categorical imperatives, universal, necessary and justified in themselves. Pascal also did so, reminding us of the importance of the “secret and transcendent presence in events that allows us to go beyond mere factuality”, warning us of the risks that could arise if we were to neglect this necessary dimension; that is, getting to the point of wondering “who put man in this corner of the universe, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he die.” Heidegger did likewise, reminding us that “what is truly disturbing is not that the world turns into a complete domain of technique. By far more disturbing is that Man is not at all prepared for this radical change in the world. By far more disturbing is that we are not yet able to achieve, through a thinking thought, an adequate confrontation with what is really emerging in our epoch.” Leibniz did it, overcoming (and resolving) Descartes and Locke as well as the dualism between thought and matter, between res cogitans and res extensa. He speaks of the presence in things (animate and inanimate) of an entelechy, a center of truth and autonomous force, a fundamental law that, if recognized, can direct every event towards a basic authenticity, without which, instead, everything contributes to entropy and not to the harmony of the Cosmos: “There is thus a perfect harmony between the perceptions of the monad and the movements of the bodies, a harmony predetermined from the beginning between the system of efficient causes and that of final causes; and it is in this that the agreement and physical union of soul and body consist, without the one being able to change the laws of the other.” Therefore, the vertigo of the infinitely possible finds its stabilizing balance in the search for meaning. After all, this is the very heart of the new concept of Harmonic Innovation, besides the message and function it aims to exercise within the public international debate: recognizing that technique is not enough and can never be enough on its own. It is for this reason that a large group of intellectuals has decided to engage in the reflection and development of this line of research. In this first multi-voice insight into the concept of Harmonic Innovation, it is worth getting back to the starting point by proposing in full what has already been

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written together with Luca De Biase,1 with the aim of proposing a first, concise and sketchy formulation of this new paradigm. “What is Harmonic Innovation then? Let us try to outline it, to represent it, to introduce it, to define it in its most general terms. It is, however, an initial, deliberately general and unsystematized (in some passages provocatively superficial, sketchy, messy and popularized) contribution of the initial perimeter of this new domain. Let’s start by saying that Harmonic Innovation is first of all “sense”, “integration” and “community”: we will have to come back later to these aspects to specify them in their operative, methodological and organizational declinations. Harmonic Innovation is “noble and kind.” And, then again, Harmonic Innovation is: • Ethical (unblemished, terse, inoffensive, good-loving, beneficent, free, untainted, holy) • Intelligent (subtle, sharp, Man-friendly, stable, secure, useful, new) • Generative (performing, emanating creative power, at once unique and multiple) • Pervasive (penetrating, mobile, agile, multidisciplinary) • Sustainable (circular, reflecting long-standing balance). Harmonic Innovation believes in innovation as a tool to contribute to the perennial mystery of “creation” which is always renewing itself and always evolving, nourished by its own inner “truth” whispered by the “spirit” of each time. Harmonic Innovation believes in innovation that, after having questioned reason, is willing to open up to a greater light, inspired by a sapiential approach constantly aimed at pursuing the encounter between immanence and transcendence, between finitude and infinity, between present and eternity, between technological research and moral research, in the constant evaluation of the ethical implications of each intervention. Harmonic Innovation believes in innovation that does not reject the logic of dual thoughts that always help us when, faced with the immense scope of certain questions, we must at the same time affirm and contradict, simplify and complicate, understand and get lost, so that from the infinite possibilities of meaning a glimpse, an intuition, a spark of “truth” can arise. Harmonious Innovation believes in innovation that is willing to confront the concept of “limit” and, more so, that is willing to assume this concept is pivotal to the development of a consistent, effective and sound theory and practice of innovation. Harmonic Innovation believes in innovation as a tool for the promotion of an integral anthropology of Man (and humanity) and interprets acceleration and “open innovation” activities as tangible means to promote inclusive, generative, cohesive and harmonious economic, social, cultural and environmental impacts. Harmonic Innovation believes in innovation that assumes technological capital as an instrumental element for the enhancement of environmental, social and human 1

Francesco Cicione e Luca De Biase, Innovazione Armonica. Un senso di futuro, Rubbettino, 2021.

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resources, for the satisfaction of emerging and unexpressed needs, the affirmation of the culture of sustainability and the overcoming of the many contemporary inequalities, in accordance with the provisions of the “UN 2030” Agenda, the “Green New Deal” and “Next Generation EU” Programs of the European Commission, the Encyclical “Laudato sii” of Pope Francis and the Social Magisterium of the Catholic Church. Harmonic Innovation believes in a new concept capable of combining thought and action, in a continuous effort of “trespassing” and multidiscipline aimed at the synthesis between science and wisdom, between technique and spirit, between hard and soft science, between technological and computational domains and social, economic and humanistic perimeters. Harmonious Innovation believes that innovation is being, not doing, because doing innovation means being new living nature; it means being the truth of oneself, constantly striving for the fulfillment of what one is in power and what one is not yet in action. Harmonic Innovation believes in the centrality of Man as the subject of every innovation process, since thinking of a new world and humanity without a renewed Man reconciled with his own truth, is an exercise of sterile utopia or sentimental and romantic manifestation of good intentions. Harmonic Innovation believes in social and business communities organized according to collaborative, participatory and horizontal models of “open organization”, based on principles of competence, quality, responsibility, sharing, result orientation, transparency and legality, constantly aiming at the enhancement and communion of talents and the full release of personal and collective potential. Harmonic Innovation believes in work as a vocation and civil duty, oriented to the construction of the common good and to the fulfillment of an inalienable moral obligation, enhancing in this perspective the need for everyone to be constantly engaged in paths of professional and moral growth. Harmonic Innovation believes in the primacy of “being” over “doing” and “having”, and in this perspective it regards professional commitment not in the logic of profit and economic dividends maximization, but aimed at the construction of shared value and beauty, in the generation of measurable social and economic impacts. Harmonic Innovation believes in the promotion of the culture of sustainability and impact finance in the perspective of an active commitment to the reduction of inequalities and social injustice, to the protection of common goods, to the preservation of social peace and peace among peoples, to social inclusion, to the dissemination of knowledge, and to the cultural growth of new generations. Harmonious Innovation embraces the perspective of the Super Smart Society 5.0 and technological humanism, re-actualizing the vision and method of the classical “paideia” as well as the virtuous Renaissance integration between liberal arts, humanistic crafts and philosophical/theological culture. Harmonic Innovation is an evolutionary, integrative and synchronic approach to the culture of open innovation (which in turn overcomes the typical approach of closed innovation).

About Harmonic Innovation

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The concept of Harmonic Innovation stands, therefore, as a new stage in the evolution of thinking around the dynamics that change the world. It serves to question which innovations, among the new, are the ones that matter. It helps to discern, in the great transformations, what improves the state of things and what risks worsening it. It allows us to design the ways through which innovation can generate a real, positive impact. In order to understand how Harmonic Innovation can help society to give itself a direction and to pursue a project of progress, it is necessary first of all to clear the field of buzzwords and preconceptions. Even the best words, when they are repeated too much, perhaps by people who do not have the merit of seeking consistency between what they say and what they do, unfortunately wear out. Only junk never wears out; on the contrary, it accumulates and grows larger in the chatter of those who do not know what they are talking about, but they talk about it anyway. Innovation is Harmonic first of all if it is witnessed rather than affirmed. Of course, nobody is perfect, least of all the writer. But a minimum of commitment to get closer to the value of the concreteness of results as well as to that of the storytelling of promises would not be a bad idea. Apart from all this, though, if we look back at the history of serious attempts to innovate, there are at least two other forms of innovation. Traditional innovation, in the industrial world, takes place in the confines of company laboratories and meeting rooms; it is done to prevail in market competition; it is situated in the history of winning company groups and is guided by their strategy. Open innovation, on the other hand, emerges from the collaboration of many subjects who work together to design it, exploiting the strength of the network and following a common working method. Harmonic innovation, instead, is the result of a chorus of talents that, each with its own capabilities, together generate a result with “sense” for the community they serve. Harmonic Innovation is connected to the meaning of things and actions. It enables action that has direction. It generates a common good which is defined by a wisdom rich in experience and thought. It leads toward happiness, peace, union, and the good of all. Learning how to develop innovation that makes sense generates a different discernment, a new selective dynamic, with incentives linked to the totality of humans. Unlike forms of selection based on market competition, it does not assume that the best possible allocation of resources will necessarily emerge from the struggle for supremacy among firms. Unlike forms of selection based on technology, it does not assume that the new version is necessarily better than the previous one. Rather, the idea of improvement to which harmonic innovation contributes must precede and enable the action of the chorus of talents collaborating to build the common good. Every project contains the values of those who define it. How do you build a better world if you don’t know what “better” means? The new is not necessarily better. But what is fairer or preferable? In short, what is better? Of course, one can answer that this judgment depends on different points of view. And these should be respected. One can also answer that it is the choices that reveal people’s preferences. And quantitative analysis of what people do is certainly important. But can these criteria be said to be enough to decide what is best?

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Apart from the relativity of preferences, there are still phenomena that are good for everyone. After all, people’s preferences are certainly not completely free, but are rather expressed only around the alternatives that the supply presents to their eyes. Therefore, the values of those who design the supply deeply influence people’s choices. However, we cannot fail to see that there is something that is better, despite supply and demand. Something that properly addresses climate change is good for everyone. The quality of the environment, of social relations, of cultural life, benefits everyone. This quality that is good for all cannot be read in people’s immediate reactions to proposals for consumption or time allocation; it can be read through the eyes of a long-term wisdom and deep cultural dimension. It is not the result of a conflictual confrontation between contrasting worldviews. It is rather the result of a chorus of values and talents that work together for the common good, at least in cases where this is so clear as to leave no room for ambiguity: biodiversity, peace, equality, respect and education are values that, if pursued, are good for everyone. How do you take action for Harmonic Innovation? You invest in education that frees people’s creative energy by eliciting new ideas from previous ones. You generate processes of synthesis and integration. You select actions that produce value for the good of all, inspiring common discernment from a multidisciplinary perspective. And it is recognized when it is adopted by the community. “When truly brothers, men don’t sing in unison but in harmony,” wrote W. H. Auden. If we want to sum this up in one formula we could say that at the heart of the issue there is only one problem to be solved: the reconstruction between “authenticity” and “end” of innovation, of every technological, environmental and socio-economic innovation. In La tendenza fondamentale del nostro tempo [The fundamental trend of our time] Emanuele Severino has clearly highlighted how our age, marked by the “domination of technique (and profit)”, has intensified and brought to its extreme consequences the recurring “will to power” that from Plato onwards has dominated and influenced Western culture to the point of transforming “technique (and profit)”, as well as their indefinite growth into an absolutized and self-referential end, rather than a simple means. In this framework, any authenticity is diluted and a confused and relativized configuration of humanity and its History ensues. It is not by chance that the absolutizing partnership between technique and profit has given shape to a society pervaded by deep imbalances. On this subject, this is what we wrote together with Luca De Biase: And it has been capitalism that has ruled for the last forty years, certainly not the market. Even if the latter has managed to build an important niche for itself in the dimension of innovation, at times escaping the domination of capitalism. The market we are talking about is not the static Walrasian one, that of neoliberalism. It is the Schumpeterian market in which the entrepreneur, the innovator, does not limit himself to doing all he can to gain a market share in a system of supply and demand for existing products, but creates new markets by inventing new goods and services that are adopted.

About Harmonic Innovation

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The market of neoliberalism fails to account for the structural changes introduced by innovation. The economic cycle assumes that the system remains the same and simply behaves in a more or less expansive way. Nonetheless, over the last thirty years, a dynamic of accelerated technological innovation has come into play, setting the stage for structural change such as to make it difficult to compare the performance of the economy from one cycle to another. We talk about a paradigm shift to explain the amount of contextual differences that exist between the world before the web and the world after the web, with amazing acceleration since internet access has become mobile thanks to the introduction of the iPhone. And what we have ahead of us is even bigger, with the digitization of science itself, which then can imagine creating new markets in nanotechnology, biotechnology, neuroscience, the most advanced forms of computer science, from artificial intelligence to robotics, from sensor science to big data. This marketplace of innovations creates monopoly moments for the big innovators. From those moments, innovators can start working to defend positions or move on to innovate. At that point, the distance between the stories made great by the Schumpeterian market and capitalism becomes blurred. For when the actions of innovators are welded to the big finance that supports their scalability, the innovative soul fatally dissolves into capitalist practice.

Hence the proposal of a new paradigm of innovation, the Harmonic Innovation, is a broad proposal aimed at defining a new (and harmonic) idea of society, economy and future consistent with the new direction of the big challenges of transition (digital, green, social and environmental). One could say (and actually it is so) that Harmonic Innovation is the natural development of the concept of Open Innovation. Or better still, that Harmonic Innovation is the Open Innovation that confronts itself with the ethical and social impacts of its activities and integrates them into its own identity as essential elements. Harmonic Innovation is therefore an unavoidable proposal, which takes into account the new political, cultural, social and economic global framework of reference which is definitely aimed at enhancing the concept of “making innovation” as a tool for the creation of a better world (for a better world). The proposal of Harmonic Innovation should accompany us for at least the next twenty years, since today, to keep on talking always about Open Innovation only, is so reductive and insufficient. This is a possible and interdisciplinary effort. It is not by chance that this first moment of collective reflection on the subject sees the contribution of social scientists and humanists prevail over the contributions coming from the technological sciences. It seems like a paradox but actually it is not: our intention is to break down and recompose the alphabet and grammar of innovation from the heart of a renewed, generative, cohesive, inclusive and sustainable humanism. This is Harmonic Innovation, the frontier of a different and necessary future.

Harmonic Ethics. A Sapiential Theological Look at Harmonic Innovation Nicola Rotundo

1 Preliminary Remarks Dealing with the topic of harmony from the theological point of view and from the specific standpoint of ethics is rather sensitive. We are currently living in a time of advanced secularism and scientism that prevents, or at least hinders, the acceptance of Revelation as an authentic source of knowledge. However, a theology that wants to call itself truly by such a name has Revelation as its source, and therefore also the Sacred Scripture (not separated from Tradition and the Magisterium). In this perspective, the ancient Fathers of the Church reminded us how it is fundamental to read the Scriptures in and through the Spirit, with which they were written, to truly understand them. Only in this way, it will be possible for the Scriptures to disclose to their readers the treasure of life and wisdom that dwells within them, and to reveal to man all the mysteries they contain.1 I use the plural for the word “mysteries” because it is clear that the Scripture conceals within itself not only the transcendental secrets of man’s Creator but also the transcendental secrets about the man and about the creation itself. Indeed, the Scripture is a “letter” that God addresses to his creature (Chrysostom). For this reason, the great Antiochian Doctor declared the knowledge of the Scripture as absolutely necessary, not just for monks but also for people living in the world, concluding that “to believe that the reading of the Scriptures is superfluous is much worse than not reading them”.2 1 In his Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, the great Doctor of the Church, St. John Chrysostom, expresses this view, advocating knowledge of the Scriptures as a beneficial exercise not only for monks but also for ordinary people, see john chrysostom, Omelie sul vangelo di Matteo/1 (Testi patristici) [Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew 1 (Patristic Texts)], Città Nuova, Rome 2003, 51–64, in part 62–64. 2 Idem, 62.

N. Rotundo (B) Via Apostolello, 27, 88050 Simeri Crichi (CZ), Italy © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Cicione et al. (eds.), Harmonic Innovation, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems 282, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81190-7_2

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As a theologian, I cannot exempt myself from proceeding in this way, as well as I cannot reflect on harmonious ethics without considering the primary source for theology: Revelation in general, and the Scriptures in particular. The epistemological paradigm of my science demands it of me. And it is for this reason that by reading some of its “pages” according to this hermeneutic principle—“Sacra Scriptura eodem Spiritu quo scripta est etiam legenda et interpretanda sit” (Dei Verbum, § 12)—I will try to show how the term harmonic ethics should be understood in the light of the Sacred Scriptures. Thereby, this will be a reading done by adopting two approaches: the Christological and the pneumatological one. For the Christological approach, I quote the teaching of the Apostle Paul who recalls that the apex of this revelation is Christ, in whom not only “the mystery of God” is concentrated and revealed, but “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge were hidden [omnes thesauri sapientiae et scientiae absconditi/ ]” (Col 2:3). No one should be scandalized, that “all” is to be understood in the perspective ˜ (i.e. all things and everything, the of the semantic origin of the Greek word πας totality). Consequently, science as well, without foregoing what it already possesses in terms of experimental knowledge, has to be open to this horizon of transcendence that it could not possess otherwise, if not for opening itself to revelation.3 There is a difference between science and wisdom. Science is acquired through study. Not so wisdom. Wisdom is a gift that descends from above (see Proverbs, 2:1-10; Wisdom, 6-9; Sirach, 1ff.). I quote only one verse: “All wisdom is from the Lord and remains with him forever” (Sir 1:1). For the pneumatological approach, the ancient Fathers of the Church taught that “reading the Scriptures ‘in the Spirit’—serves to—obtain ‘spiritual intelligence’”.4 Thanks to this spiritual intelligence the knowledge of creation itself is bestowed upon man according to the mystery of its essence. This spiritual intelligence or sapiential On the scope of this “all treasures” (omnes thesauri/ παντες ´ oƒ θησαυρo`ι) the words of the medieval doctor Thomas Aquinas are still relevant: “Now, everything that can be known of God belongs to wisdom, and God knows abundantly everything in himself. Moreover, everything that can be known about creatures he knows in himself in a supereminent way. Now all that is found in the wisdom of God is also found in his one Word, for by one act of the intellect he knows all things, for in him knowledge is neither in power nor in the form of a habit. And therefore in this Word “all treasures are hidden…”. But he adds “are hidden,” because it happens in two ways that some thing is hidden from me, namely because of the weakness of my intelligence or because of a veil that is opposed,” Super Col. c. 2, l. I, §§ 81–82 [st. thomas aquinas, Letter to the Colossians, in id., Commentary on the Corpus Paulinum], vol. 4, Ed. Studio Domenicano, Bologna 2007, 561–716, here 627. 4 I. de la potterie, La Lettura della Sacra Scrittura “nello Spirito”, in Communio [The Reading of the Sacred Scripture “in the Spirit”, in Communio, no. 87 (1986) 26]. Saint Jerome maintained the absolute necessity of the assistance of the Holy Spirit in order to penetrate the caskets of the Word fixed on paper: “ut si quando indiguimus spiritu Dei, semper autem in exponendis scripturis sanctis illius indigemus aduentu [in the interpretation of the Sacred Scripture we always need the Holy Spirit]”, hieronymus, Commentariorum in Micheam Prophetam [Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina, 76], 1,1,10/15 p. 430 (jerome, In Michea, 1,10,15, in Jerome. Commentaries on the Twelve Minor Prophets/1 [Naum and Micah], Città Nuova, Rome 2017). 3

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knowledge is light that enlightens all other knowledge. John Paul II spoke about it in 1989: “Moreover, sapiential knowledge gives us a special capacity to judge human things according to God’s standard, in God’s light. Enlightened by this gift, the Christian knows how to see inside the realities of the world: no one is better able than he is to appreciate the authentic values of creation, looking at them with God’s own eyes” (Angelus, April 9, 1989). The light of wisdom emanated from revelation is not in competition with the light emanating from experimental knowledge, as long as the latter is developed with the highest intellectual (and moral) honesty; that is, in the acceptance of their own epistemological limitation that does not allow these sciences to draw undue deductions about transcendental truths and realities, towards which, instead and almost by nature, they should open their prospects.5 By accepting this limit, these sciences are not impoverished, nor is their status as sciences corrupted. On the contrary, they create the conditions for other sciences/knowledge to offer them the Wisdom, the creative and ordering Wisdom, that is, the uncreated light that has placed and arranged everything within the creation according to an end, with measure and limit. The author of the sacred book of Wisdom is aware that the people of Israel were being guided in their history by the wise God, whose “all-powerful hand, which had brought the world into being drawing it from formless matter” has “arranged all things by measure and number and weight” (Wis 11:17, 20). For these same reasons, Chrysostom could state that the mere thought that meditating on the Scriptures was just the prerogative of “monks” would be a very harmful thought: “I am not”, you will say, one of the monks, but I have both a wife and children, and the care of a household. Why, this is what hath ruined all, your supposing that the reading of the divine Scriptures appertains to those only, when ye need it much more than they. For they that dwell in the world, and each day receives wounds, these have most need of medicines.6

Even men of science could “receive wounds”, but also “inflict wounds” to the creation for lack of wisdom, therefore by prejudice, for imperfect esteem or recognition of the “knowledge” that dwells in the sciences that study beyond the visible and the invisible, to which theology belongs. Therefore, while taking the text out of its context, but not depriving it of its potential wider and more topical meaning, I believe that even science or experimental sciences must abandon the “temptation” (today it is much more than a temptation, being almost a categorical imperative) to foreclose access to the sapiential prospect that emanates from the Wisdom contained in the Scriptures, thus grasping the salient 5

Thus Augustine wrote in his great masterpiece on the City of God: “But so that in the investigation of knowledge, because of the reduced power of human thought [propter humanae mentis infirmitatem], it does not incur the falsity of some error, it needs the divine magisterium [opus habet magisterio divino] to which it can submit with certainty and the help to which it can submit with freedom”, agostino, La Città di Dio, XIX, 14., in Opere di Sant’Agostino. La città di Dio/III [Augustine, City of God, Book 19, 14. Works of St. Augustine. City of God/III], Città Nuova, Rome 1991, p. 55. 6 john chrysostom, Omelie sul vangelo di Matteo/1, 62. [Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew/1, 62.].

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aspects of harmony disclosed by good theology to them. The risk, which is not remote, is that of preventing oneself to access the fundamental transcendent truths needed to understand the logos that dwells in creation, thereby offering to men partial visions which do not contribute to the harmonious innovation of creation but allow the creation to be misused for lack of a global and integral true vision of its essence and purpose. Giving voice to the Scriptures will make it possible to go back to harmony in its meaning and in its original and originating, founding and foundational reality, offering a sapiential vision of it. A Vision that can help the man of science to grasp the ethical imperatives that spring from the very essence of creation and that demand to be respected thus to speak of an authentically harmonious innovation. In other words, thanks to Wisdom, the experimental sciences are directed towards the ethical paths that will allow innovation to be harmonious. Our position, which we will attempt to demonstrate, is this: only ethical innovation is true harmonic innovation.

2 The Problem of Harmonic Innovation: Welcoming the Sapiential-Ethical Dimension as an Essential Condition of Its Fulfillment According to what is above, the first problem that arises in terms of harmonic ethics is the need for man to accept (we are in the field of duty and therefore of ethics) the light of wisdom thus to understand what harmony is and which is the way to contribute to its realization, to its pursuit. If divine wisdom is given to get to know the secrets of the creation, and man is the recipient, if any man rejects it the presuppositions of any human intervention for bringing creation back to its original harmony, or rather to those stages of harmonious development through which creation tends towards its end, are denied. It is as though one wanted to give life to a gigantic and innovative work of art and deliberately obscure the architect’s project after having acquired all the raw materials necessary for its realization. In this sense my contribution becomes advocacy. In a world that champions “rights”, of which today as never before it is necessary to verify the validity and correspondence,7 those who want to give life to projects of harmonic innovation cannot but recognize the right on creation that must be recognized to its Creator, Maker, and supporter. 7

I have recently addressed this issue elsewhere and I would like to refer to what I wrote there: N. rotundo, Diritti umani e diritti dell’ambiente: diritti di paura o diritti di verità? [Human and environmental rights: rights of fear or rights of truth?] in p. giustiniani and l. parente (eds.), Diritti umani e diritti dell’ambiente. Verso nuovi confronti [Human and environmental rights. Towards new debates], Mimesis, Milan-Udine 2020, 133–146. In addition to this contribution of mine to capture in the background the sensitive question of the foundation of rights: see V. possenti, Diritti umani. L’età delle pretese [Human rights. The age of claims], Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli 2017.

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For the Lord is great God, the great King above all gods. In his hand are the depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks belong to him. The sea is his, for he made it; and his hands formed the dry land (Ps 95 [94]:3-5).

The Creator of the visible and invisible universe is also the one who keeps his creation alive and governs its fortunes: Do not keep talking so proudly or let your mouth speak such arrogance, for the Lord is a God who knows, and by him deeds are weighed. [...] The Lord sends poverty and wealth; he humbles and he exalts. He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap; he seats them with princes and has them inherit a throne of honor. For the foundations of the earth are the Lord’s; on them he has set the world. He will guard the feet of his faithful servants, but the wicked will be silenced in the place of darkness. It is not by strength that one prevails (see 1 Sam 2:1-10).

Now, if recognizing to the Maker of creation his right of authorship that is necessary for harmony to be, it is also necessary to specify immediately that man has been placed by God in the custody of creation as an administrator and therefore cannot change the destination of use that his Maker has given to it. Neither can he ignore it. Therefore, since the Scriptures are a letter from God to man, even to the man of knowledge, they cannot be ignored. All this makes man called to the custody of the harmony that is already in the creation though in a potential and dynamic way. The creation has not been handed over to the man in its stage of ultimate development. On the contrary, it has been entrusted to man so that he may bring it towards its fulfillment, and thus innovate it according to all its intrinsic potentialities, but never in contrast with the project and the destination that every single element of it has been given by its divine Maker. In this regard, the hagiographer gives an example of how creation was modulated, harmonized in a different way under historical circumstances that required nature itself to “take the field” together with its Creator in favor of the Jewish people. The book of Wisdom, in fact, in its final part (cc. 10,1-19,22) proposes a rereading of some events in the history of Israel, beginning with the first accounts of the creation handed down in Genesis and then dealing with the accounts of the liberation of the people of Israel from Egypt (see Exodus cc. 11-19). The people were in Egypt since the time of the Patriarchs and as the generations passed, their prosperity brought about a change in the Pharaoh’s attitude towards them. The sacred author, referring to events that precede him by about 1400 years (the book of Wisdom dates back to a period of time close to the coming of Christ, placed according to recent studies between 60 and 20 BC), rereads the interventions of God in favor of his people on the creation as a re-modulation of the elements of the creation: a different agreement. We could speak of a harmonic innovation implemented by God on the elements of creation that are described in this way: For the elements changed places with one another, as on a harp the notes vary the nature of the rhythm, while each note remains the same. This may be clearly inferred from the sight of what took place. For land animals were transformed into water creatures, and creatures that swim moved over to the land. Fire even in water retained its normal power, and water forgot its fire-quenching nature. Flames, on the contrary, failed to consume the flesh of perishable

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In order for the people of Israel to be freed from the heavy slavery of Egypt, the Maker used creation in a new way, finding a different harmony for its elements, just as the player of a harp, using the same notes but varying “the nature of the rhythm”, finds new melodies or chords to play for his listeners. “In the same way,” evidently in analogical language, creative Wisdom came down to give the creation a new form, and creation readily obeyed by putting itself at the service of God’s saving plans for his people. The elements remain the same but the agreement with which the creative Wisdom harmonizes them changes and they give life to new effects. History changes because nature, a powerful ally of its Creator, allows itself to be harmonized in a new way by its Maker. This should be, among the many truths enshrined in the text, the constant work that a man, inspired, supported, and guided by this same Wisdom, exercises on creation. Harmonious innovation is a natural vocation inherent in creation and also in man. Nevertheless, within the man this vocation can only be accomplished through the supernatural help of the light of revelation and the regenerative action of grace,8 as we will see. Today some people want to make us believe that the events narrated about the history of the Patriarchs and the slavery in Egypt, as they do not have numerous documentary evidence, and only one account in the biblical narrative, should be placed in the category of “myth”. In reality, a history such as that of the people of Israel cannot be explained in any way by the sole power of myth. Myth has no history or is an idealization of history. A faith without history is not faith, in the biblical sense, but a very simple belief like many others that are present in the history of men and that do not change, if not for the worse, the history of men. These beliefs cannot withstand the violent impact of history with its vicissitudes and dramas, nor can they determine those historical turning points of liberation that are the creative interventions of this creative, ordering, and liberating Wisdom. Above all, they do not have the strength to create those human profiles that stand out in the history of men, typical of the history of Israel and, in a substantially different and even more elevated way, typical of the history of the Church.9 8

These aspects must refer to a recent study that delves into them in a timely manner: see R. carrabetta, Istanze cristologiche della teoria della lex naturae di Tommaso d’Aquino [Christological instances of the theory of the lex naturae of Thomas Aquinas] (Ph.D. dissertation in Theology—Abstracts), Pontificia Facoltà Teologica dell’Italia Meridionale—Section St. Thomas Aquinas, Naples 2018, in part pp. 154ff. 9 To give just a few examples, I am thinking of the reconstruction that Ben Sira, a wise man of Israel, makes of these “illustrious men” in the book of Sirach (see ch. 44–50); I am thinking of the work of Saint Jerome, which follows in the footsteps of this author (see jerome, Gli uomini illustri [Illustrious Men] [Patristic library], edited by A. Ceresa Gastaldo, Dehoniane, Bologna 1988), as well as the great work of Saint Gregory the Great (gregory the great, Storie di santi e di diavoli [Saints and Sinners], vols. 1–2 [Lorenzo Valla Foundation], edited by S. Pricoco and M. Simonetti, Mondadori, Milan 2005).

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The witnesses of this truth are the same “magicians of Egypt”—men of science and intellectual honesty—who, before the third plague with which the God of Israel was accrediting himself as the true Creator of creation to Pharaoh, who considered himself a god, affirm: Then the Lord said to Moses, “Tell Aaron, ‘Stretch out your staff and strike the dust of the ground,’ and throughout the land of Egypt the dust will become gnats.” They did this, and when Aaron stretched out his hand with the staff and struck the dust of the ground, gnats came on people and animals. All the dust throughout the land of Egypt became gnats. But when the magicians tried to produce gnats by their secret arts, they could not. Since the gnats were on people and animals everywhere, the magicians said to Pharaoh, ‘This is the finger of God!’ But Pharaoh’s heart was hard and he would not listen, just as the Lord had said (Ex 8:12-15).10

If, on the one hand, nature allows itself to be harmonized in a new way, “allying” itself with its Creator, the Wise God, for serving the people He has chosen, and through whom He has chosen to manifest Himself to the world, on the other hand, it does not obey the obstinate stupidity of Pharaoh who uses the human work of his magicians to try to confront the work of Moses and Aaron, through whom he acts with a very different force on creation.11 This is not a fact of marginal importance: nature does not allow itself to be governed by those who are not in harmony with its Lord and Creator, and if certain “modifications” take place and their production is not in harmony with the purpose that creative wisdom has placed in the natural elements (a problem of harmonic ethics), it will not be of true innovation and therefore will not be of authentic benefit to man. Only harmonic innovation can benefits the man and only ethical innovation is harmonic.

10

In previous passages the sacred text had used other expressions for the previous plagues: “Pharaoh then summoned wise men and sorcerers, and the Egyptian magicians also did the same things by their secret arts” (Ex 7:11); “But the Egyptian magicians did the same things by their secret arts” (Ex 7:22); “But the Egyptian magicians did the same things by their secret arts; they also made frogs come up on the land of Egypt” (Ex 8:3). See L. mazzinghi, Notte di paura e di luce. Esegesi di Sap 17,1–18,4 [Night of fear and light. Exegis of Sap 17,1–18,4] (Analecta Biblica—Investigationes scientificae in res biblicas, 134), Pontificio Istituto Biblico, Rome 1995, in part. 98ss. (“The topic of the Egyptian magicians in the context of the Exodic account of the plagues appears for the first time in Ex 7:11; the “magicians” are summoned by Pharaoh together with the “wise men” and the “sorcerers”. In this passage the text of Ex explicitly states that even magicians are able to produce phenomena similar to those performed by Moses and Aaron. In fact, they make use of their ‘secret arts’ (lh¸tyhm) that produce the same effect as Aaron’s staff. The fact that Aaron’s staff devours their staffs is a sign of their superiority over the magicians, who are nonetheless accorded a certain power. This element is very important in the context of the entire narrative of the plagues. The presence of the magicians, in fact, and the partial effectiveness of their action underline an event of great theological significance. The magical act may possibly be effective, but it is still limited; it will be necessary for the magicians themselves to recognize, as in Ex 8:14–15, the presence of the The Finger of God”, ibid., pp. 98–99). 11 “The actions performed by him [Moses] go beyond their [the magicians’] magical art, for they are not human in nature but divine”, L. mazzinghi, Notte di paura e di luce. Esegesi di Sap 17,1–18,4, p. 101 [Night of fear and light. Exegis of Sap 17:1–18:4, p. 101.].

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It is no coincidence that the exit of the magicians will be evident at the sixth plague12 and Pharaoh’s defeat will be total due to the obstinacy of his pride. Not only did he “not listen to them [the magicians]” (Ex 9:12), opening himself to the mystery of transcendence that was manifesting itself in history in favor of the people of Israel, but he was obstinate in wanting to “compete” with the Lord of creation, believing he could enslave creation to his pride, believing that what Moses was doing, with the “finger of God”, was within his reach. The Lord operates the plagues so that Pharaoh is convinced that he is not God and does not govern anything in creation, but he also sends Moses to explain the reason of that story that Pharaoh stubbornly does not want to understand: “…so that you may know that there is no one like me in all the earth” (Ex 9:14). The epilogue of this story is dramatic. What has been made possible for Israel by a nature that is not hostile to it, by divine command, will not be so for Pharaoh. He, his chariots, and his army, stubbornly led to cross a sea that the Lord would not have made crossable for them, will end up buried in those waters. In fact, at the passage of the latter, nature will manifest its properties again: “The water flowed back and covered the chariots and horsemen—the entire army of Pharaoh that had followed the Israelites into the sea. Not one of them survived. (Ex 14,28; see also Wis 19,1ff.). Another truth that the text wants to teach is the following: it is true harmonic ethics to respect the laws of nature, that is, those laws placed by the Creator in his own creation. They are not to be challenged. Nature will never obey the foolish, the proud and the ignorant. For harmonic ethics man will be wise and therefore a true innovator if he will obey the laws of nature inscribed in creation by its Maker. Even if, after knowing them, he senses that they may be “governed”, harmonized, in a new order, in a new harmony that accords the elements in a different way, he must always be guided by wisdom, never losing the purpose for which things were made. This will not be beneficial for man, even though the bad consequence of the human being acting on it may not immediately appear. Innovating can never coincide with distorting or, using legal language, changing the “intended use” of the created element. In this regard, precisely because of the ethical disharmony that reigns today, the examples of disharmonious innovation would be countless. Without wisdom, the innovator will never be a harmonious innovator. Harmonic ethics will have to “govern” every area and every dimension of harmonic innovation. But this requires wisdom, and wisdom has a very precise source. It is a true gift that descends from above: The source of wisdom is the word of God in the heavens, its ways are the eternal commandments. Who was the root of wisdom revealed to? And who knows its fineness? Who was what wisdom teaches manifested to? Who understands its great experience? One alone is the wise and awe-inspiring, seated above his throne. The Lord himself created wisdom, he saw it and measured it, he poured it out on all his works, to every mortal he gave it generously, he lavished it on those who love him (Sir 1:5-10). 12

“Thus, beginning with Ex 7:11, the presence of the magicians in the account of the plagues follows a clear progression; in 7:22 and 8:3 they are successful in operating the first and second plagues, then fail in the third (8:14–15); disappearing in the next two plagues, they reappear at the sixth to emphasize their ultimate defeat (9:11),” idem, p. 99.

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Since everything in creation has been imbued with wisdom, in order for man to enter into harmony with the wisdom that is in things, the Maker of creation has to reveal to him his own wisdom. And the Lord is prepared for this gift. This is why it is true foolishness not to welcome it, not to seek it, not to respect it, or worse, to challenge it. It is possible to disbelieve the law of nature by virtue of which a car, in order to correctly follow its circular motion in the setting of a curve, must constantly adapt its speed, applying a proportionate force to overcome the state of rectilinear motion to which a body in motion is subject; but if one were to believe that it was possible to disregard this law and enter a curve without respecting the appropriate speed and not applying the proportionate force to counteract the rectilinear motion, the outcome could only be the exit from the road and the coming into force of another law of nature: circular motion will have to give way to rectilinear motion. When the laws of circular motion are not observed, the exit of the car in the tangential direction will infallibly occur due to the uncontested action of centrifugal force. Even if—thinking to innovate—we create cars able to sustain circular motion at high speed, it will not be possible to challenge the laws of nature. In the same way, it is possible to innovate by moving from stone to concrete in the construction of a bridge; but the duration of stone and concrete are not equal. It is not a coincidence that centuries-old stone bridges still exist and recently built concrete bridges collapse, not for lack of innovation but for disharmonious innovation, that is, for lack of harmonious ethics: the law of nature that wants concrete to be subject to a certain amount of maintenance. One may not observe it, thinking as modern pharaohs to govern history, but it will inexorably generate its results: the collapse of the bridge will occur. It is a problem of harmonic ethics. Prudence, which is part of the furniture of wisdom, will be the only ethical path capable of always maintaining harmony even when innovation must be administered, managed, governed—over time—so that it does not backfire on man. This is why another wise man, Job, who did not belong to the people of Israel, asked himself: “Is it possible that an enemy of right should govern?” (Job 34:17). To paraphrase, we could say: Is it possible that an enemy of right should innovate? Innovation itself will have to take place within the prospect of the limit.13 When one wants to make the man believe that he is a “god”, like the Pharaoh, therefore not subject to any law, nature, and history will always “take the field” to remind man that this is not so. Nature will never ally itself with foolishness, but always and only with wisdom. Nature is ethical and therefore harmonious innovation of true wisdom.

13

I have recently addressed this topic: see N. rotundo, Verso un’ecologia economica. Riflessioni a partire dalla Laudato si’, § 141 [Towards an economic ecology. Thoughts on Laudato si’, § 141], N. rotundo (ed.), L’uomo al centro. Per un’ecologia integrata [Man at the center. For an integrated ecology], Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli 2021, pp. 9–38, in part. pp. 30ss.

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3 The Sensitive Anthropological Issue on the Grounds of Authentic Harmonic Innovation At the end of the preceding biblical excursus, I hope to have shown how the real problem of harmonic innovation lies entirely in anthropology. As I wrote, the natural vocation of the elements of creation to harmony must find, in the corresponding natural vocation of man to the wise use of creation, the completion and the tool to reveal all the potential that the Maker of creation has placed in its elements. But here the issue becomes immediately supernatural for many reasons that I cannot go into now. I will discuss some of them. I begin with an observation. All those who have come together in this editorial project of reflection depending on their scientific competencies are moved—I allow myself an interpretation in a ‘theology of history’ perspective about the event of this publication—almost by a mysterious synergy that animates and unites them in the search for something that is deeply rooted in man in the form of a secret yearning. The very fact of having discussed and related the two terms and the two corresponding realities of innovation and harmony certifies that, in their viewpoint, a disruptive process of disharmony appears evident in contemporary history, therefore underway. While, in the creation and in the very heart of man there is a powerful yearning for order, peace, and harmony, and it is this urge which, in a man of good will, does not allow him to resign himself to disharmony. Augustine of Hippo, in his Confessions, attested to having understood over time, along with his troubled search for the Truth, the powerful force that drives man inward, making his heart restless, until he reaches the goal of his desire: “fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te”.14 Therefore, as previously stated, man is called to harmony, which he lost because of sin, but on his own, without supernatural help, he cannot find his personal harmony and consequently he cannot recognize and respect the harmony that is in the creation and in things. Man’s nature is a wounded nature that needs to be re-harmonized, re-tuned and this project is fulfilled in Christ.15 When man’s restlessness, which is this natural16 and irrepressible aspiration to quiet, to peace, to harmonious order and to recompose 14 “You have made us for yourself, [O’ Lord], and our heart is restless until it rests in you,” augustine, Confessions, 1, 1, 1, in Opere di Sant’Agostino. Le Confessioni [Works of Saint Agusutin. Confessions,] Città Nuova, Rome 19753 , p. 5. 15 See c. di bruno, Legge e natura: armonia o contrasto? [Law and nature: harmony or conflict?] in f. brancaccio- - - d. concolino (edited by.), La persona crocevia dei saperi [The person as meeting point of knowledge], Tau, Todi 2012, 195–218; and I would like to refer again to some aspects already dealt with previously: N. rotundo, Il lavoro nella dottrina sociale: cristificare il cristiano per rendere efficiente il lavoro e l’economia [Work in social doctrine: Christify the Christian to make work and economy efficient] in f. del pizzo - a. gargiulo (edited by.), Teologia, economia e lavoro. Per un umanesimo della fraternità [Theology, economy and work. For a Humanism of Fraternity], Il pozzo di Giacobbe, Trapani 2020, pp. 113–134, in part. pp. 123ss. 16 “Anyone who in any way considers human facts and common natural feeling [naturamque communem intuetur] admits with me this truth; for just as there is no one who does not want to enjoy, so there is no one who does not want to have peace […sicut enim nemo est qui gaudere

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himself in God, is not supported in the last instance, the restlessness becomes a torment for man. The delicate anthropological balance is the highest risk factor determining disharmony in creation. Man is already in itself a special creature in the visible creation. He is in a constant search for harmony and therefore in a constant becoming and in a constant need that the help of wisdom and grace—which by a non-predetermined will he can close himself to—supports him so that he does not lose the goal of his pilgrimage. If he loses this goal, then he misses the harmonious use of creation. This is how Augustine expresses this truth in his De Civitate Dei: God, then, the infinitely wise Creator and infinitely just Orderer of all beings, who has constituted mankind in the becoming as the greatest of earthly values, has granted mankind certain goods appropriate to this life, that is, peace in time in accordance with life in the becoming through the health, survival and solidarity of its species and all the means that are indispensable to defend and regain this peace. For example, these are those objects that are adequately and conveniently available to the senses: light, sound, air to breathe, water to drink and everything that is suitable for nourishing, covering, caring for and beautifying the body. And this in the very reasonable understanding that whoever has used these goods correctly in the becoming, proportionate to the peace of beings placed in the becoming, will obtain other considerably more important goods, that is, peace outside of the becoming and the glory and honor corresponding to it in eternal life in order to be happy with God and one’s neighbor in God; whoever, on the other hand, will have used them wrongly [qui autem perperam] will not obtain those goods and will lose them.17

The right use (harmonic ethics) of creation is for the man himself a source of peace and harmony, as well as an aid is given to the creation so that it enters the fullness of its development. This use will allow man to achieve his eternal peace or eternal harmony in the Heavenly City, which is the true purpose of the right use of goods that are subject to the becoming. Following Augustine’s suggestions, the perspective of harmonic innovation is linked in a radical ontological way, I dare to say, to the supernatural vocation and the eternal end that awaits man in Christ. All of creation that surrounds man—even if in a state of becoming—if used correctly (harmonic ethics), will allow him to enter into the mystery of the fullness of his being, of his harmony, which is called to be fulfilled in a transcendent dimension but is staggeringly linked to the historical and time dimension of his existence. The pursuit of man’s ultimate goal (to dwell in God, in the heavenly Jerusalem) is subject to the influence of a number of intermediate goals, all of which are linked to the harmonious or right use of created goods and therefore linked to time and to everything that man is called to live in it. This is the reason why—I would like to reiterate once again—experimental knowledge will not be sufficient for the man to be the main character of harmonious innovation. The latter is essentially linked to the project of God the Creator on both man and creation. Furthermore, harmonic innovation is linked to the ultimate and transcendent goal to which man is destined in Christ Jesus. In this horizon, harmonic nolit, ita nemo est qui pacem habere nolit]”, augustine, The City of God, 19, 12.1, in Opere di Sant’Agostino. La città di Dio/III [Works of Saint Augustine. The City of God /III], p. 45. 17 agostino, La Città di Dio, XIX, 13.2, in Opere di Sant’Agostino. La città di Dio/III. [augustine, The City of God, XIX, 13.2, in Saint Augustine. Works. The City of God /III], p. 53.

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ethics, which is necessary for the right use of creation, becomes essential to achieve that innovation that will allow the man to fulfill those instrumental designs that God has on creation itself. In this sense, from my standpoint, the sentence contained in the book of Revelation (“And He who was seated on the throne said, ‘I am making everything new!’, Rev 21:5), instead of being understood in an exclusive eschatological capacity, must be persistently reported in a purely temporal and creationist aspect. Christ, in his absolute Lordship over creation and history, came and is coming to make first of all the new man and also to make creation new, through the new man. This mystery is accomplished, evidently, through the will of man, as Augustine recalls: “He who created you without you will not justify you without you”.18 Therefore, man necessarily needs this sapiential knowledge of himself and of creation, and he also needs the help of grace that comes from Christ,19 through the mediation of the Church, so that he can know and fulfill his mystery and the mystery still enclosed in creation. On these two aids rely the right use (harmonic ethics) and consequently harmonic innovation, both necessary to the man for the achievement of his ultimate goal of blessedness in the heavenly Jerusalem. It is possible to understand that the harmonic innovation to which man is necessarily called (harmonic ethics), in the light of the path taken, ceases to be a natural fact sic et simpliciter linked to experimental knowledge. Even before Augustine, Irenaeus of Lyon (Father of the Church of the second century), admonished the Gnostics to welcome in the creation the mystery of harmony sown in it by the Creator and exceeding the possibilities of human reason; for this reason, he invited men in general and the Gnostic heretics in particular, to clothe themselves with humility to pursue the search of the truth at every level.20 If human restlessness does not meet creative wisdom, it happens that the mind oversteps its boundaries, imagining what is not and giving to this anxiety of fulfillment concerning both the person and the creation; solutions that introduce the individual and the creation itself in processes of serious, and sometimes irremediable, disharmony. After all, it would not be possible otherwise, if one values as true the statement in the book of Wisdom which reports: May God grant me to speak with judgment, and to have thoughts worthy of what I have received, for he is the guide even of wisdom and the corrector of the wise. For both we and our words are in his hand, as are all understanding and skill in crafts. For it is he who gave me unerring knowledge of what exists, to know the structure of the world and the activity of the elements, the beginning and end and middle of times, the alternations of the solstices and the changes of the seasons, the cycles of the year and the constellations of the stars, the natures of animals and the tempers of wild animals, the powers of spirits and the thoughts of human beings, the varieties of plants and the virtues of roots. I learned both what is secret and what is manifest, for wisdom, the fashioner of all things, taught me (Wis 7:15-21). 18

Discorso, 169.11.13. See R. carrabetta, Istanze cristologiche della teoria della lex naturae di Tommaso d’Aquino [Christological instances of the theory of the lex naturae of Thomas Aquinas], pp. 157ss. 20 See irenaeus of lyon, Adversus Haereses [Against Heresies], II, §§ 25,1–28,9 (320), Jaca Book, Milan 2003, pp. 183–192. 19

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These assumptions are the basis through which the sacred Author can say: “Indeed, even if somebody might be thought of as perfect, this person is nothing without your wisdom” (Wis 9:6). Outside the reception of wisdom, man acts “against nature,” precludes himself from the source of true knowledge, and cannot lead creation toward harmonious development or innovation, because he does not know the purpose for which things were made and does not participate in that wisdom which is “the worker of all things [omnium artifex]” (Wis 7:21). The Gnostics against whom Irenaeus writes, since they are wrong in their understanding of the Scriptures, are also mistaking in their understanding of creation, and they overflow into an imagination that puts them in disharmony with themselves, with creation, with the Church, and with the Trinity. Yet they boast that they have knowledge that makes them perfect. Today, this risk seems to affect man in a very widespread way. Even to our days, this “Gnostic imagination” is the real cause of the disharmony in the world. As I wrote, this presumed knowledge—the human mind that wants to give consistency to things in a creative impetus that is in opposition to creative Wisdom—boasted and almost ostentatiously displayed is the first and most profound problem of harmonic ethics that man faces and that should be addressed. By not solving it, man precludes himself from true harmonic innovation because he has not entered into harmony with the source of wisdom. Source from which all creation has not only received an embryonic shape but also needs to receive a comprehensive series of intermediate shapes while waiting for the creation itself and the man to achieve their ultimate shape.21 For this reason, the Gnostic imagination is the exact opposite of the spiritual intelligence or of the sapiential knowledge mentioned at the beginning, which can be proper only to those who humbly allow themselves to be enlightened on the mystery of creation by the One who was its Maker. The alternative will be that, instead of grasping the truth that is in things themselves and in the wisdom that made them, of wanting to give things meanings and purposes that they do not have. It is at this point that crises begin at every level: economic, urban, ecological, juridical, social, and cultural. God, the Maker of creation, has the right to enlighten man so that he may enter into the authentic knowledge of his mystery and of the mystery that dwells within the creation, therefore, I use the words of Chrysostom once again to give an idea of the damage that not recognizing Wisdom can cause: Paul said, ‘Evil communications corrupt good manners’. For this cause we have need continually of those songs, which serve as charms from the Spirit. Yes, for this it is whereby we excel the irrational creatures, since with respect to all other things, we are even exceedingly inferior to them. This is a soul’s food, this its ornament, this its security; even as not to hear is famine and wasting. [...] From words come ruin and salvation: for one word provokes anger, another calms it; an unseemly word inflames desire, while a speech full of decorum leads to temperance. If, tell me, words have such great power, why do you despise the Scriptures? 21

Augustine describes this ultimate end or shape as the peace or supreme good that man will enjoy only in the heavenly City, see augustine, The City of God, 9, 10–11, in Opere di Sant’Agostino. La città di Dio/III [St. Augustine. Works. The City of God/III], pp. 41–45.

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N. Rotundo If an exhortation has so great a force, this occurs many more when the exhortations are accompanied by the Spirit. For the word that resounds from the divine Scriptures softens the hardened soul more than fire and makes it fit for every good work. [...] Let us thus form servants, children, wives, and friends, and make friends of enemies; thus great men became better, and friends of God. [...] Let us therefore not despise the reading of the divine Scriptures. This is proper to a diabolical mind that does not let us see the treasure so that we do not acquire its riches. Therefore he says that the reading of the divine laws is worth nothing, so as not to see the realization of the works that for us springs from listening.22

This is the “focus” of my contribution. And I believe the issue deserves further attention and considerable in-depth study. The work that would result from listening to this treasure of wisdom contained in the Scriptures, along with the treasures of grace that dwell in the heart of the Church,23 would open up to artists, craftsmen, thinkers, engineers, architects, urban planners, sculptors, scientists, jurists, and lovers of every science and art in general, not only a harmonious use of creation but also its correct development under the banner of a wise innovation. Chrysostom’s exhortation would be pertinent in its actuality: Let us form our scientists in this way and make our enemies friends of wisdom; thus great men became better, and friends of God. Only the wise man—of revealed wisdom—can be a harmonious innovator, because he will be an ethical innovator.

4 Conclusions The search for a harmonic innovation “betrays”, in a way that is perhaps not entirely conscious, that natural vocation to harmony, which lies in the very depth of man’s being and of creation itself, to which, however, man cannot correspond without supernatural help. The task of this contribution of mine has been to indicate, to suggest, the supernatural way of wisdom and ethics, clearly related to Christ and the Holy Spirit, who together with the Father, are the tangible “face” of this way, as the only possible solution for a harmonic innovation. Theology has this task. And here it stops. If these pages have succeeded at least to a minor extent to give a glimpse of the problem that the texts have helped us to raise, it will be up to the reader’s goodness to evaluate it, but this was our intent.

22

john chrysostom, Omelie sul vangelo di Matteo/1 [Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew/1], p. 64. 23 See irenaeus of lyon, Adversus Haereses [Against Heresies], III, §§ 24,1, pp. 183–192.

Scholars of Innovation Are not at Ease with the Notion of Harmonic Innovation. Do We Need Harmonic Innovation? Andrea Bonaccorsi

1 Introduction Scholars of innovation are not at ease with the notion of harmonic innovation. The founder of the economics of innovation, in fact, explained that innovation entails a process of creative destruction, in which old technologies are substituted by new ones. Companies that do not adapt to innovation are eliminated by the innovators, and workers who do not acquire new skills lose their job. There is no way to anticipate the specific consequences of this process, because innovation is not predictable. We only observe that the losses are more than compensated by the gains, that lost jobs are much less frequent, and usually less paid, than the jobs created in entirely new industries, by new companies. But there is no such thing as harmonic innovation: there is instead conflict between the old and the new. There will be competition among firms, and ultimately there will be selection, with winners and losers. No harmony whatsoever. No equilibrium, but rather disequilibrium. This is probably an important reason why the economics of innovation have not been well received in mainstream economic thought. For mainstream economists, the disequilibrium is always a temporary phenomenon. Given the existence of an equilibrium, for example between supply and demand, and the uniqueness of this equilibrium, which is the subject of rigorous demonstration, it is clear that economic forces will keep the system out of the temporary state and move it towards the final state of equilibrium. It is true that standard economic theory is often silent about the actual timing of adjustment, which is to say, the cost of adjustment. Therefore, there is no place whatsoever for the concept of harmonic innovation. Scholars of innovation, following Schumpeter, are sceptical about the possibility of innovations that are based on the agreement of all parties involved. Standard economists do not see the need for a new concept, in addition to equilibrium. After A. Bonaccorsi (B) Department of Energy, Systems, Territory and Construction Engineering, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Cicione et al. (eds.), Harmonic Innovation, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems 282, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81190-7_3

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all, economic theory predicts that in the final state of equilibrium, there will indeed be harmony in a technically well-defined sense (after Pareto), i.e. there will be no incentive for anyone to leave the state of equilibrium. Therefore, why bother with a new and fuzzy concept? Equilibrium is conceptually well defined, measurable and well established in the theory. Harmony is a romantic term. So, do we need harmonic innovation at all?

2 When Schumpeter Met Keynes. The Golden 1990s Before answering this question, it is useful to place the discussion in historical terms. In fact, while the theoretical integration of innovation within the framework of economics has been problematic, as noted above, there has been a convergence in the intellectual climate and the policy implications that took place in the 1990s. The full history of the role of economic theorising in innovation and economic policies in the last three decades has not yet been described in full. My personal reconstruction is as follows. The 1980s were dominated by the efforts to curb inflation that had exploded in the previous decade after the oil shocks. The right-wing governments of Ronald Reagan in the USA and Margaret Thatcher in the UK adopted monetarist policies, increasing interest rates and cutting public spending, with the main exception being military expenditure. The rise in interest rates created huge problems for middleincome and poor countries that had taken large debts in dollars. The turbulence in international financial markets was addressed by imposing on debtor countries a tight fiscal discipline, called the Washington consensus, based on flexible exchange rates, reducing public expenditure and deficit and liberalising the economy. The situation changed significantly in the 1990s. In most advanced countries, the political elections were won by progressive elites: Bill Clinton in the USA (1993– 2001), Tony Blair in the UK (1997–2007), Gerhard Schröder in Germany (1998– 2005), and Romano Prodi in Italy and then at the European Commission (1999–2004). They had good arguments for reversing their opponents’ policies. The main problem for the US economy was how to reduce interest rates without creating new inflation. Inflation is generated because the increase in aggregate demand is not matched by a corresponding increase in the supply, so that all prices tend to increase together. In turn, when consumers create the expectations that prices do increase, they anticipate their purchases, creating exactly what they try to avoid, which is a general increase in prices. This increase in prices, according to standard economic theory, is due to decreasing returns: the more the economy becomes close to full employment, the more plants are utilised and workers are fully employed. If you want to produce more, you must be prepared to saturate the plants in an inefficient way and pay workers more of a salary, which results in rapidly increasing costs. But what about the possibility of not having decreasing returns? What about increasing returns?

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The idea of increasing returns has always been considered by economic theory with suspicion. One important example of increasing returns is the existence of economies of scale, whereby large plants are more efficient than small plants. This idea has traditionally been accepted as a special case, while generally the main idea is that returns to scale are constant, that is, there is no intrinsic advantage in becoming big. And now comes the big idea: innovation is the source of increasing returns. By introducing more innovation into the economic system, we will see an increase in total factor productivity, namely the amount of output per unit of time that is generated by the combination of capital and labour. In turn, the increase in productivity will make it possible to expand liquidity and reduce interest rates without generating inflation. There will no longer be the threat of inflation that will limit governments’ expansionary fiscal policies. What are the origins of this idea? In the 1990s, several authors and institutions added strong credibility to this idea. Paul Romer, who won the Nobel Prize, published a classic article which mathematically explained that the productive use of knowledge is not subject to decreasing returns. Quite the contrary, investing into Research and Development will permanently lead to larger productivity, because knowledge is an unconventional production factor, one whose productivity increases with use. Contrary to machines, that are subject to physical deterioration with use, knowledge generates more results the more it is used productively. Philippe Aghion developed a full scale macroeconomic model in which R&D investment generates increasing returns, that are appropriated by companies but then eroded by competitors. In turn, evolutionary economics, which started in the 1980s as an alternative framework to the mainstream, thanks to Nelson and Winter, continued to produce theoretical arguments in favour of disequilibrium as a central feature of modern economic systems. To sum up, in the 1990s there was an entire intellectual climate that favoured the combination of expansionary macroeconomic policies and an emphasis on innovation. This climate was strongly confirmed by the data: the 1990s saw an impressive growth of investment from firms in new technologies, particularly in Information and Communication Technology, namely telecommunication and computer networks and the Internet. At the end of the decade, a huge bubble of start-ups and new ventures associated with Internet Technology was created, which ended only with the Wall Street crisis on 10 March 2000. Alan Greenspan, the Governor of the Federal Reserve in the 1987–2006 period, formulated this idea in a sharp way: with the advent of the Internet, we see a new production function. In less technical jargon, this means that each factor of production (say, one hour of a worker, or one dollar spent on a machine) will produce permanently more than before. The output will grow without the need to increase production costs. The implication is that there is no longer a significant risk of inflation. Aggregate demand might grow without the fear of generating price increases. It is this belief that explains why, after a decade of high interest rates, the 1990s saw a systematic and large decrease, down to a historical minimum level. This was the best possible scenario for progressive political elites: low interest rates and large public expenditure would bring the economy to its potential and reduce unemployment and

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inequality. These elites were generationally and culturally open to new technologies. The Clinton presidency saw huge public investment in the Information superhighway, which was championed and popularised by Vice President Al Gore (1993– 2001). Tony Blair significantly increased UK expenditure in R&D and launched several initiatives aimed at adopting and diffusing new technologies. Romano Prodi promoted the Lisbon strategy in 2000, by which all European countries should reach the goal of 2% ratio between R&D expenditure and GDP by 2010. There were three main pillars to these experiences. First, a strong belief in the virtue of innovation as a catalyst for change, a source of permanent increase in productivity and the generation of opportunities for all. Second, the idea that finance is a necessary fuel for innovation, so that financial markets should be left relatively free to allocate resources where the opportunities were available. Instead of the rigid and regulated financial markets of the 1970s, it would be better to open up opportunities. Third, investment in education and human capital was considered crucial. People improve their standard of living and their opportunities by investing in more and better education. This is the meaning of meritocracy, another pillar of progressive policies: we need to give people incentives to make more of an effort towards their education. While these ideas are powerful, and mostly well-grounded in theory and practice, they are incomplete. Something went wrong. After 30 years of experience, we see better their limitations. It is by examining these failures that we understand better why the idea of harmonic innovation is perhaps less naive than it might seem on first glance.

3 Why Did Schumpeter not Meet Hal Varian? The first problem is with the idea of innovation. The waves of innovation that were introduced in the 1990s—Internet, social media, Artificial intelligence and Industry 4.0—are ultimately rooted in the digital revolution: first applied to separate devices, then to global networks. The initial periods of development of Information and Communications Technology were characterised by an explosion of entrepreneurial activities. The cultural environment of Silicon Valley, as described by several sociologists and historians of technology, was anarchic, anti-hierarchical and libertarian. Technology was seen as a way to free society from the constraints of the past and the weight of heavy and bureaucratic organisations. Ingenious entrepreneurs could build up a fortune in a few years without depending on established connections and the structures of economic power. Based on this cultural background, there was demand for the political environment to set innovation free, that is, to avoid political interference and strict regulation. Innovation is good per se. This vision was entirely consistent with the Schumpeterian view. The innovators are not subject to the ordinary rules of competition: because they introduce new products or services first, they enjoy a monopoly. They charge higher prices

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for their innovative products and enjoy monopolistic profits. How can the idea of monopolistic profits be accepted by standard economic theory, which has traditionally condemned monopolist positions as inefficient and socially wasteful? The key is the Schumpeterian idea that innovators enjoy monopolistic profits only in a temporary way. The innovators are themselves subject to the competition of other new entrants, which introduce other new products and destroy the rent of the incumbents. Creative destruction takes no prisoners. Profits are not forever. It can be said that it is exactly the temporary nature of monopolistic profits that makes innovation largely accepted in standard economic theory. Here is the first thing that went wrong. After two decades, we can see that digital innovation is dominated by a few very large companies, now known as GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft). Some were born in the 1970s (Microsoft and Apple), but the others in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Google, Facebook and Amazon). They started as small ingenious start-up companies but became enormously profitable monopolistic companies. It is well known that their capitalisation exceeds a trillion dollars in some cases, larger than the GDP of many countries. Their profit margins are outliers in equity markets. While they have largely contributed to the introduction of radically new technologies, there is currently agreement on the notion that they are too large and too powerful. A number of controversies in the last few years have raised the issue of their attitude towards ethical issues, discretionary power, their approach to consumers and tax contributions. How has this been possible? While there are several factors, I argue that a key point has been the inability of economic thought on innovation to deal with the specific features of digital innovation. These features were clearly outlined by Hal Varian at the end of the 1990s: digital production is unlike manufacturing production. In digital production, there are huge fixed costs but negligible marginal costs. For example, Microsoft must employ thousands of computer scientists and engineers for many years to produce a new operating system, with an expenditure of a million or perhaps a billion dollars. Once Windows is in place, however, Microsoft has no additional costs in selling it under licence. Once it has broken even, it gains enormous profits. The same can be said for Apple’s App Store, Amazon’s logistics platform, or Google’s and Facebook’s software platforms. Consequently, these companies have the tendency to expand their market share to the maximum possible level, and therefore are inherently monopolistic. This argument must include the issue of network externality, identified in the 1990s by a few industrial economists. The idea is that consumers obtain advantages by digital technologies not only as a function of their technical performance (say, the quality of the telephone call or the speed of the search engine), but most importantly as a function of the number of other customers connected to the network. In other words, the more people who are on Facebook, the more likely to find friends, the more enjoyment in sharing one’s page. Or, the more book sellers there are on Amazon, the better it is for the book buyer. Even more intriguingly, the more book buyers on Amazon, the more book sellers have the incentive to display their books on Amazon, and not other online bookstores. Consequently, when a monopolistic position has

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been attained, there are strong economic arguments to predict that the position will remain permanent. Schumpeter did not meet Varian. Economists and politicians who promoted Schumpeter in the 1990s and beyond have not been careful in anticipating Varian’s predictions by regulating the digital markets in due time. They have been too optimistic. Now these companies behave like political authorities, with power conferred not by political legitimation but by market success. They have actively shaped the legal environment (doctrine, legislation, jurisprudence) in order to create conceptual categories that are favourable to their business. Any change advocated by governments and public opinion is now inherently more difficult, painful and expensive.

4 On Intimidation The elites that I am describing have been not only optimistic with respect to technology and innovation, but they were also ready to accept science as a leading authority in social affairs. Through education and political orientation, they praised science as their source of orientation. As already stated, the history of relations between scientific developments and policy making has been described mainly with respect to a few fields (namely, life sciences and environmental issues). My contention here is that something wrong took place in the relations with finance. The field of finance has been a traditional body of knowledge for all government-level policy makers, who however used a toolbox with minimal mathematical content. Finance underwent a major scientific overhaul with the injection of mass mathematical treatment, in particular probability theory and stochastic processes, which started with the Black–Scholes theorem (1973) at the beginning of the 1997 Nobel Prize. This body of theory ensures that agents can rationally give a prize to any future or uncertain event, whatever their nature and associated degree of knowledge. In financial markets, fully informed agents can exchange financial instruments whose value depend on whatever current or future goods. Within a few years, this theory generated a huge market for derivatives, with no limits in terms of volume. The underlying strongly held belief was that if an exchange takes place, it must be assumed that agents are doing what is in their maximum interest given their state of information. Therefore, there is no need to regulate these markets, which is what occurs for more traditional markets such as banking or the stock exchange. The operators in derivative markets are fully informed, professional and rational agents. Based on the prestige of these scientific achievements and the intimidating role of mathematical treatment, financial operators obtained special treatment from policy makers: their operations were drastically deregulated in the 1990s under the Clinton presidency after strong pressure from Lawrence Summers, the Treasury Minister. The reservations of other members of the Clinton Administration were rapidly marginalised.

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Without public regulation, the financial operators started to issue huge volumes of derivatives, building up pyramids of assets whose value was not linked to any real value in the economic system, but to the concatenation of calculations by financial agents. The end of the real estate bubble in USA in 2007 and the financial crisis in 2008 showed that the volume of the derivatives was simply too large (more than ten times the GDP of the entire planet!) and the calculation of risks ignored the existence of systematic risk, or the rare combination of low probability events. Science may fail, as all scientists know. But in this case the elites were too ready to leave experimentation free on a large scale, with no prudential rules. They were keen to buy into the argument that science may drive the rational behaviour of agents, without considering potential limitations and unexpected events. It was hubris, not prudence. It is not only that the financial sector was responsible for the 2008 crisis. It is that it created a volume of financial instruments that had no link with the real economy and was driven mainly by the search for returns. The large amount of liquidity created by Greenspan in the 1990s inflated the process because investors were looking for high return opportunities and found them in the derivative markets. Another negative implication is that the financial sector now pays exceedingly high salaries and compensation to its management. The French economist Thomas Philippon has shown that, despite impressive technological progress that has reduced the costs of managing financial transactions, the share of GDP that goes to financial intermediaries has systematically increased over the last few decades. Most of it goes to profits for shareholders. The high rates of return for investors and the rich salaries and benefits for top managers spill over into other industries, raising the expectations of shareholders and talented employees. A crucial point here is that the growth of financial markets—and therefore the growth of profits and salaries for top positions—has no boundaries. The failure of governments to source better financial market regulation is the second reason why we now are more worried about the claim that any innovation is good per se. Financial innovation, based on apparently sound science, has created imbalances that are now exceedingly difficult to correct. An example of this is story of what happened after the 2008 crisis with the Obama presidency, another eight-year period of progressive leadership. In his celebrated book, The Promised Land, Obama honestly reports on the critiques that several economists have raised—that financial markets were not better regulated after the crisis—but argues that better regulation was not politically feasible. After the 2008 crisis, and considering the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and other highly successful government initiatives, there was simply no space for embarking on a major reform of the international financial system.

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5 The Race Between Education and Technology (and the Limits of Meritocracy) The third pillar of the innovation wisdom of the 1990s was the strong belief that education was a sufficient condition for promoting opportunities for all and reducing inequalities. This was in fact true in Western societies for the mass waves of higher education up until the 1970s. On a theoretical basis, it is confirmed by the standard theory of production: the remuneration of production factors is fully determined by their marginal productivity. To increase the share of wages, there is a simple rule: increase the marginal productivity of work, in other words, improve the human capital via education. So what went wrong here? At least three phenomena that were not understood before. First, globalisation has made it possible for companies to offshore production plants in low salary countries. As noted by Acemoglu, this equates to having not two factors of production, but three: capital, domestic labour and foreign labour. Companies can protect the share of profits by shifting the production between domestic and foreign workers, placing them into competition. As a matter of fact, the share of profits over value added has significantly increased, leading to more inequality. Second, in digital production the productivity of employees is extremely high, but only for a very small share of highly qualified workers. There is no spill over of productivity onto low skill workers (or limited spill over, according to Enrico Moretti). This means that for a large share of workers, the benefits of innovation are limited. Finally, the relation between investment in education and economic opportunities is no longer direct if there is a mismatch between skills and demand. This puts into question the role of meritocracy, or the belief that investing into education has a large rate of return in terms of career and opportunities. Again, there has been an increase in inequality. These phenomena have cast doubt on the simple emphasis placed on individual merit, even among those (including myself) who believe that merit is a fundamental principle in democratic societies. Things are more complex than that.

6 Conclusions The main assumptions of the 1990s were largely correct. Innovation and education are indeed the main determinants of prosperity. Functioning markets are an essential ingredient of growth. But these assumptions were severely flawed and incomplete. There is the need to reformulate an economic agenda for the next three decades. I see the notion of harmonic innovation as a useful way to rethink some of the assumptions that underlie the common wisdom about innovation, and hence policymaking. Below I will outline just a few points for further analysis.

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First, we need a new legal framework to consider the role of Big Tech in the innovation process. So far, most of the attention has been given to the implications of digitalisation in terms of privacy, democracy and taxation. I see the need to rethink the old notion of rent as a constitutive element of the production process of digital goods and services. Rent is the remuneration of fixed factors, such as land or real estate. Big Tech utilises a global fixed factor—the world population. It makes large profits because it does not compensate the world population for rent, to which people contribute with their own use of the services. Second, we should experiment with bottom-up innovation processes based on large-scale participation from people. The common wisdom about innovation is that it is introduced by companies that take the risk of failing: they launch new products or services and observe the reaction of consumers, they do not ask their permission before. Many of the innovative processes of the future, for example those linked to sustainability, smart cities, green energy and others, cannot be introduced in the traditional Schumpeterian way. We need participatory bottom-up processes, in which the governance and sharing of risks and benefits will have to be redesigned. This is a necessary counterbalance to the recent tendency of progressive thinking to invoke the role of the State as innovator, following a top-down, mission-oriented approach. This is a politically fashionable but theoretically weak proposition. Third, we must establish the notion that education is a life-long process, the costs of which cannot be sustained by workers only. Current training systems for adults do not give sufficient incentives to people. We should consider education and training as a necessary component of human capital, to be renovated on a continuous basis. We should experiment with new forms of financing for the constitution of human capital over the entire life cycle of workers, and more generally of adults. There are many other issues, that would require additional work.

Harmonious Future. Assumptions on the Correlation Between Cooperation and Coevolution Luca De Biase

Abstract It is a difficult task to talk about harmony in a restless and complex world. All the more so when the topic is declining into the future. In this paper, the topic is addressed in the context of a pluralistic historical time that opens up to a future of alternative possibilities and a pluralistic media space that in turn serves the choice between conscious harmonic chorality or emerging in complexity. There is a set of macro-constraints that implicitly direct choice. There is an awareness of companies and organizations attempting to direct innovation in a way that takes constraints into account. There is a shared agenda narrative that can serve to bring some sort of harmonization to bear. But in the exploration of the possible, strains and conflicts are created, to some extent an alternative to harmony. The question is whether conflict or harmony tunes in over the long haul. One can imagine that the logics of history and cogent constraints may eventually reduce the possible alternatives. But innovation will not cease to reopen more of them. Therefore in the end, with harmony lasting longer than conflict, sustainable innovation will not be a historical dynamic written only in the constraints but a choice deriving not so much from a central vision but from a correlation between pluralistic dynamics that will be cooperative and co-evolutive. This could be the path to strengthen the harmonic assumption. At the bottom of the correlation between conscious cooperation and historically determined coevolution is an organization of the eco-cultural niche, in which all of this takes place, that encourages the practice of sharing an agenda over the desire to oppose interests. So coevolution becomes the new system of knowledge management which, unlike the market, is not called to get to the best allocation of resources, but to implement the most appropriate solutions for the long-term survival of the community.

1 Problems The juxtaposition of two highly problematic concepts such as “future” and “harmony” imposes a linguistic premise. This work starts from the observation that there are no L. De Biase (B) Sole24Ore - NOVA, Milano, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Cicione et al. (eds.), Harmonic Innovation, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems 282, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81190-7_4

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stable definitions of these historically dynamic concepts. In this work, therefore, we choose to use an open and pragmatic definitional system, with the goal—not necessarily intended to succeed—that the reasoning developed in these pages can withstand the change of context that this text will inevitably welcome. The future is the time of what can happen but obviously has not happened. Harmony is a kind of cooperation between a plurality of voices, in a certain media space. Putting these components together implies working at the same time on history, in the plurality of its dimensions, and on media ecology, in the complexity of its strains. The central problem is that the future is certainly a set of possibilities, but it will be the result of choices made in the present among alternative possibilities. Equally ambiguously, harmony could be imagined in relation to two very different perspectives: as the result of conscious present discernment, that is, the exercise of freedom that results in decisions and reduces alternatives; or as adaptation to the change that has occurred. Arguably, these ambiguities dissolve in history rather than in theory. But we can certainly ask ourselves if, after a more significant historical analysis than the one that we can attempt in these pages, we can arrive at identifying regularities that serve to understand what are the favorable preconditions for the design of a harmonious perspective for the future: a lasting, sustainable perspective. Can we assume that an actual infrastructure is favorable to harmony if it is open to a wide range of possibilities and an actual culture is oriented to harmony if it is able to discern the consequences of choices? We could try a sort of preventive theorization, almost an action plan, and then verify its realism in the field. Or we could try to observe what is happening and make it the reason for a subsequent theorization. Arguably, in order to maintain a pragmatic approach to the subject, reducing as much as possible the burden of prejudices, it is more fruitful to choose the second path.

2 The Consequences of the Present Any approach to the future can only start from the consideration that what will happen is a consequence of what is happening now. And what happens is partly a continuation of what has happened, and partly the choice of those who operate in the present. Choices are made within grand narratives that somehow link actions to consequences. Successful grand narratives make it easier for what they predict to come true: because if people believe them to be true and behave accordingly, they can make it more likely that events will unfold as they are narrated. Nothing is certain in any of this, of course, only probable. Well, the signs are that the fundamental narrative in which businesses operate is changing. It is entering a new paradigm. The previous one had been formed on the basis of a series of major ideological and, in part, analytical operations. At the height of the welfare era, on September 13, 1970, Milton Friedman published an article in the New York Times that was destined to enjoy a reputation that exceeded the number

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of its readers, thanks to a powerful title: “The social responsibility of companies is to increase profits”.1 Friedman criticized the hypocrisy of corporations trying to present themselves as socially useful and suggested that if they had concentrated on doing their job well it would have been better for everyone. The underlying idea was simple: the market, the greatest information system at the service of economic decisions, the best machine of resource allocation, would have created the most advantageous conditions for the social system as a whole if operators had acted rationally to maximize their own advantage. That was not a new idea. But it came at a moment in history when the comparison with Soviet communism and European social democracy apparently led to the efficiency of the market taking second place to state intervention. As we know, since then things have slowly but surely gone to the opposite extreme and between 1979 and 1980, with Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US, a process of liberalization, privatization, destructuring of intermediate bodies, and financialization would be triggered, leading to a policy aimed at replacing the state with the market in every possible space, freeing the insatiable power of capitalism. This last side effect was quite covered by the ideology—disguised with analysis—of the market. And it was probably the real goal of those who supported neoliberalism. The power of this ideology took over majority shares of Western democracies, convincing in some cases even parties of social democratic origin. But five global financial crises and forty years later, it would seem that the cycle of neo-liberal single thinking has come to an end. Although it is not yet prevalent, the turning point of the current era has rather obvious macro and micro features. From the macro point of view, it seems to be time for the recovery of another great essay of the early seventies, “The Limits of Development” (I limiti dello sviluppo), produced by the Club of Rome and MIT.2 Almost buried by the inexorable success of financial capitalism and related consumerism, the scientifically based ecological thinking seems to have found its own era, in the context of the planet’s concern about climate change, sustainability, and social polarization. Financial technocracy has given way to a majority scientifically ecological sensibility in the continent that has contributed more than any other to the destruction of the ecological balance: Europe has followed the Green New Deal narrative and is doing so with remarkable persistence. Ecological sensitivity has regained the United States thanks to the return of a civilized political class at the helm: the new president, Joe Biden, has entrusted his best partner, John Kerry, with the climate issue. The constraints of climate balance also seem to be understood by China and even India. Among the large countries, Brazil and Russia seem reluctant to decisively embrace the new course. From the point of view of macro-decisions, this change of perspective is of paramount importance. After all, the UN’s 2030 Agenda has succeeded in winning over the political debate in many countries, even if it has not yet become the decision-making roadmap needed to enable the effective achievement of its goals. However, even in the club of the world’s 1

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-ofbusiness-is-to.html. 2 https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/the-limits-to-growth/.

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most powerful, the World Economic Forum in Davos, the mantra has been renewed. We no longer have the capitalism of the stockholders—Friedman’s shareholders—but the capitalism of the stakeholders, i.e. of all those with an interest in the consequences of the actions of companies, including citizens who can legitimately demand that companies stop destroying the planet and start making serious efforts to cure it.3 There is no shortage of signs that businesses are going this way, at least on the surface. Or rather, the likelihood that companies will take a direction that is more attentive to the surrounding environment, to the quality of their social relations, and to the depth of their cultural experiences, is greatly increasing. Greenwashing itself, the hypocritical practice of pretending to be environmentalists in communication, in order to clean up one’s image without changing the substance of production practices, while being useless from a substantial point of view, proves how much the culture of respect for the ecosystem is now in the majority and influential. On the micro side, if you can call it that, a major turning point was seen with the change of course at Blackrock. This is a financial firm that manages $6.5 trillion in investments, an unimaginable amount of money that, precisely, makes the idea of microeconomics quite ridiculous. Its billionaire CEO, Laurence D. Fink, has given the company a firm turn toward sustainability, making it a condition that companies receiving funding from Blackrock must meet. The analytical idea is that, in the long run, companies that commit to the path of sustainability are more profitable than others. So there is a need to move away from the destructive obsession with efficiency on a quarterly prospect and move to a deep vision for an enduring prospect of prosperity. But, beyond this analytical consideration, the motivation for this choice is also clearly oriented towards disconnecting the image of finance from the suffering inflicted on societies halfway around the world by recurring speculative crises due to the short-sighted logic of finance stuck on “short termism”. The 2007–2008 crisis, in particular, marked the lasting end of the credibility of unscrupulous investment banks that had even achieved a certain popularity in the early years of the new millennium thanks to their apparent ability to generate economic activity by lowering the risk of debt. Appearances, however, were deceptive; and by now almost everyone knows it. So it was definitely better for Blackrock to change course.4 According to the mega consulting firm McKinsey, the best companies now give themselves a socially felt purpose and are consequential in their choices to try to pursue it.5 In the cases studied by McKinsey, the first supporters of this conscious attitude of companies are precisely their employees, who declare themselves in favor of a reduction in corporate profit if this serves to improve the social sense of the corporate project. Meanwhile, in leading companies, corporate risk management is being streamlined with a shift to a longer-term view, and attention to the interest 3

https://www.weforum.org/press/2020/01/stakeholder-capitalism-a-manifesto-for-a-cohesiveand-sustainable-world/. 4 https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/investor-relations/larry-fink-ceo-letter. 5 https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/coronavirus-leading-through-the-crisis/chartingthe-path-to-the-next-normal/be-bold-heres-how-30-top-us-companies-are-prepping-for-the-fut ure.

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of the industrial ecosystem is becoming an integral part of the strategies of leading companies. Clearly, to ensure maximum profit for shareholders to “create value” is no longer enough.6 The examples providing evidence for this observation are really too many to attempt to cite them here in full, not least because the forms in which they are pursued are not always conscious. Many companies are learning to be civically-minded citizens. But some solutions are beginning to emerge, for example, connecting corporate strategies to the vision of agencies that deal with the problems of the planet in a professional manner. Hyundai, for example, has connected its social strategy to the expertise of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).7 Hyundai and UNDP have decided to collaborate to spread awareness of the 2030 Agenda and the actions needed to achieve its goals. The co-operation program is called “For Tomorrow”.8 The idea is to identify innovative initiatives that people around the world invent in order to move towards sustainability and operationally connect them to United Nations Development Programme Accelerator Labs, institutions and companies, to grow and spread them in other territories. Another chain of solutions is found in the acceptance by corporate leadership of externally designed guidelines, designed to steer the underlying strategies of companies in the direction of some form of social awareness. This is rather like what has been done for some time on the issue of industrial quality certification, but this time in relation to the social quality of the company. Danone, for example, has chosen to be a certified B Corp by 2025. This decision was taken throughout its long growing awareness on the social and environmental impact of the production choices of large food companies. “The food industry system is wrong,” bluntly says Emmanuel Faber, CEO of Danone,9 who has been launching a program called One Planet One Health since 2017. “For the last fifty years, the food industry has worked to lower the cost of calories produced and sold to consumers. We have been successful in this endeavor. But a side effect of this strategy is the rise of obesity, diabetes, and monocultures that destroy the health of the earth.” As McKinsey reports, Danone has set challenging goals to move toward sustainability and simultaneously combat obesity and food waste while keeping the environmental impact of its production in check. In February 2020, it launched a three-year plan to accelerate innovation in relation to the climate effects of its operations worth $2.3 billion, aimed at radically changing technologies in agriculture, energy, logistics, and packaging to generate a sustainable growth path. For example, investments in innovation will have to go as far as reducing plastic use by half by its brands operating in the bottled water market and achieving carbon neutrality by 2025. “For us, the climate effect of what we do is not 6

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/organizing-for-the-fut ure-nine-keys-to-becoming-a-future-ready-company. 7 https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/news-centre/news/2020/Hyundai_and_UNDP_l aunch_for_Tomorrow_global_project_grassroots_sustainable_solutions.html. 8 https://fortomorrow.org. 9 https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/sustainability/our-insights/the-challenge-of-cli mate-change.

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an externality,” Faber says. “It’s part of the resilience of our business, so we deal with it not out of philanthropy but since it’s a smart way to do business.” The awareness that is taking place in certain companies, however, is also the result of general data; for example, on climate. The largest store on the planet, Walmart, has actually found in the data the impetus to start a major innovation program for sustainability. And it has asked its 60,000 suppliers for help. The consequences can be huge. Kathleen McLaughlin, Walmart’s chief sustainability officer, defines her business in terms of climate, nature, waste and people goals. And she thinks the pandemic has generated enormous difficulties but has also contributed to an understanding of how collective action can be powerful in addressing them. “What we’ve learned over the years and verified during the pandemic,” McLaughlin says, “is that there is no trade-off between economic prosperity, social justice, environmental sustainability. All of these goals and the dynamics that pursue them work together. And individual actions, even the smallest ones, can have a significant impact.” Walmart’s goals are to achieve zero emissions by 2040 and to use 100% energy from renewables by 2035 (Its current renewables level is 30%). In addition, the company wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from its supply chain by one gigaton (one billion tons) by 2030. That’s equal to eliminating the greenhouse gases of 211 million cars for one year, according to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calculations. So far, more than 2,300 of Walmart’s suppliers have joined it and achieved savings of 230 million tons of emissions through actions related to energy, packaging, agriculture, forests, and waste. In this case, therefore, the action of a company has succeeded in initiating a positive process throughout a chain of production and distribution.10 The positive cases are countless. A large survey of the relationship between announcements and results would certainly be an excellent study. But the reduction of emissions from the automotive industry, the increasing quality of food production and agriculture, the incentives for energy conversion and redevelopment of the building stock, together with a number of other indicators, are facts that together can give a sign of the importance of the actions that companies have individually taken towards sustainability. Of course, there are also several greenwashing strategies and as many actions of resistance against innovation oriented to the environmental, social and cultural quality of economic activity. From this point of view, there are far more than a few polluting companies that back decidedly conservative positions, expressed for example in the administration that the United States chose between 2016 and 2020 and which, for four long years, led the American industrial power to betray the commitments made with the rest of the planet in Paris to reduce the greenhouse effect and climate change. In short, not all companies have decided to join the new paradigm of innovation headed towards quality and sustainability. On the contrary, it can be said that some of them would prefer an authoritarian system that would keep innovative impulses under control, rather than commit themselves to changing their production system. 10

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/sustainability/our-insights/the-challenge-of-cli mate-change.

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These alternative strategies can also be useful to ask a pivotal question: do the “harmonizing” choices of companies that take the path of sustainable development do so because they accept an indication that comes from the market, or do they make use of another information system? The general idea that the market is the best possible information system because it generates the best possible allocation of resources does not seem to be adaptable to companies’ decisions towards sustainability. The demand for sustainable companies may be present in society but the supply is not particularly homogeneous: corporate strategies with respect to this are very different. What do companies that choose sustainability seriously, and not just for greenwashing, look at? They simply respond to the social demand for companies with sustainability messages, because in the short term this is enough to meet the market requests. But what do companies that really pursue sustainability respond to, given that the market in the short term is satisfied with the message? Those companies are likely to look to the actions of other companies and the scientific considerations that dictate that attention must be paid to sustainability or else there will be a general disaster; basically, they place the emphasis on the long term rather than the short term and are informed by the network of companies rather than the dynamics of supply and demand. These choices are less the result of the market and more the result of co-evolutionary dynamics between companies that are following the path of sustainability and their complex cultural, economic and social contexts. The dynamics that drive the entire system toward sustainability are themselves complex. There are elements of emulation, incentive, convenience, ethical responsibility and much more. In any case, the macro change must be strong in order to drag as many companies as possible into the paradigm shift. When the network of “smart” companies, from this point of view, has grown big enough, when supply chain leaderships have enough decision, when regulatory constraints and incentives become binding enough and international agreements strong enough, then the new paradigm will have a chance to have an impact on the great challenges of the contemporary world, through the sum of all the co-evolving micro-actions. But this means that the road to harmonic innovation and the narrative of the harmonic future should not be portrayed as conflict-free paths, balanced in all their stages of development, oriented to happiness for all and understandable by everyone. On the contrary. Indeed, in order to harmonize, one cannot and should not deny the difference in positions, interests and the same capacities to understand. Rather, we need to admit differences with a conceptual innovation that must start with the inclusion of different points of view, the acceptance of complexity, the criticism of overly closed schemas, the recognition of emerging patterns of behavior and their comparison with expected outcomes, based on the underlying assumption that common priorities can be developed for a sufficiently high proportion of participants to push even the most reluctant toward the best choices for the whole. A set of policy standards of global impact without central planning may be possible. But with the understanding that no one owns the right viewpoint, how can we reach an agreement that is not fragile but resilient against the difficulties? An agreement that is respectful of everyone’s sovereignty and does not result in the imposition of someone’s ideas on those of

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others? An agreement that is not global and total, but pragmatic and suitable to work at least in its parts? In order to get to the point of describing geopolitics of such scope, totally post-colonial, constructive for the planetary common good, understandable to all, a first step is to innovate the idea of the future. No longer as a unitary narration, but as an inclusive metanarrative of as many stories and as many realities as there are points of view that should converge in practice. In short, we need to discuss a plurality of futures and a multiplicity of harmonies.

3 The Plurality of Futures When you imagine that time is the succession of past, present, and future, you make a fundamental choice. The use of the singular means that one thinks that there is only one timeline. One thinks that the past is what happened before the present and that the future is what will happen after. It is thought that just as there was only one past, there will only be one future. Which means that, by studying enough, the past can be reconstructed and the future can be predicted. In all of this, the present remains quite compressed because, of the three, it is the shortest period of time, so we end up underestimating its extraordinary power. It is in the present that humans discern between past events to be remembered and those to be forgotten; it is in the present that they determine which documents are crucial to the historical narrative and which can be left out. On the other hand, it is only in the present that people make decisions and act. Of course, they do so according to what they have learned from the past and what they imagine the future to be.11 But it is in the present that they exercise what little freedom their consciousness is able to extract. Whether it matters a little or a lot, the variability of the choices made by humans in the present, among the alternatives they can imagine, can generate a very important effect: each choice among possible alternatives multiplies—usually by a little, sometimes by a lot—the trajectories of the course of history. If we accept this assumption, then the future does not exist; there are different futures that are the consequence of the different choices of humans. The issue can be explored further though, because it is necessary to try to approach the topic of freedom of choice in a proportionate manner. The past itself is far from being able to be identified as a simple time that has unfolded linearly over the centuries and that has simply become fixed in immobility. On closer inspection, it can be said that certain aspects of the past are indeed dead and buried, while others are not immovable, because they actually endure in the present and project into the future. It is precisely the most influential historians of the twentieth century who have highlighted this way of reasoning.

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“Memory helps project the situation into the imagined future and lets us envision the consequences”. Damasio [1].

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The plurality of durations of social time is one of Fernand Braudel’s contributions to innovation in the study of history.12 In a context in which history consisted essentially of the linear recounting of facts considered important to political events, his masters, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, the founders of the Annales school, had opened up the discipline of history to subjects that had previously been completely forgotten, such as food, mentalities, the media, and so on. The enlargement of the boundaries to a “total history” was accompanied by the idea of a “problem history” that did not limit itself to describing phenomena but posed questions, bringing history close to the sciences (the human sciences firstly and foremost but not only), also with the help of a constant epistemological reflection. And all this transformed history; it had been a discipline devoted mainly to politics and wars, but now it became a science interested in studying the complexity of human experience. But if history is not a succession of events, what is it? The idea of the plurality of the durations of social time, implicit in the structure of the great work carried out by Fernand Braudel for the study of the Mediterranean, is a contribution to historical methodology of enormous consequences. It makes it possible to deal with complexity in a non-trivializing way and to classify topics so as to put phenomena in order of importance. There are therefore structures, repetitive thousand-year-old phenomena connected to the rhythm of geography; their importance is immense. There are conjunctures, fashions, cycles, secular or infra-secular, even decades or shorter; frameworks that drive the interpretation of historical periods. And then, of course, there are the events, which illuminate everything, but just for a moment. In every moment, in every era, in every conjuncture, human phenomena of long duration occur, such as to overcome any periodization and connect the contexts in which the past has taken place and probably the future will develop. Major changes that modify something structural are rare. All of these change the relationship between the past, the present, and the future. In the complexity of human experience studied by the modified history of the Annales school, the classification of the different durations of social time has created a narrative context capable of founding a new “narrative methodology,” one that is broader in scope, perhaps more sincere, and certainly liberating. Sincere because, as Braudel explained, “the present explains the past” at least as much as “the past explains the present”, which means that the objectivity of the past is anything but obvious, given that the problems of the present direct research and modify its results. And liberating because it allows the results of fundamental sciences such as demography and geography, anthropology and psychology, sociology and economics to be admitted to the debate developed by the historical discipline; and it can contribute with a critical spirit and documentary competence to the theories of the human sciences with which it comes into contact. Perhaps this is not the case to provide an exemplification of all this. What is certain is that every interdisciplinary collaboration proves to be generative. And Braudellike history—or Febvre, or Bloch—was interdisciplinary by definition. The collaboration of history with economics, for example, bore important fruit. The research 12

Braudel [2].

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of economic history started from the great archives that collect the documents of the merchant of Prato, Francesco Datini, noting that the merchant at the beginning of his balance sheets wrote “in the name of God and gain”. One could be tempted to note above all the novelty of that phrase, ending up by underlining the second part; but the historians of the Annales instead wanted to understand the sense of the whole phrase; that is, the relationship between what continued—religion—and what was born—modern economy. It was precisely this open and interdisciplinary spirit, combined with immense documentary concreteness and extraordinary sensitivity to the problems that the present posed itself to the attention of the historian, that led Braudel to propose a conception of the market that differs from the idea of capitalism, and indeed in a certain sense opposed to it: the market was a place in which producers and consumers went to exchange goods and needs, strongly regulated by custom and local authorities, in which competition was a real and protected experience, whereas capitalism was the centralization of enormous financial resources, accompanied by political connivance, such that it translated much more into a system of power than into a competitive space. The distinction between market and capitalism would have helped the economists of the early eighties of the last century to make the thinking that would characterize the next forty years less unique. But apart from economics, the collaboration of Annales’ history with other humanities was fruitful for all disciplines. And the amalgamation succeeded partly because of a very special attention to the quality of writing. Braudel’s narrative choices are themselves a subject of study. Braudel rewrote the thousands of pages of his major works five to seven times. The quality of Braudel’s writing is an integral part of his story, for to make the life of the era studied felt, it was necessary to work on many dimensions of communication. One might say that narrative—in the end—is the framework in which the contexts of past, present, and futures, along with the approaches of various disciplines, connect. If the plurality of durations of social time is not given schematically but is proposed in a narrative framework of quality, it becomes a 360° human experience, not a cold intellectualistic explanation. It helps to “feel” time in a new way. With an unexpected consequence: one realizes that such a broad and multidisciplinary historical perspective, narrated in a sensitive way, becomes essential for imagining the future, for wondering why in the present the past is asked certain questions and finally why, in what the past has settled in, one can read the consequences that bind the present. History ceases to be the discipline that deals with the past, but instead rightfully becomes the science that deals with time, with a strong focus on its narratives. And as a corollary, the ways of assessing the importance of innovation of historical significance are redefined: this kind of innovation becomes what expands the constraints of the past and multiplies futures. Therefore, by studying the relationship between what lasts and what changes, precisely, the judgment on the importance of innovation is contextualized, the discernment is rested on an important documentary foundation, history is given the chance to guide the narrative chosen to evaluate the new, to minimize the tendency to exaggerate and underestimate the new. Errors through exaggeration or underestimation of innovation have indeed been a constant in the last thirty years of multiplication of novelties. The narratives that led to

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these errors were, from time to time, ideological, advertising, promotional, political, and technocentric. The historical methodology for the generation of narratives aware of the plurality of the durations of social time will allow discernment to be placed in a more balanced condition, cultivating the awareness of what changes and what does not change. The manipulator of reality can always claim that a fact “changes everything.” A historian can doubt it—with good reason. Important innovation, therefore, multiplies futures. Since innovation is not the proposal of a novelty but its adoption, possible futures flood in when users interpret the innovation in ways that push the envelope of what was imagined feasible in the past. It is likely that historically important innovation unlocks the creativity of those who adopt it. All of this can help to better understand innovation and to problematize futures more realistically. But how does this interpretive trajectory intersect with the ambiguous, complex question of harmony?

4 The Multiplicity of Harmonies Harmony is not the negation of contradictions nor the trivialization of complexities, but possibly the search for essential simplicity, which respectfully listens to every need and recognizes music where in chaos only noise is heard. The result of harmonic innovation benefits each and everyone, not just a few. What is harmony, then? A perfectly coordinated chorus to be pleasing “by design” or the sound that is achieved after going through a cacophonous experience? Is harmony the result of conscious and preordained cooperation or the evolution of the elements of a complex system towards a state in which each one adapts to the whole? Perhaps all of this may have to do with harmony. Perhaps the first kind of harmony, the kind that comes from good coordination, is easier to recognize but is also the most limited in terms of application, since it requires very precise enabling conditions. Perhaps the second kind of harmony, the kind that participants arrive at by experiencing the complexity of an ecosystem and evolving to adapt to it, is more likely in nature. In either case, we can say that stable, universally recognizable harmony is relatively rare when it emerges from radical innovation, while it may be more sustainable when it relates to long-lasting phenomena. These are strong assumptions and all need to be explored further. Certainly, there is no one-size-fits-all recipe for harmony. Without debating on the alternative realities that are likely to coexist in the world redefined by quantum physics, without the need to look for evidence and explanations of the theories that explain phenomena with the coexistence of the multiverse, we are nevertheless aware of the plurality of narratives related to the multiplicity of points of view and relationships between groups and human individuals. And we begin to understand that the diversity of points of view is not a brake on quality development; it is rather an asset and a stimulus for the search for forms of innovation with meaning. Discussion or even conflict are also implicit in diversity.

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Seeking harmony by denying conflict would clearly be a stretch. While conflict can certainly be a means it cannot be the goal. Harmony is an achievement or adaptation, not a stable, problem-free condition, unless we deny freedom and desire, which could perhaps generate harmony for a while, but would force confrontation and conflict to live in the shadows to pop up at the first opportunity, in a probably more violent and intolerant form. One can also discuss whether harmony has to do with the desirability of the path one is on or the future goal one is pursuing. The relationship between expectations and reality is always dangerous in terms of harmony. Similarly, it is difficult to reconcile the realistic narrative of the future with the ideology of the desirable future. Utopia itself can only be harmonized by thinking of it not as an unattainable future but as an intellectual tension to improve the goals to be pursued. And since words matter, “utopia” can in most cases simply be thought of as a “project”. Certainly, harmony is felt in a context in which people read their lives within the framework of a common narrative and are able to find ways to make choices that, at least in the long run, benefit everyone: dynamics that make all the stakeholders of a company win is harmonious; the platform that brings together the different and helps them interact on the basis of a common method that leads them to generate a cultural and economic wealth greater than the sum of the parts is harmonious; the vision that includes and makes tradition and innovation, established generations and those entering life, points of view marked by experience and those of people who do not know the limits of the possible, not only so that they respect each other, but so that they exchange value, is harmonious. Harmony is the result of training: to know how to apply solutions that work and to develop in order to know how to be open to the unexpected. Since we know that innovation challenges every habit and, when it is important, tends to modify the trajectory of phenomena that have a relatively long duration, to generate tensions and to provoke the need for adjustment, the distinction between those who understand it and those who reject it, between those who advance and those who lag behind, increases. However, a society that goes through a major transformation characterized by a series of important novelties that never cease to accelerate change, either accepts living in a continuous series of social and economic earthquakes, suffering the consequences, or tries to act proactively, no longer recognizing innovation unless it is framed in a further strategy, in a sort of search for meaning that serves to evaluate it in relation to a desirable direction. When society has lived long enough in a historical period of tensions caused by disruptive innovation, it tries to move to a new phase: if it chooses to invest in an innovative method oriented to the participation of all stakeholders in the benefits of innovation, if it addresses innovation to the solution of the major systemic problems it faces as a community, if it gives itself missions that only innovation can achieve, then training in harmony becomes an integral part of success; in those conditions, there is no innovation that is not harmonic innovation. At that point, innovation becomes exactly what it needs to be: a multiplier of possibilities for all, not a concentrator of advantages for a few.

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In the end, then, the issue of harmony is deeply connected to the narrative of the future open to the infinite interpretative possibilities of each one, within a framework of compatibility defined at community level. The issue of harmony does not properly arise without adequately taking into account the dimension of community. It is therefore a matter of critically discussing the mega-narratives that can be adopted to harmoniously develop progress. Lately there have been some narratives designed to connect the freedom of each individual and the common good: 1.

2.

3.

The narrative of the market: the perfect information system that allocates resources in the best possible way, for 40 years has reduced the space of the state in the belief that it was better for the common good. It was a misunderstanding based on the error of identifying the market with capitalism which led to the de-structuring of intermediate bodies that balance the dynamics of competition, privatization with social and economic polarization, deregulation with recurring crises. Self-referential technology narrative states that the next version of technology is always better than the previous one. Technology produces progress. Technology is innovation. One only needs to invest in technology, in technological expertise, in the application of technology, to generate progress. Society must adapt to technology in order to be propelled toward progress. The meaning of this is totally secondary. The exponential growth of technology, then, having become an ideology, turns into the obligation to accept it; if the next version of technology is always better than the previous one and if the growth of technology is exponential, there is no need to adapt, to obey, to merge in the continuous generation of unpredictable technological innovation. Consequences: destruction of intermediate bodies, destruction of old businesses, destruction of traditional authorities, with polarization of power and wealth, culture of convergence of true and fake, of hate and empathy, of banality and depth. Subjugation of technological innovation to the headless dynamics of speculative finance. Opportunity remains but not in self-referential technology. The ecological narrative: it is the dynamics and context in which evolution takes place, as an exploration of the possible. It is a method for looking at the consequences of choices in the complexity of reality. It is an approach that encourages us to look for signs of co-evolution among phenomena. It is the awareness of the limit and the challenge to overcome it consciously. It points to polyphonic futures whose harmony is the score of universal reality in the long term, appreciable only by conquering a broader, more open and continuously updated mind.

The enemy of the harmonious future is not conflict but the civil death of any ideology that proposes to interpret what exists as the “end of history”.

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5 The Evolutionary Networks of Harmony What to do. There are no easy solutions. It is known that the structural evolutionary framework with which to come to terms is characterized by a digitized media environment, a natural environment in crisis due to climate change, a polarized social system, a demographic context oriented towards an aging population in rich countries and a strong population growth now concentrated only in the last developing countries, predominantly African. In the face of these epochal challenges, there will be no future unless it is harmonious. The enablers of the earlier stages of innovative acceleration have been the market and technology. Inclusive forms of balance were sought by states in rich countries. But the current challenges go beyond that. They concern the dimension of community. Not in the old sense of small groups of people who all know each other and live in a restricted territory that forces them to be a community. But in the sense, as Ezio Manzini teaches,13 of voluntary aggregations of people who recognize a “common good” for the protection and enhancement of which it is worth organizing and working together. Clearly, modern communities need technology to increase their impact. And they need to give themselves rules that are easy to implement and enforce, perhaps embodying them in platforms that “codify” them in practical ways. And they need to innovate as much as they need to nurture their traditions. So their essential problem is to build common knowledge, effective operating practices, and cultures that are appropriate for respecting differences and cultivating the common good. Education in these communities is the essential investment. The problems of harmonizing diversity are the best and most generative. After all, it is clear that by finding a register of dialogue, diversity is richness. Much more difficult are the problems of harmonizing coexistence between increasingly distant “tribes” of values, such as those that gather around principles considered absolute and irreconcilable with those of others. But the conquest of points of view aimed at the common good should help; think of the issue of vaccines. The principle of freedom of conscience that would allow each person to refuse vaccination is in contrast with the need to contribute to the conquest of a general immunity that can bring infections down to a level of problems that do not bring health systems and entire countries to their knees. On the other hand, there is no freedom of conscience to drive one’s car on the left-hand side of the road, at least in continental Europe, because in that way one would contribute to destroying oneself and others. The issue of vaccines is similar. On the other hand, in general, all the topics that develop on networks and imply strong consequences on the quality of individual and collective life are more and more often topics that can be approached thinking about platforms enabling the implementation of community rules and giving them the capacity of impact. Because impact will be needed. To innovate, even in this context, will be to nurture evolution, which in turn is the exploration of possible futures. The harmony of factual results 13

Manzini [3].

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will be sought by a culture capable of exploring the possible with a challenge to win for the common good in mind. In the path of harmony, there is no abstract and unlikely causal relationship between cooperation and coevolution. However, there is probably a correlation, in some way a trend made common by a set of enabling preconditions. Will a harmonious or conflictual future emerge, then? Will sustainability or destructiveness emerge? Will the repetition of conflicting interests or cooperation for the development of the common good last longer? This is the question of questions, as far as the human species is concerned. The rest of the planet will be fine when humans surrender to their inability to overcome their own destructiveness. The assumption proposed in this paper is obviously tuned to the complexity of the topic. As seen here, we consider the context defined by strong coordinates: a plural historical time that opens to a future of alternative possibilities and a pluralistic media space that in turn serves the confrontation between conflict and cooperation. There is a set of inescapable macro-constraints that implicitly direct the choice: it can be said that in the end there will be stabilization, with or without humans. There are signs of awareness, manifest in some cases; for example, in the world of businesses that choose sustainable development and in the world of organizations that propose methods to coordinate the choices of individual states in the search for a new model of sustainable development. However, approaching sustainability will require innovations that, by exploring the possible, will create tensions and conflicts, to some extent alternative to harmony. The question is whether it will be conflicts or harmony that will tune in over the long term. One can imagine that the logics of history and cogent constraints may eventually reduce the possible alternatives. But innovation will not cease to reopen more of them. So in the end the possibility of harmony outlasting conflict, the possibility of sustainable innovation, will be an emergent choice. A choice that will not necessarily be truly conscious and preemptive, but one that will emerge in complexity, through coevolutionary dynamics that will appear cooperative. In other words, such is the complexity of the world built by humans that it will be difficult to see a global collective wisdom take over the stupidity of destructive models; but such is the power of ecological constraints that, in the end, a myriad of small local, individual, group and especially community choices will appear in a number of correlated trends; in this context, coevolutionary phenomena could emerge that resemble, ex post, precisely, cooperation. This could be the path to strengthen the harmonic hypothesis in the narrative of the future. At the bottom of the correlation between conscious cooperation and historically determined coevolution is an organization of the eco-cultural niche in which the process that encourages the practice of sharing an agenda over the desire to oppose interests takes place. Therefore, coevolution could become the new knowledge management system, which is not designed, like the market, to arrive at the best allocation of resources, but to put in place the most suitable solutions for the long-term survival of the community. It is possible to think that a harmonious future is the only one possible, for example in the face of the impending climate disaster. But in fact, to put it with an understatement, the search for harmony will not always be pursuable with a conscious coordination between everyone; it will often be a non-violent battle, made of small conscious

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choices and wise testimonies, made by individuals and especially by communities in a collective body whose intelligence is not given by the control of the whole but by the co-evolution of details. The great motto of the master of non-violence, Mahatma Gandhi, therefore remains the synthesis of the harmonic future: “The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree”.

References 1. Damasio A (2018) The strange order of things. Life, feeling, and the making of cultures. Vintage Books, New York, p 11 2. Braudel F (1949) The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world at the time of Philip II. Librairie Armand Colin, Paris 3. Manzini E (2020) Politics of the everyday, 2018 Edizioni di Comunità; Ezio Manzini, community as a space of opportunity. In: De Biase F (ed) Remediate re-mediate. FrancoAngeli

Strategic Altruism and Harmonic Innovation Domenico Marino

1 Introduction This paper tries to build an explanatory model of harmonic innovation based on the evolutionary theory of games, through which we will attempt to provide a microeconomic interpretation and foundation to this paradigm. There are many different definitions of innovation in economics. The point from which we want to start, however, is to consider harmonic innovation, i.e. innovation that arises and develops if all the players involved interact positively with each other and with the external environment. Enterprises, territories, institutions thus become pieces of a larger puzzle that can grow only if all actors cooperate and contribute to collective growth. “Innovation, in a broad sense, can be identified as the most powerful agent of change in the history of mankind, intimately linked to the concept of progress that is oriented and shaped by innovation itself […] It is not a matter of reasoning about the many innovations, the many actions, the many possible interventions: it would risk being a weak exercise if it does not stand on solid foundations [1, 2]. Rather, we need to stop and reflect on the very concept of innovation, by reframing its foundations. This effort takes on a precise formula: the paradigm of Harmonic Innovation, i.e. circular innovation that pursues the ‘right relationship’ and knows how to combine contrasting elements and tones in a logic of consonance”. It seems therefore necessary to try to grasp the founding elements of this new paradigm and the aim of this work is to identify the determinants of harmonic innovation, starting from a rethinking of the concepts of altruism in the light of competitive theory of games. Obviously, this will not be about altruism developing within a Prisoner’s Dilemma model and being an efficient coordination game, but rather a game developing according to Stug Hunt’s scheme which is a coordination game with common interest.

D. Marino (B) Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria, Reggio Calabria, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Cicione et al. (eds.), Harmonic Innovation, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems 282, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81190-7_5

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2 Altruism as an Economic Behavior In order to properly understand the microeconomic foundations of harmonic innovation, it is necessary to reflect first on the concept of altruism and then go on to explain some of its peculiar characteristics through an evolutionary game designed according to Stug Hunt’s scheme. The introduction of altruism as an expression of economic behavior is a topic that concerns the foundations of economic theory, in particular, the possibility of maintaining the principle of self-interest to describe the rationality of individual behavior. It is not the intention of this paper to rebuild the extensive literature on altruism and non-utilitarian behavior, but simply to grasp some elements of analysis that seem particularly interesting. Among the most important contributions on the topic of altruism, it is worth mentioning Sen’s critique of revealed preference theory because choices are not only about personal well-being and because there are sources of information unrelated to choices. It is also necessary to ask whether it is possible to give altruism a “measure”, i.e. whether it is possible to treat it as a topic for a utility function to be maximized. In this regard, the most advanced contribution is to be attributed to Calabresi [3], who starts from this assumption in order to attribute a value (in terms of utility) to the fact of living in a society where there is charity, gratuitousness and solidarity. Altruism, however, has a cost that can be positive, zero or negative (where it determines benefits only). Calabresi himself points out that other authors rule out the possibility that altruism has a cost [4], since it cannot be destroyed by using it. McKean [5] also pointed out that it is not possible to “optimize” altruism because it can neither be bought nor “commanded”. Where this is not possible—and in the case of altruism it is not, since when I “buy” it, I destroy its intrinsic content—it is not possible to proceed with the traditional tools of economic analysis. Calabresi counters these lines of development by arguing that much can be done and, in practice, is being done to increase altruism. There are “quasi-prices” that can be used to “produce” altruism. The typical case is that of “tax incentives” that produce altruism both because of immediate convenience, but at the same time because they help spread a culture of giving. Similarly, education can be a way to introduce altruism. Harmonic innovation in this framework could be a form of “quasi-price incentive” and an educational vehicle for generating altruism. In this short examination of some of the theoretical implications of altruistic behavior, we cannot fail to recall Zamagni’s contributions on the topic of civil economy [6–8]. In particular, discussing economic development, Zamagni argues that “reciprocity is the intangible element that allows building the networks that bind together economic actors in a web of implicit contracts.” In order to rebuild the foundations of rationality for this thesis, Zamagni recalls how the economic theory of this century has been built, starting from the assumption of amorality and “self-interest”, to demonstrate analytically how the market is the social organization capable of efficiently allocating resources.

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It has been widely demonstrated how this structure can be undermined at different levels. Zamagni concludes by arguing that it could be promising to build a path of analysis centered around the tools necessary to foster cooperative behavior, which, however, do not rely on market incentives or public intervention. This would be the space for the so-called civil economy. Therefore, harmonious innovation would have in this framework the task of “initiating” the structures of reciprocity that serve the system, including that part of it that operates on the basis of the logic of profit, to grow and consolidate. The debate on altruism cannot overlook an analysis of the type of rationality that inspires the choices and behavior of the players. In this sense, it is interesting to construct a sort of taxonomy that allows us to scale the rationality and selfishness of economic players. An extreme of the scale is certainly represented by the player who operates according to the criterion of absolute rationality, i.e. is perfectly informed, has an infinite capacity to process information, and does not make mistakes in processing information. Many people agree on the unrealism of these conditions; however, the model with rationality remains a model of extreme formal beauty and mathematical elegance. However, the assumption that the economy is also influenced by human factors has slowly made its way into economic theory. Although the incorporation of behaviors of an intrinsic psychological nature is extremely difficult to achieve within the dynamic equations that characterize the economic system, it is still necessary to obtain a higher degree of realism. In reality, human beings are limitedly rational and opportunistic. When we talk about human factors, we are highlighting this characteristic. Limited rationality means that economic players are satisfied with a sub-optimal level of outcome, as long as this level is satisfactory from their point of view. That is, players do not seek the highest individual outcome, but settle for a given outcome. Another way to define limited rationality is related to the cost of information. In a world in which additional information is expensive and achieving a higher degree of outcome requires paying the cost of more information, it may be that players make decisions using only data that is available, without seeking access to all information. Players can also be represented as opportunists who maximize their individual utility and there is no rule that can lead them to a different behavior. Thus, we can build a taxonomy of economic players [9] by relating the different degree of rationality and the different attitude towards the final outcome. We can then design a six-quadrant scheme as follows:

organic rationality limitedly rational totally rational

altruist Evolutionary approach Team Theory Team Theory

selfish Evolutionary approach Temporary balance General balance

selfish and amoral Evolutionary approach Economics of transaction costs Information economy

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In the Team theory it is assumed that all individuals share the same utility function which coincides with the social welfare function. Even if they do not have the same information, however, in such a world there is no uncertainty about the future behavior of individual players that will be aimed at maximizing the collective welfare. Equality of preferences can be interpreted as a weak form of selfishness [10]. The general economic balance consists of totally rational and selfish players. In this sense, they will not hide relevant information from others. Instead, we find selfish and amoral players in models that include unfair behavior, adverse selection, and signaling. Then there is the case of players who decide following a rationality of organic type, i.e. according to behavioral criteria, adapting subsequent decisions to the previous decisions of the others. The previous taxonomy is inadequate because it does not make sense to define the intensity of selfish behavior, and ultimately perhaps it does not make sense to define selfishness as a behavioral characteristic of the players, because it is the behavior of others that motivates their choices and not internal predisposition. Essentially, egoism is not a characteristic inscribed in the DNA of players but rather a potential evolutionary choice of the agent in relation to particular environmental conditions. This type of approach is called the evolutionary approach and is currently one of the most interesting fields of research in many areas of economic science. Harmonic innovation falls squarely within this class of problems. The traditional concept of altruism, however, is still too general a pattern to be considered as a fundamental characteristic of the economic systems. Strategic altruism [11] seems a concept suitable to describe the paradigm of harmonic innovation. Marzano’s analysis clearly highlights the limits of traditional theories in attempting to explain the relationship between altruism and self-interest behaviors. People often confuse the concept of strategic behavior with selfish behavior. In reality, strategic behavior can independently be both altruistic and selfish. Thus, strategic altruism is “what enables two parties that interact economically to both achieve, by mutual divestment, a better outcome, being both interested in each other’s welfare.” The theoretical scheme of strategic altruism can provide that link between the theory of altruism and the characteristics of harmonic innovation. The evolutionary game model that will be developed will consider altruism behavior as the fundamental feature of strategic innovation. In particular, we will attempt to model competition within a market between selfish and harmonic enterprises.

3 An Application of an Evolutionary Approach to the Problem of Competition Between Selfish and Harmonic Startups To introduce an evolutionary approach, it is first necessary to define the concept of fitness. In biological models fitness is defined as the probability of survival. In

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economic models fitness is a synonym of payoff. In the models of the theory of games, fitness can be defined both in relation to a single player and in relation to a group of players. A fundamental point is the distinction between altruistic and selfish behaviors of strategic type and, consequently, to deal with the problem of competition between selfish and harmonic enterprises, where by harmonic enterprise we mean an enterprise that follows the paradigm of harmonic innovation. In an evolutionary context, the payoff will depend on the type of enterprise that emerges, and this will be correlated with the ratio of harmoniously behaving enterprises to total enterprises. If k is the ratio of harmoniously behaving enterprises to total enterprises, then (1 − k) is the ratio of selfishly behaving enterprises to total enterprises. The expected payoff will then be: E(arm) = kPsarm + (1 − k)Pcarm

(1)

E(sel) = kPcsel + (1 − k)Pssel

(2)

where Psarm is the payoff when the two groups play cooperatively, Pssel is the payoff when the two groups play non-cooperatively, Pcsel is the payoff when the first group plays non-cooperatively and the second group plays cooperatively, Pcarm is the payoff when the first group plays cooperatively and the second group plays non-cooperatively. If two harmonic enterprises meet, then it must be assumed that the fitness gain that each of them receives from the behavior of the other enterprises is greater than the fitness loss they produce with their own harmonic behavior. In the opposite case, if two selfish enterprises meet, there is no change in fitness. Finally, if a selfish enterprise meets a non-selfish enterprise, then there is a fitness gain for the selfish enterprises and a fitness loss for the non-selfish enterprises. Using the evolutionary approach we can describe the situation with a particular game called “STUG HUNT”. In this game, the two players must simultaneously choose between two options, one risky and one safe. The risky one is to hunt together, the safe one is to forage together. The latter is the risk-free option, while the former is the risky one, but with a higher payoff. The payoffs of a Stug Hunt observe the following rules: Psarm > Pssel, Pcsel > Pcarm and Pssel > Pcarm, Psarm > Pcsel.

(3)

If we consider two populations of start-ups that can choose to operate under the harmonic paradigm (risky strategy, but higher payoff), or behave in a selfish manner (save strategy), a standard payoff matrix for a Stug-Hunt type game can be written in the following form:

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Harmonic Psarm

Selfish Pcarm Pcsel

Harmonic

Psarm Pcsel Selfish

Pssel Pssel

Pcarm

A “Repeated Stug-Hunt Game” is a description of some characteristics of the dynamic evolution of competition between altruistic and selfish enterprises. It is very useful to define the solutions of the game and their stability. Therefore, if we consider two different groups of enterprises in a specific sector, it is possible to obtain three different results that emerge from the “Repeated Stug-Hunt Game”: (1) (2) (3)

Only the first group survives Only the second group survives The first and second groups survive in the same industry.

Obviously, the term “Only the first group survives in the industry” does not necessarily imply the extinction of the other group, but simply the specialization of the industry. In the paper, the competition and selection mechanism between selfish and harmonic enterprises in the context of the “Evolutionary Theory of Games” will be modeled. Assume that at the beginning of the game a number of enterprises can be identified from their attitude towards cooperation. If the market is large enough such that the two groups can survive, i.e. the circumstance that the coexistence payoff is non-negative with probability 1, then the previous three cases can be associated with the payoffs: • In case 1 only the first group survives and the payoff is Pssel (specialization equilibrium). • In case 2 only the second group survives and the payoff is Psarm (specialization equilibrium). • In case 3 there is coexistence between the two groups of enterprises and the respective payoffs of coexistence are Pcsel e Pcarm (coexistence equilibrium). Symmetric Stug Hunt Games have been extensively studied. Using this formulation of the game, the solutions that emerge are of the “selfish/selfish” type and of the “harmonic/harmonic” type, which are the asymptotic attractors for the system. The other two solutions (coexistence) are only temporary. The solution of the “selfish/selfish” type is called “risk dominant equilibrium” and the “harmonic/harmonic” solution is called “payoff dominant equilibrium”. There is a debate in the literature between the two equilibria in pure strategy. Some authors think that the rational choice is the payoff dominant equilibrium (Harsanyi and Selten [12]), other authors (Carlsson and Van Damme [13]) argue in favor of

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the risk dominant equilibrium. The “payoff dominant equilibrium” can be harder to achieve in large groups than in small groups. The basin of attraction of the payoff dominant equilibrium is wider than the risk dominant strategy. This obviously is not enough to guarantee the convergence of the asymptotic solution towards the payoff dominant strategy. In order for the payoff dominant strategy to be the asymptotic one, it is necessary to add two additional mechanisms: a positive correlation between the behaviors of the players obtained with the imitation of positive behaviors and a reinforcing learning between the players. Harmonic innovation, as a form of strategic altruism, as we have defined it, has these two properties and therefore in the game we described above with two populations of startups having to choose whether to behave in a selfish or harmonic manner, the rational choice will be to behave in a harmonic manner.

4 Conclusions The model above is thus of competition between selfish and harmonic startups in which the outcome is given by the interaction of two enterprises that play two different strategies, one of selfish type and the other of harmonic type. The condition that the payoff dominant equilibrium is the asymptotic solution is guaranteed by the very characteristics of the harmonic innovation that constitutes the micro-foundation of the behavior of the population playing the payoff dominant strategy. The result of this reasoning is that the introduction of the paradigm of harmonic innovation has an effect of dragging on the other companies and, being the most rational strategy, it will be the one that in the long run will strongly emerge, leading to the possibility of a strong specialization of sectors of the economy which comprise only harmonic enterprises.

References 1. Marino D, Trapasso R (2020) Servitization and territorial self reinforcing mechanisms. Investigaciones regionales 48. ISSN: 1695-7253 2. Marino D, Cuomo C (2019) The local work plans (LWP) and territorial economic system (TES). In: Marino D et al (eds) Economy, business and uncertainty. Palgrave Macmillan Springer Nature, Cham. ISBN: 978-3-030-00677-8 3. Calabresi G (1995) Altruism and not-for-profits: ends as well as means. In: Le Organizzazioni senza fini di lucro, Atti del Congresso Internazionale di Stresa, Osservatorio “Giordano Dell’Amore” sui rapporti tra diritto ed economia 4. Hirschman AO (1985) Against parsimony: three ways of complicating some categories of economic discourse. Econ Philos 7 5. Mc Kean R (1975) Economics of trust, altruism and corporate responsibility. In: Phelps E (ed) Altruism, morality and economic theory 6. Zamagni S (1994) Economia e etica. Saggi sul fondamento morale del discorso economico. AVE, Roma

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7. Zamagni S (a cura di) (1995a) The economics of altruism. E. Elgar Hunts 8. Zamagni S (1995b) Organizzazioni non-profit ed economia di mercato. In: “Le Organizzazioni senza fini di lucro”, Atti del Congresso Internazionale di Stresa, Osservatorio “Giordano Dell’Amore” sui rapporti tra diritto ed economia 9. Williamson O (1985) The economic institutions of capitalism. Free Press, New York 10. Marschak J, Radner R (1972) The theory of the team. Yale University Press 11. Marzano F (2002) Un’analisi del terzo settore come economia della reciprocità, mimeo 12. Harsanyi JC, Selten R (1988) A general theory of equilibrium selection in game. MIT Press 13. Carlsson H, van Damme E (1993) Global game and equilibrium selection. Econometrica 61:989–1008

Civil Economy and the Harmonic Innovation Paradigm Leonardo Becchetti and Massimo Cermelli

1 Introduction European resources available for 2021–2027 and the EU Next Generation Funds entail an extraordinary opportunity to plan regional politics and, above all, to imagine and draw up a new post-pandemic society. In order to achieve the most desirable outcomes in this respect, it seems indispensable to undertake a participated process in which politicians, institutions, citizens and experts can propose viewpoints capable of guiding priorities and deciding on the projects to be financed. We believe that this transition can be successful and resilient if based on the original and innovative principles of harmonic innovation and on the contribution that the civil economic paradigm can provide. The contributions of the civil economic paradigm and harmonic innovation should be those of building a generative community, well connected rich in relationships, that identifies the root of satisfaction and the richness of the meaning of life in living standards, quality relationships and generativity intended as the capacity of one’s own life to have a positive impact on the lives of other human beings. In this context of opportunity, it is therefore essential to have a harmonious insight for building a resilient, sustainable and generative new beginning, prioritising those projects capable of creating the conditions for a meaningful life characterised by high quality relationships.

L. Becchetti (B) Department of Economics and Finance, University of Rome Tor Vergata, via Columbia 2, 00133 Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] M. Cermelli Department of Finance and Economics, University of Deusto, calle Hermanos Aguirre 2, Bilbao, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Cicione et al. (eds.), Harmonic Innovation, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems 282, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81190-7_6

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Civil economics can significantly contribute to this since it is a new economic paradigm that is progressively innovating the traditional economic view in four ways: (i) reforming the anthropological vision from homo economicus to the superior social rationality of homo cooperatives; (ii) establishing a corporate vision that is changing from the profit maximisation approach to the maximisation of stakeholder wellbeing; (iii) changing the goal of social and economic action from the maximisation of GDP growth to the maximisation of multidimensional wellbeing indicators in which a nation’s wealth is the stock of economic, social, environmental, relational and spiritual goods and services that a community can enjoy, a principle that can be resumed in the principal component of the generativity principle; (iv) a vision of the political economy moving from a two-hand to a four-hand approach, where the invisible hand of market mechanisms and the visible hand of enlightened and benevolent institutions are complemented by the third hand of active citizenship and the fourth hand of responsible corporations, consistently with goal 12 (responsible consumption and production) and goal 17 (partnerships for the goals) of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Below, we will outline four important contributions that the civil economic paradigm can bring to the novel idea of harmonic innovation.

2 Four Contributions of Civil Economics to the Harmonic Innovation Paradigm In our society, the contribution of civil economics to the harmonic innovation paradigm can be summarised in four main points. The first lies in the capacity to develop into social and economic life the fraternity potential which, after the French Revolution and over the last few centuries, has been less valued than the principles of freedom and equality. Fraternity, or ‘know how’, is a crucial determinant of civil progress in our society and, together with generativity—which can be intended as fraternity across space and time—represent the two most relevant principles around which, in our opinion, harmonic innovation is based. The principle of fraternity has, however, remained a common factor in religious reflection (i.e. in the Christian Social Doctrine and also in other religions) in which the community of believers, arising from the most dramatic current social issues of the present, emphasised the more urgent limits and directions towards the common good. The absence of fraternity in the social and political arena has produced serious consequences. The last two hundred years of our civilisation have been characterised by conflicts created by advocates of the two main principles of equality and freedom translated into socialism and liberal thought whereas, and using the expression by the theologian Pierangelo Sequeri, fraternity has been left aside within churches. From the encyclical Caritas in Veritate onwards, the importance of the fraternity

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principle and the limit of its scarce consideration within the culture of the time has been underlined several times up until the last encyclical Fratelli Tutti, which is a true manual not only at a theoretic level but is also full of operational advice regarding fraternity. Why and how can we be aware of the lack of the fraternity principle and its effects on our social and economic lives? We are relational beings and the satisfaction and richness of our lives depend on our capacity to generate quality relationships and generativity, i.e. on our capacity to positively contribute to the satisfaction and richness of the lives of other human beings. Generativity is a fraternity principle, not only spatial but also intertemporal, because if we are generative, we create the conditions to improve not only present life but also future life (and this is why the ecological transition has to do with the principle of fraternity). In order to be harmonious and balanced, the economy needs three dimensions: efficiency, equity and fraternity but, regrettably, each historic period has its own restrictions which limit the potential to create the ideal conditions for achieving the common good. Every time any of the three elements falls short, the system becomes stifling. A world made only of efficiency looks like that model promoted by so many social scientists who, almost without being aware, become dehumanised priests of a ‘God called Efficiency’. Thus, according to this reductionist view, it is simply enough to be efficient to produce, in an optimal way, the resources and then, still without counting on equity and fraternity, the system will automatically produce the wealth that will trickle down, thereby ultimately benefiting also the most deserving. The socalled Trickle Down Theory therefore becomes the extreme justification of a social and economic equilibrium driven only by efficiency, without equity and fraternity. However, inequalities growing within countries show that trickle down mechanisms are clearly not enough to address these inequalities. Equity without efficiency and fraternity is also not human. The experiences to which we have gotten closer probably relate to real socialism. Equity within the results undermines the undertaking human spirit. Equity is cold and not human if it is not accompanied by fraternity, and it leads to economic collapse if not enough attention is paid to the problem of efficiency. A second important contribution relates to the art of cooperation. The above mentioned considerations indicate how, given that most of the debate of the last century has revolved around the conflict between equality and efficiency, there is urgent need today for the mediating role of fraternity. However, we must acknowledge that a world made only by fraternity, without efficiency and equity, is a world where bonding social capital dominates bridging social capital [1, 2]. It is therefore an open door for phenomena such as nepotism, mafias, etc. in which the interests of the group members, to which the person is tied by fraternal bonds, are chased at the cost of third parties’ wellbeing. As is well known, the quality of action of a group depends on how the horizon of third parties is affected or taken into account. The best balance is therefore a balanced mix of the three principles (equity, fraternity and efficiency) that can bring social and economic prosperity together with richness of sense to our communities.

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As a matter of fact, in real life we are continuously taking part in team games (study groups, working groups in companies, consortiums of companies, participation in and building of community life) in which the most important aim is to gather experiences, skills and views that do not overlap but complement each other. Game Theory has identified the sort of social dilemmas that explain very clearly what happens when the principle of fraternity is lacking. The elements of imperfect information and the lack of legal protection—which can give us warranties in the face of any risk derived of opposing party abuse—produce paralysis due to distrust and the dilemma of lack of coordination. Fraternity solves the failure to coordinate that typically arises when the dilemma is ‘played’ by two homines economici. Through the logic of the gift—which generates gratitude and stimulates reciprocity—we can gradually build fraternal relationships that will become a vaccine against the risk of being betrayed, something that is more difficult as the relationship grows. In more technical terms, when studying the trust investment game, the prisoner’s dilemma and other social dilemmas in game theory, we can see very clearly that the homo economicus is, quoting Amartya Sen, a ‘social idiot’ [3], a destructive human being compared to the homo harmonicus who forms teams and creates conditions through trust, trustworthiness and cooperation for superadditivity (1 + 1 = 3), namely the capacity to produce outcomes that are larger than the sum of stand-alone contributions of the group members. This is because our economic and social lives are akin to a social dilemma where individuals with non-overlapping competences meet in the context of imperfect information and incomplete contracts, where the purely self-regarding approach of the homo economicus produces the suboptimal Nash Equilibrium outcome of coordination failure. Quite the contrary, the homo harmonicus can overcome this failure by initiating a virtuous circle based on initial gifts (actions in the group above what is expected and requested) that create gratitude and trigger reciprocity, thereby creating good relational outcomes that in turn create higher costs to violations of trust. Harmonious innovation blends with civil economy in this sense, assessing the creative intelligence of the various social participants, pointing its sight towards a fair, responsible and sustainable development, capable of producing innovations which will help to have more inclusive and safer towns, as well as production and consumption models for the protection of the consumer, the environment and all the people who work in the productive chains. A third important contribution of civil economics to the harmonic paradigm is based on the idea of constraint within harmony. In this sense, a constraint (i.e. imposed by sustainability) is not a bond or obstacle to freedom but a foothold in which we settle in to focus our life. We need to achieve a multidimensional wellbeing goal through the foundations of economic value, employment, environmental and health care sustainability, and generativity. This path passes through the modernisation of physical and digital infrastructures, a reasoned use of intelligent work as an additional means to face-to-face meetings, a higher energetic efficiency of facilities, and some birth and family policies that add to new sustainable mobility.

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A fourth qualifying point should be that of putting together generative people because we want to be happy, and social sciences results suggest that the satisfaction and richness of our lives depend on the quality of our relational life and our generativity. The coordinated work of generative people has therefore a higher superadditivity potential that can increase economic, social, environmental and, ultimately, the sense-making impact of our actions. In this respect, civil economy perfectly matches the harmonious innovation paradigm as it is based on human being generativity, the concept of sustainable multistakeholder enterprise and multidimensional wellbeing indexes that encapsulate quality of life better than GDP.

3 Policy Implications of the Harmonic Paradigm Civil economics and the harmonic paradigm should not remain abstract concepts but can produce fruitful outcomes if they inspire policy decisions. With regard to the EU’s Next Generation Funds, and based on the generativity principle—a key element of civil economics—the inspiration from civil economics and harmonic innovation principles should suggest that it is essential to prioritise those initiatives that have joint positive impact on the five points mentioned above, i.e. economic value creation, employment creation, environmental sustainability, health care sustainability, and richness of sense of life (also defined as eudaemonic wellbeing). To sum up in three words, we need popular, sustainable and generative projects. The European Funds provide us with the opportunity to prioritise employment and sustainable economic value with projects involving a great number of people and companies, instead of prioritising only a few major projects that support the investment of one or very few companies in non-strategic infrastructures. Daron Acemoglu and Phillipe Aghion, who are among the most renowned contemporary economists, have explained, through their ‘directed technological change’, why the basic and crucial role of government is, at this point, to modify the incentives and promote the behavioural change of households and enterprises in order to achieve a resilient and sustainable post-pandemic recovery. This is why it seems necessary to select those projects which include social and environmental indicators within the manager’s and employee’s incentives and strengthen the importance of helping companies and households obtain green certificates and energy efficient buildings. The economic and political success of financing an investment project depends on its impact and capacity to modify behaviours, giving rise to profit for a high number of companies and individuals. The Recovery Fund has a limited duration and the projects must finance investments instead of current expenses; the methodology used will refer to the multidimensional aspect of the goals pursued in order to achieve a resilient, sustainable and generative recovery.

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4 Civil Economics, Harmonic Innovation and the Need for New Wellbeing Indicators What we can do, starting from where we are now, to put the fraternity principle into the centre of our culture and our political, economic and social lives is to include a measure of fraternity and generativity in the multidimensional wellbeing indicators that guide strategies and policies [4]. The path to fraternity can and must affect not only the formulation of the objectives led by political options but also the processes set to build them. Deliberative democracy principles comprising participation and the construction of stakeholder networks are the main channels for including fraternity in the decision-making process. We can have salary, health care and education systems but, if we do not know what to do with our lives, we will not have a life full of quality relationships and generativity and will not be happy, and our lives will be unsatisfactory and lack sense. If we do not learn to design wellbeing indicators which incorporate the principles of fraternity and generativity, we will not have the multidimensional wellbeing measures capable of guiding us in the correct direction and to create social premises for achieving a flourishing individual life. The path to fraternity can and must affect not only the goals of political options but also their building processes.

5 Harmonic Innovation and Competitiveness: The Case for a Carbon Border Tax A crucial issue for fraternity to truly contribute to building a new cultural and economic paradigm is its merge/clash with the principle of competitiveness—a foundation which the capitalist system cannot give up in whole. How can we reconcile our wish for fraternity with competitiveness? Let’s try to explain it using a sports metaphor. Football matches or, in general, sport competitions, form part of the quality and beauty of our lives. The values shown in a healthy sporting competition encourage us to improve our skills and compare them with those of others. In a football match, there are rules and a referee who is there for those rules to be followed. These rules prevent the winning team from displaying incorrect behaviour (for example, compromising the health and safety of rivals to increase their likelihood of winning). These rules ensure a healthy competition developed in a fraternal context (for instance, the kind ‘third half tradition’ in rugby, i.e. the post-match socialising, often involving waving at the other team). Unfortunately, economic competition within this globalisation era looks much more like a sporting competition with unsatisfactory rules. There are no strict rules for the referees to apply. The race to the bottom on labour, environmental and tax costs in most cases prevails as the winning strategy so that a company that, all things being equal, finds a way to evade taxes, not pay the cost of environmental sustainability and pay workers as little as possible ends up being the winner of the

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match. And this is also the reason why competitiveness has such a bad reputation for many people. The fraternity principle counteraction means raising the bar and levelling the playing field so that even competing companies cannot ignore their social, fiscal and environmental responsibilities. A first and fundamental policy measure that produces this effect is that of the border carbon tax. The European Union foresees that, from 2023, this tax will allow the EU to collect the necessary resources to finance the EU Next Generation plan. In specific terms, this means protection against social and environmental dumping because companies that want to export their products to the EU market must comply with the environmental regulations or else pay a higher tax on consumption. The election of a new president in the USA, Joe Biden, brings a great opportunity for the border carbon tax to become a joint initiative between two worldwide economic areas which, by themselves, represent 40% of the global market. The approval of a joint US-EU border carbon tax would, eventually, enforce quality game rules in global competition and international trade which prevent the victory of those foul playing by lowering their prices at the expense of negative environmental effects, for which we will all pay in the end. In the USA, more than 3,500 economists, including 28 Nobel laureates and 4 former presidents of the Federal Reserve, have signed a document asking for the implementation of a border carbon tax. This tax is a recognition that, in a globally integrated world, it is necessary to set proper price incentives for ecological transition in order to prevent the risk of offshoring and the environmental dumping of third country companies, all this combined with compensation systems for those who suffer the costs derived from the national carbon tax. The border carbon tax is an ambitious, though absolutely necessary, answer to one of the main problems with global competition. Without it, we live in the paradox that if the goal of a country, or a group of countries, is to raise the standards of environmental (or even social) sustainability, they run the risk of paying the price by generating or increasing the production cost differential in and out its border and, therefore, increasing price competition of the countries that produce in other areas of the world (and consequently, creating an incentive for national producers to relocate their production). The result, even regarding the ecological transition, would be null or counterproductive because the greenhouse effect is a ‘global public evil’ that depends on the global stock of emissions from any corner of the planet. Moving them inside or outside the borders of the area with higher environmental standards does not change the issue. The only way to prevent global competition from turning into a race to the bottom in environmental, social and fiscal standards, in a world where digital opportunities greatly facilitate the dismantling and geographic reassembling of production chains, is to evaluate the standards of products and apply additional taxes to consumer prices in the event that the standards are lower than those established for those who produce internally. For this reason, the border carbon tax is one of the few taxes desired by the national industry (which seeks protection against dumping) whose implementation would not negatively affect the consensus of governments and politicians.

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The European Union has pointed out that the border carbon tax would be one of the main sources of in-house resources and, from the beginning of 2023, it should allow the Union to raise the funds needed to finance the EU Next Generation plan and to avoid having to resort only to an increase in contributions from member states to the EU budget. The border carbon tax would be a positive revolution in the way we understand the rules applied to international trade. Instead of strong conflict between national interests through fees and duties (the approach chosen by the Trump Administration), the guiding principle would be that of international competitiveness based on social and environmental standards. The tax, in order to be congruent with the principles set by the WTO, should be equally applied to national and third country products, i.e. those who are above the standard do not have to pay and those who are below it do have to pay, regardless of where production is set. In doing so, we can avoid the discriminatory effect. The margin for criticism and arbitrariness would therefore be limited. During the next few years, the pressure to assess environmental standards within company production chains will be very strong and this will help to build the necessary infrastructure for the implementation of the border carbon tax [5]. With regard to environmental indicators (carbon footprint, water footprint, degree of circularity of products, intensity of polluting emissions), standards and common measurement methods are gradually being imposed on the basis of a series of processes already underway. An example of this progress is non-financial reporting, which requires large companies to publish regular reports on the social and environmental impacts of their activities. This information, which is becoming mandatory in several countries in the case of companies of a certain size, is also used to assess investment funds in order to reduce exposure to environmental risk, which is now becoming mainstream. EU directive 2088 of 2019 establishes that in the MIFID questionnaires needed to assess the client’s risk profile, preferences for sustainability should be also detected, and those funds can only be proposed to clients who respond positively in order to improve progress in the ecological transition of their portfolios. All nations are already aware of the emergency and threat posed by global warming and they all know that to achieve the goals established in the Paris Agreement, we must set ambitious objectives for indicators that can be objectively defined. It is always possible and advisable to recognise, when negotiating, that for some countries the transition will be more difficult and costly; this will be relevant for negotiating a Just Transition Fund which will have to take this issue into account. If, at the time of the Trump Administration, the hypothesis of launching a border carbon tax had likely triggered a series of retaliations, this new US Administration opens an important new window of opportunity that should not be wasted. It is no coincidence that the Bruegel Institute, a community policy think tank, speaks of a possible US-EU collaboration for the implementation of this tax; a group which other countries could, eventually, join. Therefore, it would be advisable that the European Union and the United States come to the next international conference on climate change (COP 26), in November 2021 in Glasgow, with a proposal. For example, of negotiating a border carbon tax

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system capable of orienting international trade towards ecological transition and modifying the economic incentives of global competition actors. This would be a real step towards fulfilling the Paris climate agreements. In this sense, the new challenge of harmonious innovation must address the industrial revolution of our time, which is the circular economy. We are responsible for combining the creation of economic value with environmental sustainability, thus modifying our processes and products to use fewer raw materials, generate less waste and create circular mechanisms where the quality of life and the creation of economic value depend more on access than on property. To conclude, we tried to argue how the civil economic paradigm and harmonious innovation can significantly contribute to social and economic progress by introducing the fraternity principle into the debate and into social community and economic relationships. We started with the principles but also tried to demonstrate the implications and consequences in terms of policy measures with specific reference to the core issue relating to the trade-off between fraternity and competition.

References 1. Putnam RD (2000) Bowling alone. Free Press, New York 2. Putnam RD (2002) Introduction. In: Putnam RD (ed) The dynamics of social capital. Oxford University Press, Oxford 3. Sen AK (1977) Rational fools: a critique of the behavioral foundations of economic theory. Philos Public Affairs 317–344 4. Becchetti L, Cermelli M (2018) Civil economy: definition and strategies for sustainable wellliving. Int Rev Econ 65(3):329–357 5. Acemoglu D et al (2012) The environment and directed technical change. Am Econ Rev 102.1(2012):131–166

Harmonic Society Valentino Bobbio

1 Growing Injustice and Poverty in the World: A Society for the Few is not Harmonic Are we satisfied with the society we live in? What is the quality of life of human beings on this planet? Our lives are generally difficult and tiring, and now they are even made more difficult by the pandemic, which upsets and disorients us. However, our society is increasingly suffering and unequal, and unable to take care of those in need, with the paradox at the same time of enormous waste and great potential. For example, in 2019 while 690 million people worldwide1 were going hungry, half of the world’s agricultural production was wasted. Injustices and inequalities add up to environmental disasters and the climate crisis, causing suffering, unemployment, despair and emigration, and generating, as Pope Francis reminds us, “human waste.” The crisis is comprehensive and concerns society and the environment as a whole. In short, we live in a severely disharmonic society. The World Inequality Database (WID),2 a worldwide database on inequality in which 150 researchers from all continents collaborate, including Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman and Andrea Brandolini, updating data on income distribution in different countries, shows that income inequality continues to grow and that the increase in inequality is due to the growth in wealth of the richest 1% of the planet, while the portion of income of the poorest 50% of the population fluctuates, depending on the country, between 5 and 25% of total income. Even more unbalanced is the distribution of assets: the poorest 50% of the population owns 1 The

State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, FAO Report 2020.

2 https://wid.world/.

V. Bobbio (B) General Secretary, NeXt Nuova economia per Tutti (New Economy for All), Via Vincenzo Monti 4/B Roma, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Cicione et al. (eds.), Harmonic Innovation, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems 282, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81190-7_7

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almost nothing (generally less than 5% of the total), even in the most egalitarian countries such as those of northern Europe. According to Oxfam, in 20193 in the world the richest 1% held 47.2% of net aggregate wealth and the poorest half (3.8 billion people) held 0.4%. In the same year in Italy, the richest 20% owned 72% of national wealth, and the richest 5% owned the same wealth as the poorest 90%. If income inequality is a very serious problem, economic poverty goes hand in hand with other work-related dimensions of poverty (unemployment, undeclared work, poor work…), health with limited access to even life-saving treatment in many countries, relationships due to loneliness and lack of human contact, education with consequent loss of opportunities and marginalization, culture with inability to understand and adequately address the critical issues of life. These different forms of poverty are mainly cause and effect of each other together. Moreover, the different forms of poverty tend to be hereditary and to be passed on from generation to generation. Even in Sweden, the surnames of the most prestigious families in the 1700s still appear, after three centuries, among the highest-income and highest-wealth families. Above all, educational poverty contributes to the intergenerational transmission of economic poverty. According to studies by Branko Milanovic4 and Thomas Piketty,5 confirmed by WID, the only ones to have gained income shares are the poor in emerging countries and, above all, as already mentioned, the richest 1% of the population, whose income has gone from 17% of the total in 1980 to 20% in 2000. In short, we live in a very suffering and disharmonic society, and to make it more harmonic, that is appropriate and collaborative in all its components, as well as more harmonic, we need to tackle and strongly reduce inequalities.

2 The Harmonic and Happy Society is not the Richest One Richard Easterlin6 in 1974 noted that happiness does not increase with income; beyond a certain level the benefit of income on personal and social wellbeing is limited. In people’s lives, happiness seems to depend very little on variations in income and wealth. Health conditions, quality of democracy, freedom of expression and respect for personal rights certainly influence happiness. According to Becchetti7 —co-founder of NeXt and president of the Scientific Committee—the components of happiness (in addition to wellbeing) are above all the quality of interpersonal relationships both in social life and at work, the esteem and

3

Oxfam global Inequality report 2020, based on World Bank report 2020. Milanovic [1]. 5 Piketty [2]. 6 Easterlin [3] 7 Becchetti [4]. 4

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appreciation of others who recognize one’s contribution and value, and the perception of usefulness of one’s life and work. These are all intangible aspects that give motivation to one’s life. The society and its policies can foster growth in population happiness and thus promote greater social harmony. If we compare the policies of a seemingly much wealthier country (Ireland) to one more concerned with social sustainability/harmony (Finland), the result is that growing a harmonic society is possible. The Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, leader of Fine Gael, had called early elections. Sure that he would win them and gain a solid majority, believing that he could capitalize on a consensus arising from the strong economic growth of the country and a resolute management of Brexit to save free trade relations between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Instead, on February 8, 2020, he was defeated, and lost both votes and seats, and his party even came in third. What happened? From 2012 to 2017 the Irish economy grew at an average rate of 9.4% per year, and in ten years GDP per capita grew by 53%. Today, the Irish rank among the richest in the world: in the 2018 IMF rankings, they are fifth in the world, with a per capita GDP of $79,925, preceded only by small countries. Nevertheless, the country’s high GDP is just smoke and mirrors: on the one hand, it is inflated, and without the multinational corporations, with the European headquarters of Google, Amazon and Facebook attracted by a very favorable tax system (corporate tax at 12.5%), it is worth 30% less. On the other hand, wealth does not have an impact on the population, and the Irish are not as well off as it may seem. In fact, according to data from the Irish Central Statistics Office, many citizens (800 thousand people, equal to 16.6% of the population) still live below the poverty line. Interviewed by journalists from The Economist at the exit of the polling stations, voters expressed a strong unease: 63% of voters said they had not perceived economic growth in recent years on their incomes; 32% complained about the health system, for the difficulties in being hospitalized, the lines in the corridors of hospitals, and the years of waiting for specialist visits; 26% considered the problem of housing very serious, both for the lack of housing and for its very high cost; 65% called for an increase in social spending, feeling little protected. This is also the effect of the strict policies to balance the budget and reduce public debt, which had risen sharply due to the banking crisis of 2007–2008. The cutback in social and health spending and the freeze on real estate mean that 77% of young people still live with their parents, and in Dublin the housing situation is very critical: high rents make it the fifth most expensive city in the world. Irish people no longer stand the long period of austerity, and want more welfare and more services, not more GDP. The curse of GDP has hit Fine Gael and Leo Varadkar! Quite different is the situation in Finland. Despite having, according to the IMF, a GDP per capita of $49,738 in 2019, just over half that of Ireland, for the second year in a row Finland is for the World Happiness Report 2019—prepared by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network—the happiest country in the world. The secret can be summed up in three words: equality, culture and social security.

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Equality. Finland has a very low Gini coefficient that expresses limited inequality. This is due to long-term policies of inclusion, for which the state works together with local government and private foundations. Citizens therefore prize their political and administrative class, balanced by a widespread sense of civic duty and honesty. In addition to experimentation with a citizenship income for underprivileged citizens, mention should be made of the substantial abolition of prisons replaced by re-education and re-integration services (with a reduction in security costs). The commitment to recovery and reintegration of homeless people, which has reduced them from 18,000 in 1987 to 5,000 in 2019 through the Housing first policy, is an example of this: first of all, they are offered a house, accompanied by social assistance aimed at training and social and work reintegration. The houses are bought through gambling revenues, supplemented by municipalities and foundations. The government has also increased parental leave to 14 cumulative months, to be divided equally in a flexible way between both parents, so that both take care of the children. Culture. Education is free until the doctorate, and schools have great organizational autonomy and are very engaged in educational experimentation. Children work on projects, without homework, and have excellent results. Teachers have a very high level of preparation, all with at least a master’s degree, are well paid and their role has great social prestige. Thus the level of education of the population is high, fueling an innovative economy that was able to overcome first the crisis of the Soviet market, outlet of most Finnish exports, and then the collapse of Nokia. As a result, unemployment is low and gender equality very high: for gender equality, Finland is the fourth country in the world—according to the Global gender gap 2018 survey of the World economic forum—while Italy is seventieth, after Mongolia, Rwanda and Namibia. Social Security. The Finns believe that social security favors serenity of life, work/life balance and therefore a productive and creative working atmosphere, where everyone is committed to making the contribution they can. Working hours are welldefined, and those who lose their jobs can find transition paths and training and retraining that fit their skills. Citizens can find help from the community for every need. Even if widespread social services entail high taxes, citizens believe that these are well-invested resources and that the return for them is of greater value than what they pay. Investments in quality health care that is accessible to all are substantial. Rare diseases, disabilities and mental illnesses are quickly addressed. Tackling alcoholism has reduced distress and halved the suicide rate. Finland is a model of society based on cooperation, mutual trust, hard work of analysis, the search for shared solutions over time, within the framework of continuous policies that are implemented by increments and successive tests. It is a harmonic society not only because of the policies pursued, but also because of the method by which they are conceived and implemented, both through ongoing commitment over time and by systematically listening to the needs of society.

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What about the United States? Warren Buffet, a big investor of Berkshire Hathaway, declared that it is not fair that his secretary pays more taxes than him. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz says the economy is not working in America despite a 2.1% GDP increase in 2019 with a soaring stock market: he confirms that “neither GDP nor the stock market, he says, is a good way to assess a country’s performance.” Since 2017, in three years, the average wage has increased by only 2.6% and remains lower than it was 40 years ago. Meanwhile, the 1% of the population, and the 0.01% in particular, have become enormously wealthy because much of the increase in GDP has benefited the immoderately wealthy: the tax cuts enacted by Trump have favored them only, and instead of new investment, they have triggered corporate share buybacks. The consequence of this policy is higher taxes for middle- and low-income families, while cutting social spending. In two years, health coverage has collapsed, and millions of people have lost their insurance: the uninsured have increased from 10.9% to 13.7% of the population. All of this has led—a one of a kind in the developed world—to a decline in average life expectancy and an increase in middle-age mortality from despair due to alcohol, drug overdoses and suicide, especially among white males, who have more unstable family and social networks of solidarity, as Princeton economist Anne Case and Nobel economist Angus Deaton point out. Stiglitz believes that deregulation measures “have allowed corporations to pollute the air, increase the number of Americans addicted to opioids, pushed more children to eat food that provokes diabetes.” Finally, the U.S. economy has a low employment rate: unhealthy people cannot work, there are two million incarcerated people (up 6 times since 1970), and since there is no reliable family leave and child care, women’s employment rate remains low. A good economy—concludes Stiglitz, and a harmonic society we say—needs trust, stability and security, instead of uncertainty, volatility and prevarication. What kind of economy would we like to live in? Which economy serves men and women while respecting the environment? If we try to rank economic systems and different forms of enterprise, comparing the distribution of power with the spread of wealth, as in the matrix below, a strong correlation emerges between the distribution of power and forms of enterprise and economy that provide for different forms of participation, such as the social market economy and cooperative enterprises. Thus, the structure of the economic system and the forms of business also contribute to a harmonic society. Ranking of Economic Models

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Communism Market with few rules Market social economy

Power structuring

Large cooperative Regulated market Social enterprises

Distributed among Few

Civil Economy Co-operatives Common good Well-being For all

3 Disharmonic Society Breeds Populism A disharmonic society breeds anger and frustration in those excluded and people who feel marginalized, and this gives rise to a social context in which populism and extremism and the denial of dialogue and listening thrive. Even the social condition of the dispossessed, due to the decentralization of production and the fragmentation of forms of labor, which leads to the decline of mass organizations, no longer finds comfort in commitment to parties and social movements.

“Watch out man…he wants to steal your cookie”

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It follows that these masses, fragmented and without references anymore, are victims of populist calls which, through social networks, divert attention from the real reasons for the problems they suffer, shifting the responsibility to other social groups, such as immigrants, who become scapegoats. The cartoon on the left effectively shows how this process is triggered. These distorting interventions do not make society more harmonic, but more conflictual, tackling approaches based on inclusion and the pursuit of less inequality with new tensions, with the effect, in the meantime, of deferring addressing the problems at the root of suffering and injustice. A harmonic society, on the other hand, chooses to deal consciously with these problems, knowing that they are complex and not easy to manage, and that they require an ongoing commitment over time.

4 The Dimensions of Social Welfare What are the dimensions of social wellbeing that lead to a harmonic society? Unlike the environmental dimension, which is easier to define and measure, the social dimension is much broader and more articulated because it concerns the different spheres of people’s lives. However, it is important to try to define the different areas that lead to social wellbeing and therefore to a harmonic society, as I will try to do below by briefly examining the main issues. Fairness: Human beings rebel, in various forms from passivity to withdrawal up to protest, when they perceive that they are treated unfairly and differently from others. In addition to pay equity (discussed below) and wealth rebalancing, people generally demand fair and respectful treatment in social relationships. We have already seen that an inclusive society with few inequalities is perceived as a happier and more peaceful society. Health: The protection of and access to healthcare beyond economic conditions is considered an essential aspect of serenity of life. The anguish of those who cannot care for themselves because they do not have the means to do so poisons their lives. Countries with universal healthcare systems that treat rich and poor alike with the same care are considered happier, as we saw for Finland. Safety: Safety at work, in society and in the family, which stems from attention to people’s lives, is a very important component that contributes to the harmony of society. The perceived safety is often different from the real one, and populisms feed the sense of insecurity in order to offload the problems on scapegoats; in Italy the crime rate has constantly decreased, but the perception spread by a pressing narration is that of a growing social danger. Fair remuneration: Fairness means equal pay for equal work, and pay differentials between different levels of responsibility that are not excessively high. The Italian Code of the Third Sector provides for a maximum pay gap of 1 to 8 between the lowest and highest gross pay of the organization (art. 16 of the Code) in order to remain an ETS-TSB (Third Sector Bodies) and enjoy the related tax and regulatory benefits. Obviously, huge gaps are disproportionate, such as those that occur in some

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multinationals, which reach gaps of 1 to 400 and more. These are unjustified whatever the skills and performance of the top management are. Gender equality: The gender gap stems from a patriarchal legacy that must be overcome as soon as possible, as it is extremely unjust and devalues half of society. The low levels of women’s employment in Italy and the obstacles (clearly visible in their effects) to their proper placement and remuneration are one of the causes of the country’s economic backwardness. Any positive action to achieve true gender equality is urgent. Equal opportunities: Everyone, regardless of personal ability, has the right to a dignified life, and everyone has some ability that can benefit the society. Therefore, positive actions for the social and work integration of people in difficulty are essential in a harmonic society. Personal development: As Leonardo Becchetti says, three beautiful things in life are (1) Keep learning; (2) Be innovative and generative; (3) Invest in the quality of relationships. People’s dignity is rooted in their personal and human growth, as well as in their professional growth, which makes it easier for them to gain respect and esteem. Society, social organizations, the family and the world of work are the areas in which personal development is built. Participation: The citizen differs from the subject because he or she participates in social life. A democratic society is the one that facilitates participation in all its components. Today, the issue of democracy and participation of workers in the company, already protected by article 46 of the Italian Constitution, and also of other relevant stakeholders, is urgent. At least the Constitution requires prompt practical application. Cultural identity: In an increasingly interconnected world where migration is a normal phenomenon, increasingly pluralistic societies can transform the condition of diversity into harmony, richness of experiences and points of view. But this requires a commitment to knowledge and a deep respect for different cultural identities and their specific needs and characteristics. Sustainability of the supply chain: The harmony of a society cannot hold if there are other societies around it that are disharmonic due to the export/extraction of resources and skills from the dominant society. Equity throughout the social chain— and in economics also in the supply chain—generates balance in society.

5 The Harmonic Society Involves Francesco Cicione and Luca De Biase8 have proposed a very interesting paradigm that describes the context of Harmonic Innovation. Following this conceptual scheme, we can see how well it fits with the issues of a society that operates in harmony, with the different roles well coordinated and well mixed, according to the metaphor of the orchestra that succeeds in playing together producing a great result from 8

Cicione and De Biase [5].

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very different contributions that come from different skills. This paradigm is also enlightening for the society that wants to be harmonic. In the following diagram, the different areas are matched with the characteristics of the harmonic society, highlighting which characteristics a society that wants to be truly harmonic entails.

The 4-handed economy Environment

Supply chain

Third hand Mul-stakeholder enterprise (responsible, cooperative, ethical company)

Shareholders Consumers Forth hand - Consum-Actors: responsible citizens that vote with their wallets out of far-sighted selfinterest, backed by intermediate social bodies

Workers Local communies Second hand - Market: competition generates social results by voting with one’s wallet

Consumers and enterprises generate share capital and better rules and institutions Reputation eased by social responsibilitye

First hand – State: attentive to common wellness Leonardo Becchetti, Vote with your wallet, Albeggi editore

As said before when we talked about the dimensions of social welfare, the method of the harmonic society to become choral requires respect, ability to listen, and cooperative approach. The context that makes a harmonic society possible requires a major investment in a community logic of solidarity, support for the most fragile groups, and strong investment in education for all. The objectives of a harmonic society put the common good at the center and therefore require choices that take into account balance, an overall vision of the society and its problems, which allows one to reconcile the expectations of different components. Quality comes from circularity, which entails knowledge-based reuse choices, with participatory processes for a true coordinated action. Origin comes from the awareness that without sharing and without an approach on generosity, friendship, and joy, there is no harmony among the various components of society, and therefore no social sense. The approach is certainly interdisciplinary, and comes from culture, curiosity, attention to the complexity of problems and life, thus requiring the joint intervention of different disciplines.

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6 Let’s Change the Goals of Society and the Economy Our society is in serious trouble: in addition to the problem of inequality, there is the growing consumption of resources that jeopardizes ecosystem services, which are essential both for supply (of food, drinking water, materials, etc.), regulation (of climate and tides, water purification, pollination and pest control), and for our cultural values. The quality of our lives affects the foundations of a harmonic society and even the economy on which our income and wellbeing are based. Why does our society seem so incapable of meeting people’s needs in life? Why is the current economy experienced as unjust and oppressive? Because we are obviously unable to set ourselves the right goals. We cannot talk about a harmonic society overlooking the economy that produces the goods and services we need. Moreover, our working life is at least half of our vigilant life, and the relationships and conflicts generated at work strongly affect the harmony of our social life. The cause of disharmony is us. This is bad, but also good news, because if we want to we can change. The alternative is right in front of us. In order to rebalance our society, and the economic system accordingly, and aim it at the well-being of all, it is necessary to bring people and the planet back to the core of society and economy, because a just and sustainable economy—being aware that everything is connected and interdependent—reduces upstream the causes that generate both social injustice and human waste, and environmental degradation. This is also the purpose of the 17 goals of the United Nations 2030 Agenda, but also of the Index of Fair and Sustainable Welfare, now a mandatory reference in Italy for spending laws. In order to move towards a harmonic society, it is necessary to change the economy. Leonardo Becchetti believes that in order to achieve an innovative and fairer economy, it is necessary to move from a two-handed economy based on the state that regulates (first hand) and the market that produces (second hand), to a four-handed economy (Fig. The 4-handed Economy) that is more complex and articulated, with more distributed powers, where responsible businesses (third hand) are fundamental, spurred by a market of citizen-consumers (fourth hand) “consumeractors”.9 The latter, out of far-sighted self-interest, as they “vote with their wallets”, exercise bottom-up pressure for true social responsibility, both by choosing products from responsible companies and by allocating their savings to funds and companies that take care of people and the environment. This brings out the market power of conscious consumers, eager to contribute to a more harmonic society. This is the New Economy, the necessary forerunner of a harmonic society that puts priorities in order. The New Economy moves from the dominance of shareholders (who want maximum profit) over all other stakeholders, to a market economy based on attention and dialogue with all stakeholders (shareholders, customers, workers, suppliers, environment, local community).

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This approach is becoming increasingly inescapable and favorable for the company, and is of great benefit to the society as a whole, but it requires overcoming the predominance of capital over all other stakeholders. The traditional company considers stakeholders only as a resource and a productive factor on which to make efficiency, even though, when necessary, it needs to manage their consensus and negotiate conflicts.

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2

Responsible consumers

Fiscal responsibility – People - Environment

Without the help of active and responsible consumers, attentive to social and environmental tax responsibility, as exemplified in the image on the left, and without awareness of the social role of business, companies tend to mediate with their stakeholders at the lowest possible cost. The graph on the left highlights the active role of citizens for a more harmonic society. The bottom-up pressure of citizens addresses both the emerging problems with local social interventions (as well as with the vote with the wallet), and public policies by asking for new rules that safeguard common goods, have a social approach and promote and nurture the sense of community and solidarity.

3

The active role of citizens for a sustainable society and economy A life of dignity for all

Responsible consumption

Cizen mobilizaon

Public Policies

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This approach forces society as a whole (and also the economic system) to change its culture, thanks to the bottom-up pressure of citizens and, as far as the economy is concerned, this is supported by the awareness of responsible companies, which by changing the competitive logic, encourage and push other companies to become more attentive and sustainable.

Changing culture and goals A new approach

No pure profit: no capital predominance

People Environment Profit

The human being at the center of the economy and society

The goals of the society and business change

Generate shared value

Companies as community of human beings

The cultural leap required is a great one: it involves changing the goals of society and the economy. It is a new and old perspective at the same time, which is part of a long tradition of humanism. As shown in the last diagram “Changing Objectives”, putting people and the environment at the center means changing the goals of society and the economy. This means shifting the focus from the central power of money and individual interest—of homo oeconomicus—to generating shared value and value of good for all, with the logic of a society that becomes a cooperative community of people. This approach uses all the declinations we have applied to the Cicione-De Biase paradigm to create real value and make an essential contribution to a more equitable society and a better life for all.

References 1. Milanovic B (2016) Global inequality: a new approach for the age of globalization. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 2. Piketty T (2020) Capital and ideology. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 3. Easterlin R (1974) Does economic growth improve human lot? some empirical evidence, nation and households in economic growth: essays in Honor of Moses Abromowitz. Academic Press, New York e London

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4. Becchetti L (2015) NEXT—vote with your wallet! Albeggi editore, Rome 5. Cicione F, De Biase L (2020) Harmonic innovation. Un senso di Futuro, Rubettino editore, Soveria Mannelli

Harmonic Finance Ugo Biggeri

1 Is Finance Today Harmonious? The concept of Harmonic Innovation is built around the imperative need for complementarity between “purpose” and “sense”, between technique and ethics, between meaning and significance, between specialization and interdisciplinarity, between thought and action. Harmony therefore lies with the search for balance between different drives guided by a common vision. Trying to apply this paradigm of harmonic innovation to traditional finance, it might seem at first glance that finance is already harmonic, by definition. In fact, finance has a system of well-established rules and theories, a mathematics, sometimes elegant, sometimes complex, able to make interdisciplinary forecasts, to understand economic trends, people’s choices, productive developments, or political directions. Finance also continually finds balance through the meeting of supply and demand, the balancing of forces in the free market. It is therefore capable of managing risk by assessing any type of uncertainty, whatever its type or sector, and relating it to a measure of financial risk. So, it stands as a well-structured discipline capable of interacting with other disciplines. Yet, as we shall see, harmonic finance is definitely more than traditional finance. Therefore, in what ways can we critique traditional finance in order to propose harmonic finance? Let’s start by saying that Harmonic Innovation is first of all “sense”, “integration” and “community”: it means trying to go beyond one’s own field of knowledge to find harmony with other knowledge and give a sense to the choices made and innovations introduced by looking at the community in a broad sense: people, society, environment, ecosystems. U. Biggeri (B) Eticasgr, Banca Etica’s group, Milano, Italy © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Cicione et al. (eds.), Harmonic Innovation, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems 282, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81190-7_8

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Traditional finance in its interaction with societies and ecosystems has an approach guided exclusively by the preordained financial rules of the other ones. In particular, finance almost pursues a single strategic objective, that of profit maximization; a profit measured primarily in terms of individual interest in which the generation of shared value is secondary and not strategic. The environmental, social and regulatory contexts are considered as constraints within which to achieve this goal of individual profit; an external force that compels one to find a new financial balance. Any social or environmental impacts, which are fundamental to harmonic innovation, are excluded from the financial assessment and, if present, relegated to a market niche. Finally, some of the foundations of harmonic innovation cannot be met, such as, for example, multidisciplinarity or the ethical attention not to contradict the acquisitions of moral research. On the contrary, it could be said that there is still a “principled” detachment from moral issues that has its roots in the very birth of economics and, therefore, of finance in the academic sphere in 1800 when economic studies and teaching left the philosophical sphere to be considered an autonomous discipline (do not overlap magister). Thus, we can argue that there is a wide research space for harmonic finance innovation to pass the scrutiny of the harmonic innovation evaluation assessment already shown in this volume and reported below for convenience: Synthetic Assessment of Harmonic Innovation 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Is it an innovation that stems from multidisciplinary processes and expertise? Is it an ethical innovation that does not contradict the acquisitions of moral research? Is it an innovation that produces positive social and environmental impacts? Is it an innovation that springs from a “sense”? Is it an innovation capable of generating shared value? Is it an innovation that is universal in time and space? Is it an innovation recognized as good and useful by a broad community? Is it an innovation that fosters open and choral organizational models? Is it an innovation that favors circular models of valorization of “human” capital, technological capital, environmental capital and economic capital? Is it an innovation at the service of the development of an integral anthropology of the “human”?

Concluding this first examination of the relationship between harmonic innovation and finance, we can observe that finance has always carried out its function of allocating financial resources (between surplus wealth and the need for investment) while also carrying out a function of “democratic distribution” of resources. Until a few decades ago, in fact, the financial system distributed resources mainly to entrepreneurial activities, or in any case connected to the real economy. This second function has strongly diminished in relatively recent years by moving financial resources into zero-sum markets, where no value is created (first and foremost the derivatives market), and moving it away from productive investments or investments for people.

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Already in 1979, James Tobin (Nobel Prize winner for economics) had assumed the need for a tax on financial transactions (at that time we were thinking of the currency exchange market), to put some sand in the financial gears that kept resources away from investments in the real economy. Since then, resources invested in zerosum financial exchanges have grown incredibly to become dozens of times the world’s gross domestic product. Today, finance is definitely one of the platforms on which the market operates with rules and practices that are not harmonious as we mean it here.

2 For a Harmonic Finance That said, harmonious innovation in the financial world would have a formidable effect in driving innovation and change. Finance today, in fact, has a crucial value in our society and in providing economic means to any business or activity. A rethinking of finance according to the principles of harmonic innovation would trigger a doubtlessly positive and self-generating process of change towards sustainability. The first step towards this innovation would be to regain some humility and consider the other academic disciplines on a par with economics and finance in being able to determine the strategic goals of economic activities as well. It is obvious and beyond question that profit, or rather economic and financial health, is definitely fundamental to any type of activity, even non-entrepreneurial. However, alongside this binding objective, other strategic objectives can and must be managed for harmonious innovations. To be clear, it is not just a matter of going back to “seeing” the non-economic effects of financial activities, but also of making decisions with choices that are not merely financial. The experience of the global alliance of value-based banks and, as far as Italy is concerned, of Banca Etica, show that it is possible to effectively give financial activities an environmental and social purpose, while maintaining a healthy and prudent management that starts with attention to financial and non-financial risk aspects. This alliance pursues a triple bottom line approach to its financial resource allocation activities by considering the effects on people, planet and prosperity. These are areas towards which harmonic innovation works: society, ecosystems, economic sustainability. The term “prosperity” deserves special consideration and is well-suited to harmonic innovation. In fact, it is another way to define the generation of shared value. Compared to the term “profit”, prosperity has a more choral meaning, clearer than the wellbeing of a community or society. Simplifying greatly, but to give a clear view of what harmonic finance could be, the radical change lies in maximizing prosperity versus maximizing profit. In both choices the objective is financial and therefore means maximizing the efficiency of the activities with respect to this objective, but in the second case the

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efficiency is reduced to the interest of those who have control of resources, while in the first case it is necessary to look at “the interest of all” (one of the initial slogans of Banca Etica). This is a disruptive innovation with respect to how economic actions are evaluated, especially by policy makers who can and must direct the market with simple rules and disincentives that can encourage innovation and the efficient use of economic resources with respect to objectives of the general prosperity of society. In this sense, efficiency is one of the keys to harmonious innovation, and to be implemented with respect to prosperity requires concreteness about what to measure and how to manage the inevitable choices that must be made to hold together strategic objectives that may generate potential divergent results. The main management innovation in harmonic finance could be to set clear strategic environmental and social objectives for financial companies (and not only for products) that are consistent with the objectives of sustainable development. For example. the reduction of the use of resources or water, the reduction of climatealtering gases produced or, in the social field, attention to workers’ rights, gender equality, or local communities. Therefore, it would be necessary to set criteria and indicators with which to evaluate one’s operations and investments on the basis of these objectives. There is no shortage of indicators today, and international standards are increasingly being defined to give them robustness; see, for example, the Global Impact Investing Network (thegiin.org) or the taxonomy proposed by the European Commission. Obviously, it is necessary to define which indicators can actually be measured and which are the most impactful for the sectors in which one invests. It is therefore necessary that these indicators are used to make decisions by management and therefore to report on their activities to stakeholders. To ensure that these attentions and efforts do not remain in the realm of good intentions, it would be essential that these indicators are used in financial management and, above all, that they be the subject of internal control activities. Financial activities have a strong tradition of effective internal controls, driven also by supervisory authorities. The system of internal controls is very pervasive with respect to management activities and moves hand-in-hand with them to ensure compliance with internal and external standards. This model reduces the risks of mismanagement and is imposed by the supervisory authorities in a much stronger way than in other economic sectors. Among the motivations for this activity is the protection of savings and the stability of the financial system. But the same system of controls could be used for no less important objectives of global interest such as, for example, tackling climate change. The strongest innovation that could be generated by building harmonious finance concerns positive relational feedback with stakeholders and, in particular, with investors and savers, especially retail or institutional ones. The growing interest of public opinion in sustainability issues is leading to the idea that environmental and social responsibility is also implemented through consumption and savings choices. This idea of indirect moral responsibility in the economic field is gaining ground in

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many areas and is also clearly expressed in recent encyclicals that have inspired the idea of harmonious innovation. Therefore, there is room for a positive interaction between harmonic finance and market opportunity, and this makes it definitely interesting to go deeper into this idea. In conclusion, it might be interesting to add to the key word of harmonic innovation a concept that today seems outdated and was known in popular economics. And yet, it is precisely harmonic finance that could help us to think about this word, which is also a sort of manifesto of a different kind of finance. The word is “thrift” and goes well with prosperity, even though it may seem counter-intuitive. First of all, thrift entails the existence of a limit or a restriction. In today’s finance it is a concept that has been lost, at least since the creation of money has been detached first from gold reserves and then, increasingly, from credits to the real economy. In general, the concept of limits is outgrown for global finance, especially if considered as a limitation by ecosystems or communities. Limiting the growth of finance to the sustainability of the planet is urgent, but it still seems like an unmanageable constraint, a limitation that would bring everything to a halt. Yet, economic history is full of limitations imposed by circumstances on economic activities that have generated innovation and greater efficiency (just think of the link between labor productivity and the abolition of slavery or the recognition of workers’ rights). In recent times, the global coronavirus pandemic has made us reach limits to which we were not used to, showing us that we were not prepared, with consequent suffering, but at the same time making cultural and social innovations that were unthinkable until recently flourish. So, recovering the idea that there are structural limits to manage could be very healthy and help the resilience of the economy itself. Thrift indicates the ability to manage limited resources. The ability to manage risk. The ability to save money. Ultimately also the ability to plan for the future from adverse conditions. So it is a concept that, in addition to financial resources, would apply well to natural or social resources. Finally, thrift is not deprivation, but the ability to understand well how to produce prosperity even from scarce resources. And so, just as risk is the other side of the profit coin, thrift is the other side of prosperity. A change of perspective that would generate innovation for a change towards sustainability. With a little harmonic finance this would be possible.

Harmonic Systemic Organizations: Activities, Interactions and Feelings Saverio Mecca

... although you have to have commissions, you have to make what you can out of the commission you get. And, you know, gradually people come to you to buy surprise and the thing that’s nicest about it is that when people come to buy surprise I have no idea of what I’m going to give them either. It’s not like I’m going out of my way to surprise them, I’m actually quite often surprised myself by what the outcome is because I’m a bit like a hound following a fox; I’m following something really close to the ground and I can’t actually see where it’s going. I’ve got my nose to the ground to make sure I’ following it properly. Peter Rice, An EngineerImagines, 4 February 1992

1 Preliminary Remarks: Thoughts on the Project as a Means for Building New Knowledge A reflection on a harmonious vision refers us to a line of theoretical and operational thought that can be traced back to the vision and method proposed by systems theory, which has greatly influenced and shaped organizational thinking oriented towards the search for efficiency and effectiveness in human organizations. I think a preliminary reflection on the organization that is more complex, more competitive, more inseparable from innovation is needed: the organization we call project. In the words that conclude the book that Peter Rice wanted to leave us at the end of his project adventure, the project appears to us as a process of knowledge that we build while we act, while we decide: designing becomes orienting the process of exploration, of construction of new knowledge. The project is not, with evidence, given. It is not something existing outside the subject, but it is his expression, it is a creative and structuring act of reality, it is an act S. Mecca (B) University of Florence , Florence, Italy © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Cicione et al. (eds.), Harmonic Innovation, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems 282, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81190-7_9

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of oriented knowledge that consists of objectives, constraints, limits and resources in search of a balance that is harmonious. The knowledge that each of us can build of a reality is that of our own experience of reality. According to the expression of Gaston Bachelard, the real is not “ce que l’on pourrait croire”, but “ce que l’on aurait dû penser”, had to think rather than could think in order to allow us to separate knowledge from dream, the knowing act from the delirious act. This knowledge grounded in experience, whether tangible or physically sensed, intangible or cognitively perceived, is knowledge if the subject ascribes to it some value of its own; a value whose definition cannot be said to be independent of the subject who knows. In constructivist epistemologies, the value of objective truth or revealed truth is thus explicitly renounced, since it is agreed that for a knowing subject, the value of knowledge depends on his appreciation of the consequences of actions he processes. This pragmatic criterion proposed by constructivism makes evident the ethical option connected to all knowledge and easily lends itself to the definition of any scientific research policy in rejecting the uncertain and illusory distinction between “fundamental” and “applied” knowledge (and disciplines) that positivist and neopositivist epistemologies are at pains to identify. In addition, the knowledge evaluated by the experience of the thinking subject must be accessible to him/her through the artificial mediation of representations built by the same subject with the help of a system of symbols. To this assumption on which all knowledge is based, which therefore does not belong in a strict sense to the constructivist paradigm alone, the following complementary assumption is added: representation “builds” knowledge, which in this way constitutes.

2 Operable Representation and Testable Knowledge The phenomenological response of the constructivist paradigm to the conceptual problem that the signification of the relation between knowledge and its representation poses to any epistemology makes explicit the operational feature of the notion of representation, along with the experiential character of the notion of knowledge. The innovation is profound and full of consequences: the knowing subject does not represent objects, things, but operations, interactions, and the knowledge that he constructs through representations is itself operative or active. The inseparability of knowledge and representation, understood in their distinguishable activity, the intentional experience of the knowing subject and the tentative construction of the subject that represents knowledge, constitute the strong founding assumptions on which we can now more usefully define the knowledge we can teach, scientific and common, and which legitimize constructivist epistemologies. Attentive to the phenomenon of cognitive experience, Piaget perceives the inseparability between the act of knowing an object and the act of knowing itself that the knowing subject exercises: this cognitive interaction between the object (or the

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phenomenon to be known) and the knowing subject forms at the same time the knowledge of the object (organizing the world) and the way of processing knowledge by the subject (intelligence organizing for itself). In this radical formulation, the phenomenological assumption associates the narrow conception of knowledge with an active conception: the knowledge that the subject builds through his experience simultaneously organizes the way of building said knowledge, or his intelligence. Within these assumptions one can no longer separate knowledge from the intelligence that produces it, and one must understand knowledge as the process that forms it and as the result of this process of formation. One does not know things per se, but through the act by which interactions between things are perceived; one does not know a machine, a technological process, but the interaction between this machine, this process and its context, through the interaction between the knowing subject and the interactive phenomenon. In attributing to the knowing subject the decisive role in the construction of knowledge, we must somehow assume and evaluate the intentionality or purpose of the knowing subject; in other words, acknowledging the intentional—and therefore finalized and finalizing—character of the cognitive act, it may be legitimate to attribute the same character to the knowledge built through that act and agree that the modeled phenomenon is known as finalized by the cognitive action of its representation. This problem of finalization, on which cybernetics and the systems theory have developed, has also been deeply analyzed by Herbert Simon. In a general sense, the teleological assumption, in the moment in which it postulates the existence of a more or less active cognitive system of finalization, leaves the problem of the forms of the activities of finalization that can vary in variety and cogency open and undetermined. The important thing, as Simon and more generally the systems theory reminds us, is that the modeler—the knowing subject, the researcher—should take scrupulous care to make explicit and specify the purposes to which he or she claims to refer when building the teachable knowledge that he or she will examine and communicate. Associated with these phenomenological and teleological assumptions, on which constructivist epistemologies are based, are two methodological principles, the principle of systemic modeling and the principle of intelligent action.

3 The Systemic Vision for a Harmonic Project The contemporary development of the practices, as well as the methodological principles of the systemic vision, appear to be so closely connected with the development of constructivist epistemologies that they can almost be considered as two sides of the same process, while they are autonomous and independent, even if the systems theory and its diffusion has somehow stimulated the emergence of constructivist epistemologies capable of giving answers to the epistemological questions posed by the systems theory starting from the observation of the behavior of living systems. Systemic modeling has thus found, in the decades following its formulation, epistemological supports in the dialectical constructivism of Jean Piaget, in the paradigm

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of complexity or method of Edgar Morin and even earlier in the paradigm of bounded rationality and artificial intelligence of Herbert Simon. These elements in the decades since their formulation have in turn been influenced by the experiences and teachable applications of the systemic model in the most diverse disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields, from ecology to engineering and architectural sciences, organization, pedagogy, etc.; scientific fields that easily use systemic modeling to pragmatically state and justify the scientific nature of their statements and communicate them. The systemic modeling is presented almost under the same terms of the rhetorical formulation of the search for the topics of the speech, as in direct descent from the Inventio of classical rhetoric. It is a modeling that expresses the meditation of the object by the subject that always takes the form of project, of knowledge to act, to transform, a modeling that is both teleological (what project?) and phenomenological (what actions?). Although not yet fully and consciously adopted, the systemic methodological principle is profoundly appropriate and fruitful for a designer’s way of knowing, understanding, and acting: systemic modeling is profoundly different from analytical modeling in that it explicitly assumes the role of the modeler and his projects, privileging the modeling of the act over the modeling ofthe object, and that it initiates the modeling process not from the question “what is it made of,” seeking to answer exhaustively and “closing” the model, but from the question “what does it do, why,” and thus seeking the identification of some function without claiming exhaustiveness, without exhausting the possible senses that will be recognized to the modeled phenomenon. Edgar Morin, with the text “La méthode”,1 gave to the systemic modeling its conceptual system, highlighting the ethical necessity and the reflective intelligence on the cognitive act that we can perceive and evaluate through the exercises of modeling complexity to which we are continuously pushed by both scientific research and civic sense, a permanent and intentional modeling of phenomena that we perceive as complex and therefore intelligible, or active, functioning and self-transforming, finalized or self-finalized in environments consisting of processes. In this way, the methodological instrumentation belonging to constructivist epistemologies proposes to us a definition of systemic modeling that may appear conceptual, even if not more so than that proposed to us so far by positivist epistemologies, but which is certainly richer in knowledge tools, in its non-exclusion of any representation among those capable of expressing “scientific” knowledge.

4 Intelligent Action to Compose Cognitive Dissonances The “principle of intelligent action”, which allows us to symbolically express the second characteristic of constructivist epistemologies, is defined by Newell and 1

Morin [1].

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Simon2 to characterize the capacity of a cognitive system that explores and builds, “enquiring”, the symbolic representations it deals with. This definition is taken up by J. Dewey who designated as “intelligent action” the cognitive process by which the spirit builds a “representation of the dissonance it perceives” between behaviors and projects (the identification of the problem) and tries to come up with some response or plan of action capable of restoring the desired consonance (the solution of the problem), and placing it at the center of his open conception of logic, not reducible to the formalization of syllogistic deduction. The principle of intelligent action tells us, then, that human reason can, in a reproducible way, elaborate and transform intelligible representations of dissonanceconsonance phenomena that it perceives, representations that allow it to invent responses in forms of “intelligent actions” or “adapted actions” capable of eliminating cognitive dissonance. The cognitive process deployed, often according to hesitant procedures, alternates between the provision of adapted means and intermediate ends, which suggest new means that evoke new possible ends. These ways of dialectical reasoning privilege the examination of previous experiences that provide them with reserves of usable heuristics, always selected according to a criterion of feasibility, of heuristics that will take the form of abductive reasoning, without therefore being constrained by requirements of formal truth. A space is opened to heuristics capable of exploiting the extensive resources of retroductive and transductive reasoning, cultivated for many centuries by rhetoric that exploits the syntagmatic and paradigmatic deviations authorized by the complexity of the games of form and sense, from “wordplay” to metaphor, and of the schematizations of knowledge thus constructed.

5 The Systemic Vision of an Organization: From Activities to Feelings To go more into the topic of the systemic and harmonious vision of processes and organizations we can take as a reference and guide the model proposed by Seiler,3 which in its simplicity has had considerable influence in organizational studies, identifying as theoretical assumptions both the school of Human Relations and the Systems Theory, and is based on some basic systemic concepts, such as: system, hierarchy of systems, environment, dynamic balance of systems, input output process, feedback, and functional relationship. An organizational system is defined as a complex system in which each part depends on all the others, in such a way that any change in one part reflects on the whole system, producing a change in all the other parts. This statement has a strong methodological value, strictly systemic in overcoming classical deterministic-causal 2 3

Newell and Simon [2]. Seiler [3].

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models of the production system, but it is difficult to apply from an operational point of view, if not integrated with other concepts. This first concept of system is thus flanked by the concept of hierarchy, thanks to which it is possible to represent a complex system as an articulation in systems of progressively lower rank according to one or more operators. It is therefore possible to replace the verbal representation of complexity with a scheme in which the relations that connect each elementary unit to the others that belong to the subsystem are represented, then the relations between subsystems of lower rank that belong to the same subsystem of immediately higher rank, up to the maximum rank coinciding with the boundaries of the system. The reality located outside the boundaries of a system is defined as the environment of the system with which it continuously exchanges and therefore is interrelated. The quality of the environment and in particular its dynamism stimulates the system to seek new conditions of exchange, of necessarily dynamic balance. The ability of the system to respond to continuous stress is not natural, but the result of continuous decisions aimed at controlling the behavior of the system in relation to the environment, which tend to be counteracted by homeostatic behavior. A system is made up of several interrelated variables; the quality of the relationships therefore becomes an important cognitive and planning parameter. Seiler introduces the qualitative attribute of functionality, an attribute that we can associate with the concept of harmony; each variable can be functional in relation to another variable if it favors it, otherwise we can say that it is dysfunctional. Each variable can be both functional for some and dysfunctional for others at the same time. To Seiler, the perception and analytical examination of the relationship of functionality between variables is the determining action for managing the systems (design and control), the composition of the different dimensions of an organization is in fact a search for harmony. What interests us about a system, an organization, is therefore the behavior. The dynamic relationship can be divided into three interdependent aspects: • Activities, which are the most obvious aspect of behavior, as individuals act within the system. • Interactions, since individuals often act in relation to the actions of other people: interactions are proportionally more important in relation to the physical proximity of workplaces and the division of labor among individuals. • Feelings, which individuals develop “about what they are doing, about what is being done to them and about the people they are with. These feelings are closely related to each individual’s personality” and “different aspects of the technological, organizational, and social environment tend to develop different feelings in relation to each individual’s predispositions.”4 The three aspects of behavior are not easy to distinguish and together they interact and determine the results obtained, which can be measured and expressed

4

Seiler J. A., ibid., p. 30.

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with three units of measurement: productivity, individual satisfaction, and individual development of the group and the system. As we can easily understand, of the three aspects of human organizations of any nature and complexity, the decisive one, the one that feeds a system with energy, backs its dynamics, its evolution, the reason why it evolves, is the aspect of feelings: above all sustainability, in particular environmental sustainability, the decarbonization of human activities, the care of life in all its forms on the Earth. If it were only a technical or economic issue it would be one of the many options proposed to individual and collective decisions, but it is not and has not become so. Today this is perceived in an increasingly shared and dramatic way because it is associated with the deepest feeling in Western culture and beyond: the feeling of giving our children, the generations that will come after us, a better life that will only be possible in a better world in which all life is preserved and cared for. In planning, in innovation, in politics itself, we must find the ability to be guided and propose the sense of what we do; that is, a feeling that can be the reason for our actions. On feeling only can we build consensus, which is nothing but con-sentiment.

References 1. Morin E (1983) The method. Feltrinelli, Milan 2. Newell A, Simon HA (1976) (Turing Lecture n°75) Computer science as an inquiry: symbol and search. Commun ACM 19(3):113–126 3. Seiler JA (1967) Systems analysis in organizational behavior. Richard D. Irwin, Homewood, IL (translated in Italian: Analisi dei sistemi e comportamento organizzativo, Etas Libri, Milan, 1976)

Towards the Harmonic City Valerio Barberis

1 Prato a Vision: Urban Agendas as a Tool for Sustainable Urban Policies Prato is a vibrant, contradictory, innovative, conflictual city: a city that, since the beginning of the twentieth century and in particular since the second post-war period, represents a formidable urban, social, cultural and economic laboratory, in which new models have often been experimented. Prato is an ever-changing reality. Prato is a contemporary city; it is the city of contemporaneity in Tuscany. The City Council, in its strategies of local development, since 2014 has been pursuing a clear vision of the city that aims to characterize Prato as a place of contemporaneity, a place where the signs of the past and those of today find new forms of dialogue, the “traditional” economic sectors of the city with the frontiers of digital, artificial spaces of the built environment with nature. Prato, therefore, is able to demonstrate in an even stronger and more concrete way its contemporaneity as a city of textile fashion, visual and performing arts, a city of coexistence of multiple ethnic groups, a city of new economic sectors, a city of circular economy, a city of experimentation of urban practices of recycling, a city of innovation in the training of young people, a sustainable industrial district, a city of experimentation of new forms of urban agriculture: a city that confirms its vocation for innovation. Prato, with its 194,7931 inhabitants, is the second largest city in Tuscany and the third largest in Central Italy in terms of number of residents. Prato is famous worldwide for its textile district, which accounts for about 3% of European textile production, making it the most important district on the continent. It counts over 3,500 companies in an industry at the service of the big fashion brands. 1 http://statistica.comune.prato.it/?act=f&fid=2706.

V. Barberis (B) Prato, Italy © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Cicione et al. (eds.), Harmonic Innovation, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems 282, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81190-7_10

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The strategies of the textile district over the years have led to choices directed towards sustainability as the main watchword and focus on strengthening and research and development in the traditional sector; that is, textile production that starts from the reuse of old disused clothes, making it the most important sustainable and circular textile district in the world. Alongside the textile district, since the ’90s the fast fashion district has grown, with over 4,000 clothing companies, making Prato a leader in Europe and a reference point for large-scale retail trade. It is a city where many cultures live together—more than 130 different ethnic groups—and that, with contradictions and problems, integrates different knowledge and lifestyles. Prato is the symbol of a multicultural dimension. Prato also has a great tradition in innovation not only in its manufacturing production but also in the experimentation capacity of local government in services delivered to citizens, thanks to the possibilities offered by the information technology and new organizational methods. Since 2014, the City Council of Prato has promoted a debate at the national level, on a political and cultural level, on the need for an overall renewal of the governance tools of Italian cities. Starting from the recognition of the strategic role that urban areas have at the level of the country system in relation to sustainable development strategies, the city has outlined an overall vision of the city, extending the reflection on the role of Prato within the Florence—Prato—Pistoia metropolitan area and, more generally of Central Italy on a national level. For the definition of the medium-long term vision, the Administration uses two Urban Agendas: the first one, approved in 2015, Urban Agenda for Prato,2 was the basis for all choices on urban and territorial policies of the 2014–2019 administrative mandate and outlined the strategies for sustainable development in relation to the priorities of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals—SDGs and the Urban Agenda for the European Union; the second, approved in 2020, Prato Urban Agenda 2050,3 defines the strategic positioning of the city in relation to the global competition on green and circular cities and strategically integrates the vision of the city within the priorities on which the Next Generation Europe and the European Green Deal programs are based. The two documents of the Urban Agenda develop an overall project for the city, starting from the analysis of the peculiarities of Prato, and integrates them in the global competition among territories, in particular that which sees in green and circular cities the major drivers of development for the future of nations: a competition that takes place in the field of innovation, digitalization and new economic models based on the centrality of environmental and social issues. The Urban Agendas promote Prato as a city of contemporaneity in Tuscany. These are therefore the grounds on which to define actions and programs for the development of its socio-economic sectors, in particular the textile district. This 2

http://allegatiurbanistica.comune.prato.it/dl/20151118124227452/atto_di_indirizzo_PS_PO_1. pdf. 3 http://pubblicazioneatti.comune.prato.it/doc/prato/CC_2020_0000080_2.pdf.

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support strategy outlined with intangible actions and new models of governance is flanked by the Strategic Urban Areas; that is, urban districts on which to develop a coordinated planning of urban regeneration projects and public interventions, which should be understood as the physical actions in which the narrative of the contemporary city takes form and, at the same time, functional tools to achieve the more general strategies of sustainable development. Agenda Urbana per Prato and Agenda Urbana Prato 2050 thus promote a model of integrated urban and territorial policies in which the intangible actions of support to the economic, social and cultural sectors of the city are associated with specific physical places deemed functional to speed up the processes of innovation, social inclusion, environmental transition and circularity. Since 2014, the City Council has promoted a vision that based the city’s strategic positioning on four main pillars: – – – –

Environmental transition, promoted in the Prato Green Deal program Circular transition, promoted in the Prato Circular City program Digital transition, promoted in the Prato Smart City program Social inclusion and the city of rights.

Alongside these, it has developed a transversal and specific action in relation to the traditional economic sector: – Support for the Prato textile and clothing district. The acceleration towards new socio-economic models and the new scenarios that have opened at European and international level following the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, have triggered a phase of deep reflection and awareness of the need for a renewed vision tool for the city. As a natural evolution of the debate triggered since 2014, in December 2020 the City Council approved the new vision document, called the Agenda Urbana Prato 2050 (2050 Prato Urban Agenda) which introduces for the first time in an urban planning document the paradigm of Harmonic Innovation in the founding principles, as a value, operational and impact assessment basis in the medium and long term. A challenge between territories has opened up on a global level, based on innovation, environmental and social sustainability, which will see different models of development in opposition: Italian cities will be able to represent places of experimentation and reference for new models if they have the ability to promote the hallmarks on which they are based; that is, the intimate and inseparable relationship between territory and social, cultural and economic dimensions. La Pira said cities are alive. “They have a characteristic aspect and, so to speak, their own soul, their own destiny: they are not occasional piles of stones, but they are the mysterious dwellings of men and, I would like to say more, somehow the mysterious dwellings of God.” La Pira’s quotation expresses the exceptional nature of Italian cities: why are fabrics produced in Prato? Why tanning in Santa Croce and paper in Lucca? Why trees in Pistoia and gold in Arezzo? All these questions, which concern only a few

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cities in Tuscany but which can be extended to all regions, are underpinned by a dimension that is absolutely typical of Italian urban areas, based on the relationship between territorial resources and socio-cultural skills that, over time, have shaped physical and social space in an indissoluble way. The outcome of this natural evolution is represented by the Italian industrial, artisan and agri-food districts as socioeconomic models, which are based on the cultural identity of the territories. They build widespread and shared knowledge, develop models of zero-km production and distribute resources at a local level, generate productive symbiosis and models of circular economy. The challenge ahead is to project the socio-economic dimension of the districts into the global competition of digital and environmental transition, maintaining and strengthening the dynamics of social impact on which they are based. This is the framework from which the Agenda Urbana Prato 2050 was born, a new vision for the city that reinterprets the strategies developed since 2014 in terms of Harmonic Innovation, as in an extraordinarily and surprisingly consistent manifesto a posteriori, and reintroduces them in the challenge that looms at the global level, promoting Prato as Harmonic Green and Circular City.

2 Prato as Harmonic Green and Circular City: Taxonomy of the Harmonic City 2.1 Nature as the New Center: Prato Green Deal Cities are the biggest contributors to the ongoing climate emergency; over 70% of climate-changing emissions are produced in urban areas. Particularly in European cities, the urban suburbs built after the Second World War until the 90 s of the twentieth century—that is, the largest percentage of buildings in Europe—were built without any sensitivity to sustainability issues, representing, therefore, the major issue from an environmental point of view, as well as the quality of the urban landscape, social and spatial inclusion. Prato, a laboratory on the relationship between man and nature Prato has had a peculiar urban evolution: until 1950 the city can be represented as a medieval historical center, with its walls intact, located on the slopes of the pre-Apennine system of Calvana, lapped by the Bisenzio river to the north and immersed in the agricultural landscape of the Florentine plain, dotted with dozens of small hillside villages and towns, each with its own social identity, historical buildings and squares of aggregation. San Giorgio a Colonica, Paperino, Tavola, Iolo, Grignano, Cafaggio, Fontanelle, Galciana, Sant’Ippolito, Coiano, Santa Lucia, Figline, la Querce, la Macine, Mezzana, are the names of some of these villages, called “frazioni” (districts) in Prato. Some toponyms derive from the Etruscan period and what is significant is that studies on the human activities of the plain have shown

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that their location, in addition to deriving from the Roman centuriation, coincided with the outcrops of the water table, outlining a historical relationship between water and man that in Prato, since the year 1000, has given rise to extraordinary territorial infrastructure of canalization for the exploitation of hydraulic energy, the system of Prato’s gore, which lays the foundations of the textile tradition of the city. Between 1950 and 1970, the city grew from 75,000 to 150,000 inhabitants, becoming one of the largest textile districts in the world. Prato does not follow the model of other cities: the urban sprawl, which expands the built-up area starting from a single historical center, producing increasingly large concentric suburbs, but it develops according to a polycentric model, with respect to which all the historical centers, the major one and the villages, expand. In some portions of the territory the built-up fabrics connect, while in others the agricultural landscape remains intact. The polycentric model of Prato has therefore generated an extremely dense urban fabric in the built-up parts, which include ancient settlements and modern fabrics, interspersed with large unbuilt free portions, generating an urban landscape suspended between built-up areas, agriculture and nature. The current image of Prato, therefore, draws its origins from the historical dynamics of the human activity of the territory, based on the polycentrism of settlements, which still defines the urban and social landscape of the city: a territorial structure that has demonstrated, even during the building boom between the 50s and 70s of the last century and in the subsequent expansion phases, an extraordinary resilience and ability to generate a socially inclusive urban model, which preserves the cultural identity of the villages, allowing people to ensure local services and, above all, that maintains within itself large natural and agricultural areas. Urban planning and the centrality of environmental issues This arrangement makes Prato an ideal laboratory in the definition of new urban paradigms that put nature at the center in order to face the challenge of the climate emergency with strategies of resilience, urban forestation and, above all, rethinking the role of nature in the city as an active tool for human health. The planning of the city has been set on the model of landscape urbanism,4 which overturns the traditional urban planning concept: the city is an interconnected network of areas, lines and green poles that build a real green territorial infrastructure, incorporating built islands, in which to develop strategies for reuse and circular economy paradigms on the urban scale. The urban planning document, the Piano Operativo Comunale5 (Town Operational Plan), adopted in September 2018, promotes a systematic project that aims to generate an environmentally active behavior of the city as a whole: urban areas must equip themselves with integrated urban and environmental planning tools with the aim of radically changing their impact and becoming the protagonists in addressing the global climate emergency. Cities, from places that generate causes, must become places that generate solutions to environmental problems, through strategies of resilience and urban forestation. 4 5

Cattaneo [1], pp. 12–17. http://www2.comune.prato.it/piano-operativo/.

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Urban forestation and city resilience The Town Operational Plan contains the document Strategie per la Forestazione Urbana6 (Strategies for Urban Forestation),which consists of two sections: Green Benefits—Analisi dei benefici del verde urbano di Prato (Green Benefits—Analysis of the Benefits of Urban Greening in Prato), developed by Pnat, directed by Stefano Mancuso and the second, Prato Action Plan per la Forestazione Urbana (Prato Action Plan for Urban Forestation), developed by Stefano Boeri Architetti. The first section analyzes the environmental benefits—pollutant removal, carbon dioxide interception, reduction of runoff, energy savings—of publicly owned trees, i.e. a limited portion of the trees present in the city, providing systematic and geo-localized data that unequivocally demonstrate the environmental impact of tree-lined areas at an urban scale. The second section, starting from the environmental project of the Town Operational Plan and the data provided by Pnat, outlines a comprehensive strategy at an urban scale, projected to 2030, for the planting of 190,000 new trees: an action plan that consists of six scenarios—river and gore park, green infrastructure mitigation, capillary green, peri-urban agricultural gulfs and large parks, urban demineralization, agricultural park belt—that promote a multi-scalar process and planned over time for the construction of the green city. Urban forestation and human health The Town Operational Plan, together with the Strategies for Urban Forestry, builds a unitary project for a green city that interprets nature in the city as a real territorial infrastructure: an active tool in the face of the climate emergency, environmental issues, to which can be assigned a new role in improving the health of citizens. Nature in the city takes on the role of a tool for health prevention, which starts from the instances of the WHO Toronto Charter, according to a new motto: a tree instead of a pill. The Prato Operational Plan promotes, at a political and cultural level, a paradigm shift in which urban and environmental planning are associated with health planning, assuming as an objective, or rather, as a moral imperative, that of generating healthy cities that bring nature back to the fore for the psycho-physical health of citizens. A framework that results in the prospect of creating and managing with health welfare resources, urban green areas designed and monitored on the basis of specific indicators for the purpose of health prevention. For these reasons, the Prato Operational Plan is considered the first document in Italy in which urban planning is directly associated with human health. Urban forestation and smart cities The Urban Forestation Plan is implemented through the Prato Forest City7 program, which encourages the involvement of the city in all its socio-economic components in the sharing of the city’s green vision, through communication strategies, training, participation and co-design. Alongside these environmental awareness actions, Prato 6 7

file:///C:/Users/a024/Downloads/01.1_Relation%20forestation%20urban%20(11).pdf. https://get.treedom.net/prato-forest-city/. https://www.pratoforestcity.it/.

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Forest City promotes crowdfunding and private financing activities for the implementation of urban forestation. Prato Forest City is a program with a data-driven approach: under an agreement with the Institute of BioEconomy (IBE) of the CNR, the city is constantly monitored on environmental aspects through the management of satellite data from the European Sentinel program and with periodic hyperspectral flights carried out by the Italian Space Agency, promoted by the Tuscany Region, which provide data on tree coverage, heat islands and air quality. In addition to these data, 50 sensors have been installed in the city to acquire localized and dynamic environmental data, as well as a device positioned in the center of the city in order to collect overall data on CO2 emissions in the urban area and detect changes over time. All these data will flow into a digital twin of the environmental behavior of the city, outlining a model of governance and urban and environmental planning, in which the policy maker will have at his disposal detailed data localized and distributed in the city and tools for monitoring and evaluation of planning choices in the medium to long term at the whole urban scale. The challenge of digital and environmental transition will have to be implemented in the cities with new integrated models of governance based on the development of digital twin, in which urban, environmental and health planning are interconnected through the digital and monitoring tools of the smart city, in a holistic vision that focuses on the needs of nature and man. City and nature healing Prato Forest City aims to delineate an arrangement in which the large urban green areas, namely the natural axis of the Bisenzio river, the nature reserves of the preApennine slopes and the inclusions of agricultural landscape within the urban fabric build a green territorial framework, in which to develop forestation strategies, in the logic of promoting healthy lifestyles and especially health prevention with the Local Health Authority: an urban model that organizes an interconnected infrastructure of green areas for the purposes of the actions of natural therapy, based on Green Care strategies. “The physician heals, Nature makes well,” said Aristotle.

The city is interpreted like a network of therapeutic gardens, which starts from a main structure of large green and natural areas that branches out penetrating the urban fabric in an increasingly capillary way until it reaches the small pocket gardens, school and condominium gardens. A natural infrastructure monitored through the instruments of the smart city, in which to generate a harmonious integration between the deep needs of man and digital health programs, made possible by the new potential of 5G technology. Urban forestation and community The implementation of Prato Forest City foresees the involvement of the city in all its components; urban forestation must become an asset and a goal of the community. Nature takes care of the city and, in turn, the city must take care of nature, finally recognizing that man also, or rather, especially in the urban environment, is part of a complex and delicate ecosystem of which we must know how it works, restore

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the relationships and understand the mutual benefits. Prato Forest City therefore promotes environmental awareness programs dedicated to citizens through activities in schools, museums, and sports areas, with the collaboration of the third sector, large-scale retail trade, and the network of local stores, as well as specific programs in synergy with the Local Health Authority, the local network of the Health Society and with specific actions in the city hospital, Santo Stefano, where the relationship between nature and health can find extraordinary forms of application both in relation to patients and healthcare professionals. The objective is to organize governance and financing models in which urban green areas, both public and private, are treated equally, outlining new forms of public–private partnership. In this context, a specific activity is dedicated to promote urban forestation programs as a decarbonation strategy for the textile district: trees in the city become functional to the sustainability strategies of the manufacturing sectors, developing urban policies that concretely build models for the environmental transition of the industry, that produce competitive advantages for the economic sectors and introduce the principle that CO2 must be intercepted and compensated where it is produced. Nature-based solutions and the environmentally active city As part of the reflection on the role of natural areas in the urban context promoted by the Prato Operational Plan and the Urban Forestation Plan, the City Council of Prato has developed the project Prato Urban Jungle -PUJ,8 which has been funded in the fourth call of the Urban Innovative Actions—UIA9 program on the topic of Nature-Based Solutions and Sustainable Land Use. The PUJ project has contributed in a decisive way to draw international attention to Prato and to make it come to light as a city able to promote innovative urban and environmental policies; the partnership coordinated by the European Department of the City Council of Prato involves the start up Pnat directed by Mr. Stefano Mancuso, Stefano Boeri Architetti, the Institute of BioeEconomy—IBE of CNR, Legambiente, Estracom, Treedom, Green Apes and Codesign Toscana. PUJ addresses a crucial issue for the European urban areas, namely how to intervene in dense built-up areas, to give them a new role in urban environmental strategies and to include them within the more general issue of the vegetation of cities. The concept of Urban Jungle, developed by Stefano Mancuso and Stefano Boeri, promotes a new urban paradigm that sees the existing dense neighborhoods as potential places to invade with intensive renaturation programs, through the use of Nature-Based Solutions, according to a data-driven model based on environmental data coming from a system of sensors located in the areas of intervention. The project also provides for the involvement of citizens through codesign from the early stages, in order to share strategies, objectives and identify formulas for the management of shared green areas between the public institutions and citizens involved. PUJ promotes a vision that transforms the existing dense city, especially the suburbs built after World War II, from areas that cause environmental 8 9

http://www.pratourbanjungle.it/it/pagina893.html. https://www.uia-initiative.eu/en/uia-cities/prato.

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problems to active tools to increase urban resilience and to improve the environmental conditions for the purpose of the health of citizens. Therefore, since 2014, the city of Prato has promoted a vision that has placed nature at the center of its medium-long term planning, developing, at the same time, symbolic projects to be implemented in the short term to make citizens understand the green turn with tangible examples: the Central Park of Prato,10 the new green lung in the historic center that will stand on the former hospital building; the Riversibility11 river park project; the new Parco del Soccorso12 obtained thanks to the undergrounding of the city’s busiest thoroughfare; the 100 Piazze13 program for the renewal of public spaces in the historic center and the “frazioni”; the new network of routes dedicated to sustainable mobility; the program of new sustainable school buildings and many other projects have configured a general action that today makes us speak of a real Prato Green Deal. A new urban destiny is looming: botany is destiny14 Cities must face a radical change in which nature takes on the role of a new local infrastructure that starts with integrated urban, environmental and health planning, whose beneficial effects on the environment and human health are constantly monitored through the processes of the smart city and the digital twin and that involves the sharing and involvement of the community in its construction. It is important not to lose sight of the deeper meaning of this turning point. All these activities, in fact, must be driven by a very simple inspiration: to regenerate a harmonious relationship between man and nature in the cities, to build healthier, sustainable and, in the end, more beautiful places to live.

2.2 The City as Circular Metabolism: Prato Circular City Prato is a paradigmatic place of circular economy at the European level.15 The Prato Textile District for hundreds of years has based its main production on the recovery of “rags” and, thanks to the expertise gained over time in the industrial sector, the practices of reuse have become an integral and essential part of the identity of the city, building a socio-economic fabric with extraordinary widespread, shared and, very often, unconscious skills that have led the city to coordinate the participation of Italy in the Partnership on Circular Economy16 under the Urban Agenda for the EU.

10

http://www.ilparcocentralediprato.it/. https://www.cittadiprato.it/IT/Sezioni/518/Riversibility---Parco-Fluviale/. 12 https://www.comune.prato.it/it/muoversi/viabilita/sottopasso-soccorso/pagina242.html. 13 https://www.cittadiprato.it/IT/Sezioni/113/I-nuovi-spazi-pubblici/. 14 Cattaneo [1], p. 145. 15 https://circulareconomy.europa.eu/platform/en/good-practices/car-city-governance-prato. 16 https://ec.europa.eu/futurium/en/circular-economy. 11

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Prato, the symbol of circular economy For over 200 years, the Prato Textile District has been producing textiles from the recovery and reuse of discarded clothing: an expertise that has allowed the development of technologies and processes capable of regenerating any fiber, which, in addition to representing an ancient industrial tradition, today represents a strategic asset of great importance for the future of the district. Every year, 220,000 tons of rags are recycled in the Prato Textile District,17 making it the most important textile recycling center in the world. The rags are once again used as fabrics for the fashion industry, identifying Prato as a fundamental manufacturing district for the green, sustainable and circular turnaround of the global fashion system. Starting from the skills developed for the fashion industry, the district over time has also oriented its research towards other sectors where textile technologies of reuse have been used with significant results, such as construction, furniture, automotive and interior. In Prato, the district skills of textile waste recycling have represented over time a sort of socio-cultural paradigm, a collective and inclusive DNA, in which these practices have become part of all the dynamics of the city, such as the reuse of the urban and building fabric, the reuse of water and the forms of collaborative economy promoted in the social sphere. It is no coincidence that Prato was the birthplace of the first theater in a factory, the Fabbricone Theater,18 built in 1974 as part of the experience of Luca Ronconi’s Laboratorio Prato,19 or that many of the city’s most important cultural and public institutions have been created over the years by recovering old abandoned industrial factories, such as the Polo Culturale Campolmi,20 which houses the Lazzerini Library and the Textile Museum,21 or the Chamber of Commerce22 of Prato, anticipating an action of urban regeneration and recovery that is now a current practice. These public examples, together with urban planning policies aimed at reuse,23 have encouraged the private sector in the recovery of existing buildings, especially industrial and artisan ones, promoting circular economy practices at an urban scale and innovative governance models.24 Starting from the 80s of the twentieth century, the city of Prato, the City Council and the Industrial Association have 17

https://astrirecycling.it/. https://www.cittadiprato.it/IT/Sezioni/44/Fabbricone/. 19 https://lucaronconi.it/scheda/extra/fonda-e-dirige-fino-al-1979-il-laboratorio-di-progettazioneteatrale-di-prato. 20 https://www.cittadiprato.it/it/Sezioni/36/Campolmi/. Mattei [2]. 21 https://www.museodeltessuto.it/museo/sede/. 22 https://divisare.com/projects/257298-mdu-architetti-pietro-savorelli-nuova-sede-della-cameradi-commercio-di-prato. 23 In the urban planning of Prato since the Secchi Plan (1993–96), the priority strategy is the recovery of the city-factory through reuse interventions that maintain and preserve the character of mixitè, a term coined by Bernardo Secchi for the fabric of Prato. The Operational Plan adopted in 2018 confirms the centrality of reuse policies in urban strategies, interpreting the topic of reuse of the city as a declination of the narrative of Prato as a paradigmatic city of the circular economy. 24 Prato and the circular economy—the city https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jV1ess7B1U& vl=it. 18

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invested in an innovative system of treatment of civil and industrial wastewater, which is conveyed to a single purification plant managed by the company Gida spa.25 From the plant, after several treatments in addition to those that are normally carried out, the water is fed into an industrial aqueduct26 that supplies the artisanal and industrial areas of the city, becoming a model of sustainable and circular reuse of water. The network of the industrial aqueduct, which extends for over 46 miles, is a one of a kind in Europe and has made it possible to ensure the supply for water-greedy companies of the textile district (dyeing plants, finishing, etc.), making it an alternative source of supply essential to preserve the groundwater and ensure its use for drinking. The city as a circular metabolism Prato, therefore, is a territory in which the circular economy is a daily practice in the manufacturing sector, in the water cycle, in urban management policies and in the collaborative economy models that pervade the social dynamics of the city, joining those European cities that are promoting the circular transition of their socioeconomic processes and promoting, together with them, the role and centrality of urban areas in the transition towards the circular economy of the states. Urban systems are increasingly confronted with the need to implement policies and initiate experiments that facilitate the transition from linear to circular activities and behaviors, introducing ecosystem models with respect to which the behavior of the city is considered as a circular metabolism. The Prato Circular City27 program is part of this framework and has the strategic aim of strengthening the image of Prato as a circular city at an international level and establishing a permanent table with local stakeholders to promote shared actions of circular economy and build a circular city governance. Prato Circular City promotes a model of a circular city based on three fundamental principles: innovation of production processes, urban regeneration and strengthening of social cohesion. A city model that focuses on innovation and digitization of processes as essential tools to direct the urban metabolism towards a circular behavior, keeping the principle of equity and social inclusion in actions or governance models as a constant background. Circular cities and industrial districts Each city has peculiar aspects, specific and different socio-economic dynamics. Within it there are multiple identities that in turn relate to the geographically close territories and to the global dimension of economy and trade; the circular transition of urban areas must follow and support the characterizing aspects, which represent the strategic assets and modulate specific and general models. Italian cities have often generated industrial and artisan districts that were born thanks to particular conditions of the territories and that are intimately connected with their cultural and social 25

https://www.gida-spa.it/. Prato and the circular economy—circular reuse of treated wastewater https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=N8Zh6HIqmec. 27 http://www.pratocircularcity.it/home625.html. 26

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evolution. Italian District dynamics are circular by nature, produce manufacturing symbiosis and generate widespread positive social impacts in the local social fabric. They still represent one of Italy’s most important assets, in their ability to represent resilient, flexible, sustainable economic realities and for their interdependence with the territories. Cities and circular governance models In this strategic framework, Prato Circular City, on the one hand, moves from the specificities of the city, in particular from the actions in support of innovation and circular transition of the Textile District, and on the other hand builds actions consistent with the general dynamics of urban metabolisms of European cities, developing four vertical topics and one horizontal topic, that of Urban Circular Governance, which mirror the most important aspects in the transition of the city towards the circular economy: 1.

2.

3.

4.

Textile and Apparel District and industrial symbiosis: Aims to accelerate the transition towards a circular production model of the Textile District. The areas of intervention are the definition of a better regulation (end of waste), promoting a communication at district level, identifying funding and economic incentives, studying new business models, outlining the impact of 5G technology in terms of industry 4.0 and supplying chain tracking, promoting LCA analysis actions and developing strategies for carbon neutral products with urban forestation actions to be implemented in the city. Urban resource management—urban metabolism: From innovative forms of waste management to the recovery and reuse of water, the use of energy from renewable sources, and the valorization of by-products and sustainable materials, the flows of materials necessary for the functioning of a city and a productive district can be the subject of sustainability policies. The tool of sustainable “circular” tenders can also contribute to a more responsible use of resources by public administration. Circular consumption: The circular city is the one where citizens are aware of the issues of sustainability, circularity, short and ethical supply chains, and behave proactively by adapting their consumption patterns and lifestyles. This attitude thus encourages companies to change production processes by adopting more sustainable technologies and procedures. Sustainable urban agricultural systems: Greater attention to local and national production has put the quality of production back at the fore, but also respect for the environment and protection of workers. Urban agricultural systems can meet different supply needs and at the same time support the local economy, developing food policies on an urban scale.

Cities and new circular social models Alongside the construction of comprehensive governance tools, cities need to rethink how best to use their existing spaces and buildings, involving them in a new vision

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that enables the social, cultural and economic creativity of communities. The socioeconomic dynamics taking place in cities today stand out for an ultimate rapidity of change: urban areas are places where new models of social and economic interaction are experimented, often in an informal way, appropriating existing spaces in a creative and innovative way. Temporary uses, collaborative economy, shared space management, adaptive reuse are becoming words that are now part of the common language, defining new urban practices in which the social impact and the collective dimension are placed at the center. Alongside these aspects, cities possess a stock of unused or underused private and public spaces and buildings which, if associated with new urban practices, represent an extraordinary opportunity, because they are places that can be brought back into play in a very short time and with limited economic resources. The change of perspective towards environmentally active and circular models goes in the direction of developing coordinated strategies between urban planning and management; the challenge then is to move from urban planning to a new model of urban re-use management, in the logic of developing the functional transition of the city towards new, innovative functions at the social and economic level. The future of cities depends first of all on a correct use of its spaces and buildings, introducing models of circular economy in urban management. The unused or underused buildings and spaces of the city thus become an important strategic element to be associated with the overall vision and must be the subject of a rethink: not what is done with the building but what is done in the building. This new way of adaptive thinking about the city starts from the issue of temporary reuse and gets to the definition of urban strategies to develop models and reuse of parts of the city functional to the overall vision. From this standpoint, it becomes clear how unused buildings represent a huge potential for cities in terms of space available for the implementation of specific urban policy strategies. Circular and smart city Technology today makes it possible to develop digital models of the city, the digital twin, which, associated with systems for detecting the occupancy of buildings and spaces, can lead to real-time knowledge of the spaces available. In Prato these reflections have promoted active urban policies applied to the productive building heritage, more than 5 million square meters, which, if observed in the key of new urban practices, represents a fundamental strategic asset for the city, able to respond with innovative ways to the needs of spaces of its economic sectors and of the other industrial districts of Tuscany, in order to promote actions of industrial symbiosis. The digital twin of the city, functional to activate all the policies of urban reuse and promote territorial marketing programs, introduces the opportunity for a new model of governance that provides for the establishment of an Urban Reuse Agency, in the form of a coordinating structure that constantly manages data, develops the general strategy of reuse in relation to the medium-long term vision, facilitates the interaction between supply and demand of spaces and promotes diversified models of use in relation to the vocations of different types of spaces and buildings and in relation to ownership (public or private). The Urban Reuse Agency represents an innovative governance

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tool for the smart modalities that it introduces in the management of existing buildings in the city and is an extraordinary enabling tool to implement the principles of circular economy in the management of urban resources. Cities and collaborative economy This operational model is the proposal of the document Handbook on Sustainable and Circular re-use of spaces and buildings28 developed by the City Council of Prato and Laboratorio Arco in the framework of the work carried out within the partnership on Circular Economy jointly with the partnership on Sustainable Land Use and Nature-Based Solutions. The document can be identified as a starting point on new models and strategies for adaptive urban re-use in urban policies, also promoting the inclusion of collaborative economy, temporary uses and shared management of spaces, according to an approach promoted at European level on the priority issue of Jobs and Skills in the Local Economy29 that sees in the city and the economy of scale a potential to generate new social economies and new jobs.

References 1. Cattaneo EC (2019) Foreword. In: Barberis V, Cattaneo EC (eds) Prato Fabbrica Natura. Skira, Milan 2. Mattei M (2011) Campolmi. La fabbrica della cultura. Il recupero dell’antica Cimatoria Campolmi di Prato per il Museo del tessuto e la Biblioteca della città. Edizioni Polistampa, Firenze

28

https://ec.europa.eu/futurium/en/circular-economy/handbook-sustainable-and-circular-re-usespaces-and-buildings-0. 29 https://ec.europa.eu/futurium/en/jobs-and-skills-in-the-local-economy.

Towards Harmonic Space Planning? Giuseppe De Luca

1 The Beginning of Harmony in Urban Planning Legislation in Italy I deal with the first point by reporting a passage from the debate on the need for a national urban planning law. I start from the accompanying discussion of what later became Law n. 1150 of 1942, still largely in force, despite the enactment of the Italian Constitution in 1948 which imposed, in its transitional provisions, the overcoming within three years of the previous laws. This was not the case for urban planning. The National Councilor Rosario Massimino, in his speech, states: “We cannot admit that in the master plans for the arrangement of our cities we should not make room for the needs of services of public interest, which today are basic for the civil coexistence and for what is the harmony of the buildings in the framing plans”.1 The concept of harmony is well connected, on the one hand, to that of civil coexistence and, on the other, to the buildings and their location within the space. This “confinement” is the result of a verbally-designed plan specially drawn, made by a cartographic system and a series of technical rules that mediate between the design and the real space. The harmony that derives from this is nothing new. The whole history of architecture is characterized by this approach.2 Its declination to the physical space through the urban discipline is, however, an innovation of a technical-formal nature: on the one 1 R. Massimino (National Councilor—new designation of the Honorable—as Representative from the Steel and Metallurgy Corporation component), Intervention, in the Discussion of the Bill: Zoning Law (2038), House of Fairs and Corporations, Legislative Committee on Public Works and Communications, 30 Legislature, Minutes of the Meeting of July 2, 1942, p. 519. 2 One of the fundamental paragraphs of the Fifth Book of 1414 on Architecture by Marcus Vitruvius Pollonius is titled precisely “Of Harmony”.

G. De Luca (B) Department of Architecture, University of Florence, Florence, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Cicione et al. (eds.), Harmonic Innovation, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems 282, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81190-7_11

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hand, as a “vertical” conformity between the various levels of the urban instrumentation that the law has actually provided (from the territorial plan, to the inter-municipal plan, to the general plan, up to the implementation plan); and, on the other hand, as a “horizontal” conformity between the building/architectural project and the urban regulation (functional zoning, planning criteria, distance and typologies).3 In the mid-twentieth century, therefore, the instrumental harmony is connected and grafted to a sort of “formal discourse” foundation of the organization of public and private space through territorial and urban planning. The idea of positivist matrix— we are in the middle of rationalism—is that of defining a logical path starting from general principles and making the deductions necessary for action depend on these, in a purely logical way. A procedure to unveil the mechanisms underlying an event, a manifestation, a society, so that they can be controlled and governed. The social function of property and the possibility that it can be expropriated for reasons of general interest complete the framework. The control of cities and agglomeration are the main concerns, and urban discipline is the pedagogical tool to do it,4 at least in the intentions. The discipline has, therefore, a very precise social role of an educational nature: a collective procedure of education to action, since it does not build a specific urban order, but “shows” the citizens how they should do it. From this it follows that any action tending to modify the territory in a qualitative or quantitative sense, changing the destination and/or distribution of the population, productive activities, and services, is an urban planning act. The educational function is implemented through the plan. In any case, it represents the most significant act, the hegemonic part, of a conscious organization of a given territory. The urban plan of any nature and hierarchy is therefore a complex ordered act, but harmonious and immaterially beautiful, which must guide in a conscious and reasonable way the process of transformation to lead it towards social goals, to achieve results of economy and high quality of life. It follows that the urban plan is an immaterial product, made of rules, procedures, processes, which are expressed in standards. It is not the project of a change, but the law itself, for voluntary self-imposition— because validated by an institutional political deliberation—of the changes. The planning that derives from it is of a conscious type, subordinate as it is to the availability of resources (scarce) and bound to preserve as much as possible the environment (unique), both natural and anthropic, and made binding because it is validated by the institutions. The space we have available in this contribution does not allow us to go further. We can just say that doing urban planning, therefore studying and planning actions,

3

Studies and research on this subject are endless. I cite only the last volume, in order of time, that measures up to this original approach and its long permanence in the Italian technical, cultural and political system: Zoppi and Carbone [1]. 4 Territorial Coordination Plans, in the original law, were to be approved by the Ministry of Education.

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should bring reasoned “harmony” (in terms of physical composition, beauty and functionality) in the human consortium.

2 The Bureaucratic Application of the Concept of Harmony The concept of harmony, therefore, was “diluted” into that of vertical and horizontal conformity. The implementation of the law, however, was not rationalist in nature, as the provision of the law presupposed, but different, defined as “post-rationalist”, which means that the vertical steps necessary for orderly planning were not complied with and not at all composed, while only the horizontal one was applied, centered on the municipal level; that is, general urban planning. Conformity has thus been restricted to urban planning regulations and the project of space defined by them. Harmony has therefore been interpreted with reference to a double legal nature: the destination of a land and its “exploitability” using a series of parameters both of an urban nature (ratios between spaces intended for residential and productive settlements and public spaces or spaces reserved for collective activities, public green spaces or parking lots) and of a building nature (building density, type, maximum height, distance between buildings, coverage ratio, distances between boundaries). Legal nature “normalized” and made compulsory through a special ministerial decree no. 1444 of 1968, which introduced in Italy the so-called urban standards5 : mandatory limits of building density, height, distance between buildings and maximum ratios between the spaces intended for residential and productive settlements and public spaces or spaces reserved for collective activities, public green or parking, to be observed for the purposes of the formation of new urban tools or the revision of existing ones. The intersection between density, height, distance and maximum ratios between spaces has ended up determining not only the quantities but also the qualities of the urban project which, since then, has implicitly incorporated—by normative imposition—what is defined as “legal harmony” of a horizontal nature. The latter is a type of harmony that has not always been transformed into formal and physical beauty of the urban landscape; indeed, in most cases, respect for the law has become a limitation for creativity and architectural design, which has come to condition. The post-rationalist nature of urban planning underwent a first adjustment from the second half of the 80s of the twentieth century as a result of the first regulations for the protection of the landscape and environmental heritage and the soil. Law no. 431 of 1985 relaunched vertical harmony, that between the different levels of planning: from the highest, regional, provincial or sectoral level, to the lowest, the municipal level. This type of harmony is interpreted and applied as “consistency” between levels, that is, as a continuity of meaning between the objectives and indications of the highest level up to its applicative transfers to the lowest level. This is a substantially

5

See Falco [2].

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procedural approach: not conforming in terms of quantity, but consistent in terms of linguistic and argumentative content, a kind of “textual harmony”. The two paths of harmony, the horizontal juridical one and the vertical textual one, have come down to us and have strongly influenced all the practical actions of both public policies and territorial and urban planning, at all levels. This kind of harmony is different from the kind of harmony we deal with in this volume and which we need in contemporary times.

3 An Operational Proposal What do we need to go beyond technical and procedural harmony? What innovations do we still need to call upon and pursue in order to give new meaning to the public action of governing the territory? Before answering, we need to unveil the postulates of our thought. When we talk about urbanism, planning and territorial government, we are not discussing disciplines in the strict sense of the word, but rather political and technical practices that find their essential point of reference in the public domain. Therefore, we speak of urban policy, of planning the territorial zoning plan, because each of these terms has as its point of arrival a planning instrument which, at whatever administrative level it is connected to, is in any case a technically assisted political decision. It is therefore a meeting between two spheres of action: that of the political decision-maker who refers to the so-called principle of planning, according to which each elective body of the first instance, representative of the general interests of citizenship, expresses its choices on the territory through plans and acts of planning in which the choices must be explicit, clearly defined in relation to all, transparent and—with regard to the regulatory part of the uses of land—precisely referred to the territory, that is, represented on a cartographic base of adequate scale to the greater or lesser definition and precariousness of the choices, and that of the technical planner who, depending on the type of involvement he or she is called upon to respond to, technically transfers political intentions—correcting or adapting them, if necessary, also by resorting to direct forms of social participation and impact assessment—into regulatory frameworks and technical provisions, that is, into projects for cities or territories. Obviously, technique is not neutral, nor is it impartial, because it too alludes to affiliations, refers to theories and uses practices. In the end, it gives a significant contribution to building the environment in which we live by outlining priorities, scenarios, strategies, rules and physical arrangements with the tools of urbanism and planning. The paradigm of Harmonic Innovation is grafted in this relationship: “or rather the circular innovation that pursues the ‘right relationship’ and knows how to combine contrasting elements and tones on the terms of consonance”.6 6

Cicione and De Biase [3].

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In the field of territorial and urban planning, right relationship means “right dimension” for this open and dynamic harmonic relationship, both in the early political and technical dialogue and in the final technical and planning exchange. Let’s debate them separately. In the political and technical relation, different dimensions come into play, from economic planning to sectoral policies, and different modes of action that refer both to decision-making procedures through participation and evaluations. It is this new relation that has broken the traditional isolation between territorial plans and programs and economic and sectorial planning, and has paved the way for an initial homogenization not only of procedures, but also of the reference information system and the operational repercussions on the territory. Homogenization now requires a circular relation, because it also triggers the evolutionary trajectories of the economic and productive and social system that open up a series of questions and problems on various fronts and make an overall rethinking of both the instruments and the way of public acting mandatory. From a perspective of harmonious innovation, both planning and programming cannot be understood as self-referential and separate modes of action: the former linked to the organization of the physical uses of the territory and the latter to the allocation of the expenditure of financial resources. In a perspective of consonance, though, they need a new sense and a new purpose among the instruments of political action and among the institutional levels currently in force. An impulse to this process could be significantly given by the passage from the model of self-referential sectorial policies to models of integrated and consistent policies, which hinge on intersectoriality, partnership and rooting with the demands, projects, specificity and territoriality of single spaces. This passage is facilitated by an intrinsic characteristic of planning: that of being able to be open innovation, through the institution of participation and that of strategic environmental assessment, and above all for its location within the public domain. If we agree on this approach, the Circular Harmonic Innovation is the one connected to the way of living and connecting with nature: hence the concept of right dimension that must guide us in policies and projects related to practical reason. Designing with nature is not new; a seminal text from 19697 already proposed this alliance. The book indicated a form of operational relationship between man and the environment and of dynamic interrelationships between natural and cultural ecosystems that would become a reference dimension for an international chain of urban planning practice: the one which would assume the connotation of ecological planning. But this found very little space in Italy, where urban planning practice has always been addressed primarily to the regulation of land uses and only to the redistribution and control of the so-called urban land rent, to be immediately pervaded by a new paradigm. Conditions now appear to have changed, and the 2020 global pandemic may be the agent behind the ultimate resetting of even this long and robust tradition of land governance. 7

McHarg [4].

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One of the most promising strands of harmonious innovation is certainly that of the so-called “plant infrastructure”.8 The “plant” approach to design is a very weak field of research in urban planning, almost unknown in Italy, while it is gaining ground in more established research areas such as traditional agricultural disciplines and recently is also entering the field of investigation and work of architectural design. Meanwhile, it has been present for some time in the field of architectural technology, especially due to the emergence of the eco-sustainable approach in the design process of residential buildings. The latter is supported by the so-called “ITACA Protocol” which contains the methodological and procedural principles underlying the system of multi-criteria analysis for the assessment of environmental sustainability of buildings, for the purpose of their classification through the assignment of a performance score. The “vegetation” approach sits alongside the better known and historically dominant landscape approach to design, which has a longer tradition and more widespread roots in both various design practices and international research fields. Nevertheless, when we attempt to circumscribe its meaning from a technically relevant point of view, everything becomes more nuanced and slippery. The plant-based approach still seems a very feeble disciplinary field. To make it closer to urban planning we have to override it with the adjective “green”. Hence the “vegetable revolution” of infrastructures, proposed in the form of documentaries in 2008 by Legavideo, within the World Political Forum of Torino Esposizioni, as a cultural provocation for the transformation of road surfaces by removing asphalt everywhere and replacing it with vegetation. A utopian program, yet an indicator of that Circular Harmonic Innovation that we are chasing. However, the contemporary question for a way out of the pandemic is another one: what harmonic dimension must we have in order to transpose the rhythms and generative modes of nature into anthropic practices? In other words, how much can we learn from observing nature, not as a mere resource but as a heritage to be shared, and how much of this teaching can be transposed into the practices—even the tiny and apparently marginal ones—of territorial and urban planning? Or better, how can it be grafted into a practice of spatial planning, linked to procedures, times and modes of action consolidated and regulated in Italy by national and regional legislations? Apparently, perhaps very little. In reality, maybe just enough to project ourselves towards new modes of research and action, if only we look at everything from a new perspective of the natural contexts present, as Pierre Bélanger reminds us.9 Talking about regulatory and support services in a perspective of Circular Harmonic Innovation, having natural and vegetal conditions as “material” of work, means reckoning once and for all, at least in Italy, with the traditional “urban standards”, but also repositioning the debate around the so-called “territorial equipment”.

8

We refer to our, “From “green” and “blue” to “plant” infrastructures: towards a new paradigm of urban design”, in Moccia and Sepe [5]. 9 Bélanger [6].

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The new public equipment is the ecological networks, which host slow mobility and allow the reproduction of biodiversity, land reclamation and soil protection works, social housing services and the various spaces for social aggregation (required by interculturality and functional mix of uses), the spaces for new economic “districts”, energy production, the spaces needed to reduce heat islands and those to be left free to manage emergencies, those needed for air and water, for reforestation and city agriculture, the spaces of living increasingly hybridized by online work. To navigate such challenging paths we need interactive governance, in the dual meaning of Jan Kooiman and Svein Jentoft, according to whom: “The whole of interactions instigated to solve societal problems and to create societal opportunities; including the formulation and application of principles guiding those interactions and care for institutions that enable or control them”10 ; and the group of scholars Torfing, Peters, Pierre, and Sørensen, according to whom: “The complex process through which a plurality of social and political actors with diverging interests interact in order to formulate, promote, and achieve common objectives by means of mobilizing, exchanging, and deploying a range of ideas, rules, and resources”.11 In the end, an innovative harmonic and circular governance, which raises questions about giving a definition of new values and new common visions in a cooperative way and with experimentalism in practices12 that require a different behavior for a different organization of the public space of citizenship, using a model of open innovation and harmonic approach for the new generations, more attentive to the needs of the community. That is, the germination of a new school of planning culture that will merit further scientific, methodological and operational investigation and that, in one formula, we could define (and name): Harmonic Space Planning. We will come back to it, also soliciting and integrating further contributions, as it will be useful and necessary to do so. In the meantime, we simply say that being guided by this approach facilitates the solution of new needs that express urgency.

References 1. Zoppi M, Carbone C (2018) La lunga vita della legge urbanistica del ‘42 (The long life of the urban law). Didapress, Florence 2. Falco L (1978) Gli standard urbanistici (Urban standards). Edizioni delle Autonomie, Rome 3. Cicione F, De Biase L (2020) Harmonic innovation. Un senso di futuro (Harmonic innovation, A sense of future). Rubbettino, p 15 4. McHarg IL (1989) Design with nature. Garden City, NY, Published for the American Museum of Natural History [by] the Natural History Press (It. tr. Progettare con la natura, Muzzio, Padova, 1989). 10

Kooiman and Jentoft [7]. Torfing et al. [8]. 12 In the perspective of Sabel [9]. 11

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5. Moccia FD, Sepe M (eds) (2018) Developing, regenerating and reconstructing cities. Contemporary topics and challenges. Inu Edizioni, Rome 6. Bélanger P (2017) Landscape as infrastructure: a base primer. Routledge, New York 7. Kooiman J, Jentoft S (2009) Meta-governance: values, norms and principles, and the making of hard choices. Public Administration 87(4):820 8. Torfing J, Peters BG, Pierre J, Sørensen E (2012) Interactive governance. Advancing the paradigm. Oxford University Press, p 2 9. Sabel CF (2013) Experiments in new democracy. Armando Editore, Rome

The Role of Harmonic Innovation in Design Massimo Roj

What role can, and should, innovation play in the reconstruction of a better world? What role can, and should, innovation have in facilitating cycle-breaking processes post-emergency? What role can, and should, innovation play in the broader context of global politics in terms of development and sustainability? These are questions Francesco Cicione raises in the publication Innovazione Armonica. Un senso di futuro, co-authored by Luca De Biase [1]. Questions we will aim to address in the context of design. A disciplinary area in which the heuristic process, innovation/invention, takes place within a finite set of norms that are, nevertheless, capable of producing a limitless variety of outcomes. The meeting of a regulatory plan with a creative one, in reciprocal rapport, gives rise to a heuristic phase. Innovation begins at that moment when knowledge, ideas, cultural and technical information come together in a sketch but it is not yet complete. It accompanies the entire design process and concludes once the idea has been physically made real. For both the scientific researcher and architect, the origin of an idea, a discovery, has common roots and it is increasingly necessary to promote a new paradigm of innovation, one that is open and harmonic.

M. Roj (B) Via Russoli 6, 20143 Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Cicione et al. (eds.), Harmonic Innovation, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems 282, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81190-7_12

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1 Design, A Shared Working Method 1.1 The Harmonic Innovation Method: Chorality The concepts of togetherness, common purpose and objectives, and human dimension have been sacrificed each and every day during this health emergency in favour of other values and objectives. It is, therefore, more than ever essential to (re)discover and promote a new dimension of the collective where, hopefully, human beings are and will truly be the nerve centre. At the risk of sounding utopian, our community of Real Estate professionals should concentrate their efforts in this direction, where we are all called upon to do our part in order to launch a new ‘Humanism 2.0’, an era where human beings and technology interact to support each other. This period of emergency has taught us much about what our cities and the people who live in them need, their priorities and how much has to be done in order to create models that respond effectively and efficiently: it is a design that is to be developed in a team, with synergy, where egos and lead players cannot coexist. The concept of ‘connection’ can become the new key to rediscovering a novel approach to the world: as a connection of aims and ideas, a connection between the natural and built environment, a connection between needs and solutions, a connection between vision and reality, a connection between the individual and community, and ultimately, a connection between people. What this extreme trial of strength and courage, that calls all of us to action, is teaching us is the beauty of humanity, of supporting each other: physical, mental and social barriers no longer exist; we are all united in a common goal to come out of this complex situation together, stronger and closer than before. As with social organization, the collaboration between freelancers and employees is the true driver of innovation and their behaviour can be influenced by structural changes to office spaces. The symbolic value of architecture is very powerful since the design represents and transmits the values, vision and company identity, its very reason for being. Steel, glass, positioning of executive offices on top floors and type of furniture, have had, for a long time, the role of showcasing management strength and company prosperity. Organizational evolution has led to imbuing space with different meaning, highlighting the sense of belonging, with attention to social aspects, creativity, dialogue, entertainment and autonomy. Since we know that a direct correlation exists between the environment and human behaviour, we must take this into account and design spaces that are true drivers of change. The common goal of the companies in our Gruppo Progetto CMR is to design and give life to workspaces that favour sharing, where the company community can recognize the values that set it apart and create pathways to creativity freely and safely by respecting the uniqueness and diversity of the individual.

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2 Mix and Match of Knowledge Well Beyond the Interdisciplinary 2.1 The Harmonic Innovation Approach: Across Disciplines Umberto Eco, a rare but eclectic example of essayist, semiologist and writer, once said that the architect is perhaps the last humanist1 in that his working method combines different areas of knowledge and disciplines, from sociology to economics, engineering to aspects of urban planning: the culture of design, together with transversal and interdisciplinary creativity, are the founding premise and generative condition. If for us Italians it is quite normal to design a building and subsequent interiors, furniture and lighting, and if need be, the garden and exterior, in other cultures, especially within the Anglo-Saxon mould it is just as natural for an architect to be paired with an interior designer, a lighting designer and landscape architect. Ours is a question of a long-held tradition that has its roots in a humanistic culture and in the renaissance idea of the arts where the artist was responsible for painting, sculpture, architecture and urban design. Furthermore, talent and mastery were expected of him, moving from one disciplinary field to another. This topic is still relevant more than ever, constituting a strong specificity in our design and “creative culture” in much the same way as specialization, and segmentation of knowledge, is part of Anglo-Saxon culture and the technical school tradition of Northern Europe. These are two quite distinctive cultural, social and entrepreneurial models, each with their own framework of labour organization and production. Our approach is based on an integrated vision where architecture, engineering and design combine perfectly to offer solutions in all respects, and to consolidate a diverse approach in Italy, one that is more ‘scientific’ and pays close attention to living spaces and to workplaces in particular. The planning of spaces for us is holistic and multidisciplinary, encompassing values and principles from many spheres that are diverse from each other but complementary: the concepts of livability and large scale from urban planning, innovation and openness of designs for schools and universities, the idea of entertainment and attention to safety from designing sport complexes, the need for efficiency from industrial structures. We have summarized the main factors that, in our view, should be taken into consideration when designing ‘humancentric’ workplaces, no longer just from the standpoint of Work Space but from Living Place where safety, health, user-experience, attention to individual needs, identity of places, innovation and sustainability all come into play.

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Umberto Eco, La struttura assente, Bompiani, Milano 2002. “The architect finds himself doomed, by the very nature of his work, to be perhaps the only and last figure of the humanist in contemporary society: obliged to think about totality to the extent that he is a specialized sectoral technician, dealing with specific operations rather than metaphysical declarations”.

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The picture we designers have before us is a rich and complex one when bearing in mind the multiple factors that affect the design of a living space centred on the demands of its users. For these reasons, we work incessantly to define our team, to embrace new competencies and new professional skills, working with efficient solutions in line with what is asked of us. Apart from designers and specialists in space planning, our extended working group is composed of HVAC Engineers (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning), IT and AI Developers, biometric Specialists, App Developers, doctors and scientists such as Neuroscientists, Anthropologists, Environmental Psychologists, Occupational Physicians, Sanitization and Safety Managers (RSS) and Managers for Safety and Prevention (RSPP). Moreover, there are Media Specialists, Change Management Consultants, Community Managers, Analysis Specialists, GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) Consultants. Last but not least, we count on Research and Development experts such as the Sustainability Manager, Experts in LEED & WELL, Researchers in Materials and Innovation. A broad and extraordinary scenario of competencies where working in harmonic innovation is made tangible in our living spaces.

3 The Purpose of An Architectural Work, The Good of the Whole 3.1 The Goal of Harmonic Innovation: The Collective Designing for the common good epitomizes a concrete form of architecture at the service of the group. The designs promote the development of actions such as the completion of infrastructure to link disconnected and marginalized neighbourhoods, actions implemented to limit indiscriminate exploitation of land and energy, designs for architectural restoration and urban and social regeneration. The works aim to give a renewed sense of dignity to housing, and to educational and research centres that are multifunctional and integral to the development of culture. The urban fringes will become the ‘new centres away from the centre’, places of socio-cultural and environmental regeneration integrated in a scattered system, a veritable driving force for cities of the future. In the context of urban regeneration that involves many cities in our country, Progetto CMR has defined a broad methodical plan supported by research data, as exemplified by the case study of Residential Social Housing in San Siro in Milan and working on findings of the General Development Master Plan (PGT) “Milano 2030” with the aim of protecting the environment, safeguarding the right to housing, restoring the rapport between ‘centre’ and ‘margins’, and densification. The idea is for an organic residential system that can engage with the metropolis, guaranteeing independence of services, thus becoming a place of enhanced quality for the vicinity.

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As a pilot study, a hypothesis of urban regeneration was presented through a process of demolition, reconstruction and densification in the blocks around Piazzale Selinunte in the Milanese neighbourhood known for the historic football stadium: a social housing complex built between 1935 and 1947. The research outlines three phases that will radically transform this urban scenario: no longer a series of low buildings distributed in rows but rather several nuclei of towers around both public and private green areas. Operating within new settlement strategies will significantly free up terrain; improve and enrich the functional mix, residences, offices, trade, crafts; create services and infrastructure in the neighbourhood, medical centres, schools, sports areas; it will enhance public buildings by providing new buildings while maintaining the current quantity; open out to heterogeneous social integration, avoid the creation of ghettos and shape new communal green spaces, parks and gardens. Demolishing and rebuilding with new paradigms means increasing greenery and improving mobility, opening wider pedestrian zones and boosting public transport in order to better living conditions in a careful and sustainable way. The methodology for works on the urban fringe is based on a system of values derived from observing the urban context. This verifies the area earmarked for enhancement and the typological consistency and size of the existing urban landscape. The actions of regeneration are defined by spatial models and the urban identity of single parts of the city.

4 Circularity as a Driver for a Sustainable Approach to the Environment, People and the Economy 4.1 A Feature of Harmonic Innovation: Circularity According to the latest study published in Renewables In Cities 2021 Global Status Report by REN21,2 more than a billion people—approximately 25% of the urban population—live in a city that has, or is working towards, renewable energy policies. The impact cities have on energy transition is fundamental: they are responsible for roughly three quarters of end-use global energy consumption and global CO2 emissions linked to energy. Fifty-five per cent of the world’s population already inhabit cities and that figure is likely to grow significantly.

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https://www.ren21.net/reports/global-status-report/ Report by REN21 global community for renewable resources composed of representatives from the world of science, government, NGOs and industry.

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In this respect, it is worth remembering the Green Deal3 and European Commission initiatives that not only support energy transition but also encourage energy efficiency and reductions in emissions. Renewables, efficiency and decarbonisation are three crucial factors that have had positive repercussions not only on the environment but also on the economy and employment. Energy transition is a process bolstered by the bold aid program of the Recovery Plan that in recent years has accelerated government action in our country through tax incentives which have left a green imprint in the construction and housing sector. A strategy that looks beyond the scale of an individual building in order to stimulate broader urban regeneration works. In this context, architecture and design are key sectors in the circular economy: a new way of understanding the economy and new trends in business and production policies, design methodologies and technical as well as technological solutions that denote environmental awareness and responsible behaviour. The European Union has moved towards sustainability even in the financial sector. New European legislation came into effect on 10 March as part of the first stage of Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) with the aim of channelling capital inflows to sustainable investments.4 The norm has three key objectives: to redirect capital to ESG investments, to integrate sustainability in risk management and to promote transparency in financial and economic activities in the long-term. It is a push in a totally new direction even in the Real Estate sector where environmental, social and governance factors have become increasingly important. The pandemic has influenced the way in which threats to human health is perceived and subsequently impacted on the entire socio-economic sphere. This transformation, together with an ever-growing awareness of sustainability issues, was bound to have repercussions on the real estate sector that, up to now, is responsible for more than 40% of global emissions. To give you an example of sustainability in finance, while in the past return on investment, even with regard to property, was based exclusively on value generation, nowadays it is necessary to factor in benefits to society as a whole, not to mention to the environment. Indeed, demand is increasingly high for buildings with reduced environmental impact and energy consumption close to zero and which can provide safe, resilient work spaces with employee wellbeing in mind.

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https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/european-green-deal_it Green Deal, a European plan for decarbonsation that defines requisite investments and available financial instruments. It outlines how to guarantee an equitable and inclusive transition. 4 https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/sostenibilita-regolamento-sfdr-fara-emergere-l-impatto-pro dotti-finanziari-ADNxQSPB, “Sostenibilità: il Regolamento Sfdr farà emergere l’impatto dei prodotti finanziari”, Leonardo Broni e Irene Bengo, Politecnico di Milano, 11 marzo 2021.

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5 Meaningful Spaces, The Solution to People’s Need in a Future Scenario 5.1 The Origin of Harmonic Innovation: Meaning User centrality and wellbeing permeate throughout our designs regardless of scale, culminating in the cardinal principle of sustainability inherent in all our designs. Not only limited to focusing on the environment but in a much broader sense extending to the economic, social and technological spheres, to the opportunity and meaning behind the work we carry out. Our experience and ability to listen give rise to a more inclusive and broader vision of the places we inhabit. This goes beyond mere spatial efficiency—which is certainly a fundamental aim of our job—and looks toward other equally important demands that can be summarized in a single concept: to guarantee the maximum comfort possible to the individuals who occupy the places we design. We can take the world of offices we have designed as an example of living spaces and attribute ‘meaning’ to them. A school of thought based on human relations—Office Space Planning, where Luigi Giffone was maestro5 —historically restored the quintessence of the office space, transposing its dynamics to those of urban places. The revolution in Information Technology took root on top of this new approach and upended our way of working and, indeed, business culture itself. Management had to adapt rapidly to the changes in organization, to the speed of the transformation to production facilities, and eventually to the impact on the spatial organization of workplaces. In order to interpret the changes that are occurring in our society today, and which are inevitably reflected in the urban microcosm that is the office space, such an approach is indispensable. According to research conducted by some of the largest institutions specializing in the sector, including by Smart Working Observatory of the Polytechnic of Milan,6 of the main concerns raised by employees is the need for dynamic, flexible spaces, differentiated to favour collaboration and communication; availability of services to ensure a work-life balance; provision of technological tools to improve work performance. Today the prevailing concept is smart working, a way of working that favours flexibility both in spaces and management: a sea change determined by infinite possibilities also thanks to the digitalization of our homes. All these elements identified by studies raise an issue that is bound to influence the way workplaces are designed: by placing the individual at its centre, meeting their needs, expectations and, above 5

In1973 the architect and engineer Luigi Giffone, born in Calabria and graduated in Chicago defined a new design approach to the work environment: Office Space Planning. 6 https://www.osservatori.net/it/ricerche/osservatori-attivi/smart-working the Observatory of Smart Working was created in 2012 within the wider context of Research and has been studying the evolution people’s work patterns for over ten years.

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all, their dreams. The tangible evolution of this ‘humancentric’ process is the new certification for internal spaces: the WELL7 protocol, the first system to certify wellbeing within the workplace by taking into consideration criteria such as air, water, nutrition, lighting, physical movement, thermal and acoustic comfort, sustainability of materials, mental health and community. What this means in terms of office space and work areas, is the provision of dynamic, flexible, healthy, efficient and pleasant contexts. The design is focused on the definition of informal meeting places conducive to socialization and collaboration, and phone booths for moments of privacy. We can say that the watchwords for office design, but also for many of the spaces we are experiencing in new ways, are collaboration and sharing. As needs change, so too the ‘meaning’ that we attribute to spaces.

Reference 1. Cicione F, De Biase L (2021) Innovazione armonica, un senso di futuro. Rubettino Entopan Publishing

Massimo Roj is Chief Executive Officer of Progetto CMR, a company specializing in integrated design (architecture, engineering and design) established in 1994 with the aim of creating a flexible, efficient and eco-sustainable architecture based on a detailed analysis of the needs of the end user. The headquarters are in Milan, with offices in diverse cities around the world: Rome, Athens, Beijing, Hanoi, Istanbul, Jakarta, Moscow, Tianjin and is a partner of the EAN—European Architect Network. www.progettocmr.com.

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https://www.usgbc.org/articles/what-well Il WELL Building Standard® is a performance-based system that measures, certifies and monitors the characteristics of the built environment that influences human health and wellbeing in the following areas: air, water, nutrition, lighting, fitness, comfort and mind.

Harmonic Technologies Giuliano Muzio

1 Preliminary Remarks Building a new cultural paradigm is certainly no small matter. Difficulties increase if we have to deal with innovation, an area that lends itself to different interpretations, involves wide-ranging skills and affects multiple aspects of our daily lives. Rivers of ink have been written on innovation in literature (or terabytes of memory used, if you prefer), and yet it seems that something is still missing in order to define it fully and that the last page has yet to be written. If we want to characterize harmonic innovation, it is not technologies that come to mind first. Rather, we think of specific areas: protection of the natural environment, social inclusion, protection of people, and so on. And perhaps to particular processes that are carried out in these areas: the production of goods that minimize environmental impact, the possibility of generating wealth in such a way as not to increase the gap between those who have and consume more and those who have less, or nothing at all, or mechanisms that are able to protect those who are in conditions of weakness or even suffering. We hardly ever think of technologies that can be somehow “suitable” to build harmonic innovation or, as we used to say among insiders, technologies “enabling” harmonic innovation. Keep in mind that the topic is not so easy. In fact, it is not necessarily so easy to identify the most suitable technologies, both because it is not always clear which are the potentialities and the limits of a particular technology, and because sometimes we are deceived into thinking that certain technologies can serve certain purposes. The debate on this issue would take us very far and this is not the place to do it; suffice to say that we start from the assumption of having sufficiently investigated the characteristics of the technologies that we will identify as “harmonic technologies”.

G. Muzio (B) Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Via Sommarive, 18, 38123 Trento, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Cicione et al. (eds.), Harmonic Innovation, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems 282, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81190-7_13

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The goal of my contribution is to outline the characteristics of these technologies and try to argue why they can be considered as enabling harmonic innovation. Moreover, we must say that innovation qualified by the adjective “harmonic” suggests a quality that recalls ethical principles. It seems important to me, therefore, to stress that the decisive factor in this conceptual framework seems to be people and their ability to use technologies for the most appropriate purposes. In other words, there can be no enabling if those who have these technologies in their hands do not decide to use them in accordance with ethical principles that are superordinate to the technologies themselves. Therefore, if we assume that there may be technologies that can be considered more harmonious than others, this condition is a necessary condition, but not sufficient to unfold their potential, since the latter ultimately depends on the correct use by people. We therefore take it for granted that we can identify some technologies that lend themselves well to the construction of the harmonic innovation paradigm. The reasoning is more or less the following: technologies develop on the basis of roadmaps dictated by market needs, societal trends and the progress of scientific knowledge (the detailed dynamics would be very complicated and beyond the scope of this contribution). The application of some of these on the basis of the paradigm of harmonic innovation is not only “suitable”, but may even favor the development of the paradigm itself. It goes without saying that in the development of harmonious innovation, the values that guide it are what really matters, and not the technologies. The latter, instead, should always be intended to be at the service of the primary goals. Falling in love with technologies is a trend that unfortunately is often found in our times, but that ends up stifling the real motivations that underlie the introduction of the new paradigm. The failures or problems that occur in the contexts in which technologies are relevant are hardly ever attributable to technologies themselves, but are rather the result of a lack of clarity about the underlying objectives or from a poor consideration of the context of reference and so on. Therefore, in the next few paragraphs I will briefly describe those technologies that in my opinion are more suitable to be used in the paradigm of the harmonic innovation.

2 Artificial Intelligence: AI for Good In the context of technologies that today are currently going through greater development and a wider range of applications, we cannot fail to consider artificial intelligence (which we will abbreviate with the acronym, which has now become of common use). We adopt in this case the definition given by the European Commission [1]: Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are systems designed by humans that, given a complex goal, act in the physical or digital dimension by perceiving their environment through data acquisition, and deciding the best actions to take to achieve the given goal. Clearly, a deep and thorough definition of artificial intelligence is

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beyond the scope of this contribution. I will simply consider the heuristic definition presented above and use it for our purposes. Like any technology, AI has risks and opportunities associated with its use. If we are looking for harmonious technologies, we will clearly be interested in the positive aspects, which is why I used the locution “AI for good” (see in [2] what is said in this regard). But, to tell the truth, knowing the potential risks is not of secondary importance either, because it helps us prevent possible distortions. If we reason in technological terms, identifying harmonic technologies is an activity which must be associated to the knowledge of when these technologies may be “disharmonious” and therefore counteract the adoption of the paradigm. But what is AI for good, then? In other words, what are the harmonic potentials of AI? Certainly the possibility of improving people’s health care, which in a pandemic phase like the one we are going through is something that can certainly be appreciated. The possibility that the transport systems on which we travel today, but also those that are planned for the future, such as self-driving vehicles, are safer. But also the possibility of easier access to information and the possibility of creating personalized training systems. AI for good can also help to improve production processes, making them more environmentally friendly by increasing efficiency and energy savings. It can also reduce the waste of natural resources in agriculture, while helping agricultural and food traceability. Thanks to AI, it will also be possible to prevent fraudulent behavior online and speed up the administration of justice. Alongside these benefits, however, it is also pertinent to be aware of the risks and how they may impact people’s lives, thus requiring ethical use of AI and mitigation of these risks. Let’s start with one of the most sensitive aspects: if AI systems are used to make decisions, it is appropriate that these decisions are not potentially harbingers of a dramatic impact (sometimes people’s very lives may be at stake). This could happen in work-related issues, or justice, for example. AI-based systems can also theoretically violate the integrity or confidentiality of personal data. As a matter of fact, the wide spectrum of what can happen if algorithms are able to operate on systems without human oversight is vast, and it is only recently that mechanisms that can bring these situations under control have been developed. This is only a very brief overview of the possibilities that this technology offers. We clearly refer to more comprehensive sources for a closer examination of these features [3], and here we simply address two examples: the possibility of using AI to identify violent, harmful or dangerous sources of communication and information (such as, for example, “online hate speech”) and the leaps and bounds AI is making in the field of human health and wellbeing. Let’s start with the first example. The spread of the Internet, the development of social media and global communications have unfortunately encouraged the spread of so-called “online hate speech” [4]. According to the Council of Europe [4], hate speech “covers all forms of expression that spread, incite, promote or justify racial hatred, xenophobia, anti-Semitism or other forms of hatred based on intolerance, including intolerance expressed by aggressive nationalism and ethnocentrism, discrimination and hostility towards minorities, migrants and people of immigrant origin”. Of course, such manifestations have existed well before the birth of the

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Internet, but with digital technologies and online connections, these phenomena have grown exponentially. What AI can do in this context is provide linguistic technologies that can detect and potentially curb such issue where it is detected early. The second example opens up a potentially broader field. If we want to make a quick overview, we can start from the enormous possibilities in the field of prevention: from the analysis of large amounts of clinical data, it is possible to derive what are the virtuous behaviors that prevent the onset of certain diseases and then correct behaviors that are considered instead negative. It will also be possible to access personalized treatments, once the AI can have as input a sufficiently large amount of data regarding individual cases. AI can also support the doctor in the correct diagnosis of a disease, comparing a real case with the models at its disposal. Not only that, but AI-based robots and machines can perform certain tasks much more accurately and safely than humans can. From these hints, you can see how the scope of AI in healthcare can be boundless. It also becomes clear what precautions need to be taken from an ethical standpoint, which fall under the risks we addressed earlier.

3 Social Networking “Social” apps and platforms have entered our lives with absolute pervasiveness. They have changed our existence and the Covid-19 pandemic has further accentuated this aspect. The social implications of this phenomenon are wide and complex; we are interested in highlighting the harmonic potential of these technologies and I will simply stick to this. Again, I give two examples that can get it straighter more than anything else. The first concerns community creation. Beyond the generalist platforms that aim at the “mass market” (Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, etc.), the platforms that we can call “vertical” are aimed at a precise, sectoral and typically fairly well-identified target. They are born and grow with the most varied purposes, but they often have an objective of social nature. Whether they are dedicated to the development and financing of social innovation projects, or to the exchange of good practices for environmental protection, or to the so-called community projects, which leverage the resources of specific territories, or to urban regeneration projects, they have something in common, which I will try to underline. They promote instances that arise “from the shallow”, or that in any case take up topics decided at a high level, but for which a wide participation is necessary. They typically speak of limited, punctual and very concrete initiatives, with which the members can easily identify. They push participants to take a leading role that produces some tangible results. Sometimes, in the most ambitious cases, they even aim at profoundly changing the standard models that characterize a given market, as is the case for example in so-called “community tourism”. This is a form of tourism that assumes that those who travel are interested not only and not so much in a quick and superficial consumption of the places visited, but in a “slow” and deep knowledge of the social fabric and communities of those places [5].

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The second example refers to the educational value of the game. We are used to considering a game essentially as a recreational moment, but lately it has been discovered that using the game in non-recreational situations can be a useful tool for transferring knowledge and improving relationships among people. The game, in other words, becomes an element of construction of communities that aim to learn [6]. In this way, the audience can be introduced to topics or issues that would be otherwise more difficult to appreciate with other tools; these are often topics with a social purpose, such as, for example, the importance of protecting the environment, contrasting wrong behaviors, or raising awareness of issues of particular educational importance. Now I think it is clear why this can be a technology that has every right to be considered harmonic.

4 Cyber Security and Physical Security As the network becomes the catalyst for many everyday experiences, a problem regarding its security clearly arises [7]. Not only for what concerns little or not at all “safe” interactions, but also for what concerns information and data that people have or make available on the net or upload more generally on supports that then connect to the net. All of us have a current account on-line by now, or we buy goods and services on-line for example. But there are hundreds of examples of this in other contexts too. Ensuring that people live in a safe environment is certainly a principle that can be fully framed within the paradigm of harmonic innovation. Technologies can then play a fundamental role, also because, as we have just seen, some of our current insecurities are derived from a technological context. Therefore, all technologies that allow prevention of frauds become important. First and foremost, we are thinking here of the financial system and all the hardware and software mechanisms that have been developed with this goal in mind. By extension, we can include in this category all the frauds that involve processes that are enabled by information technology (which then end up producing an invoice that reaches a customer). In raising this issue, we must always remember one thing that I made clear at the beginning of this contribution: technologies are only one aspect at play, and basically not even of primary importance (contrary to what many people think). By way of example, in fraud prevention a pivotal role is played by organizational measures. Just to mention another harmonic technology in the field of security (which can also be considered a sub-case of the previous one), which takes on a not-secondary role, we can mention the set of technologies that can be put in place to protect the digital identity of a person. They are typically software systems that allow unique recognition of a person in his activities of a digital nature and avoid the so-called “identity theft” that can cause huge damages to those whose identity is stolen. If we move into the area of physical security, the field becomes vast. First of all, we must mention all the devices based on sensors and developed specifically to ensure the physical security of people. Some examples could be anti-intrusion mechanisms,

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but also sensors that guarantee the security of various types of equipment, from household appliances to motor vehicles, including industrial machinery for safety at work, or sensors able to detect anomalies potentially harmful to human health or behaviors considered unsafe. A different approach to physical security is based on trying to ensure the proper performance of one or more procedures that underlie the maintenance of security in a given activity. These procedures may or may not involve the use of technology. For example, let’s think about the security of people during a journey using a means of transport (car, train, plane, etc.). If we focus on a particular case, for example driving a car, we understand that there can be procedures that do not use technology, such as properly fastening seat belts, and procedures that use technology, such as turning on the indicator lights on the car dashboard. In order for a warning light to come on, a number of automatic technology-based controls that can be very complex must work. Since in certain circumstances these controls can be an indispensable guarantee for the safety of people, it is advisable that the underlying technologies are reliable and effective. It is not necessary to use rivers of words to understand that these types of technologies can definitely be fully included in the field of harmonic innovation.

5 Environmental Protection The last chapter, which reviews some examples of harmonic technologies, is dedicated to a very broad field: that of technologies capable of protecting the surrounding environment from the potentially harmful effect of certain human activities. The macro-theme in this case is the identification of the technologies that have two properties at the same time: first to be renewable: that is, guaranteed not to deplete the surrounding environment of resources that may run out; and second, to be sustainable: that is, not to burden excessively the environment, thus generating devastating and irreversible consequences. Specifically, this means making the most of natural sources of energy, gradually eliminating dependence on fossil fuels, improving construction techniques to build homes and plants that allow a reduced consumption of resources, and act on production cycles to ensure that these too can be made with a minimal consumption of resources and a reduced impact. This is clearly an enormous field in which there are dozens of technologies that it would be too much to describe even briefly (new electric propulsion engines, new ways of storing energy, hydrogen as a vector and so on). There are also other technologies and issues that lie in the background of the scenario just described. Let’s think, for example, of all the technologies that make it possible to monitor, on the one hand, and prevent, on the other, environmental pollution. Just to mention a few examples, let’s consider sensor networks to detect the presence of harmful substances, but also software platforms to analyze the data collected by the sensors themselves. Or all the filtering systems that make it possible to avoid the spread of harmful substances in the air or water, which can instead be

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treated through special processes that guarantee greater safety. It is worth remembering once again that technology is only a tool that helps achieve a certain objective, but even in this case behaving correctly is what really matters. A lot can be done to prevent undesirable effects on the environment by acting on behaviors before technologies. Another area in which technologies can be of great help is certainly that of waste disposal and recycling. These technologies can enable the paradigm of the circular economy, which has been gaining great momentum in recent years and can definitely be considered a branch of harmonic innovation. I’m thinking of all those chemical and physical processes that can intervene on waste materials. By treating them appropriately, we can try to reinclude them in the production process (or include them in a primary way if they are organic materials). In addition to this area, we can eventually point out a related one: all the investments that are being made in new materials that can be more environmentally friendly. We are talking about the increased use of natural materials within production cycles, as well as the synthesis of new materials designed from the very creation of the production process in order to minimize environmental impact. And in this last category we can include both products which have been discovered to have a high impact that are appropriately “manipulated” thanks to innovative technological processes, as well as real new materials (such as nanomaterials).

6 Conclusions As clearly shown in the previous chapters, in the emergence of the new paradigm of harmonic innovation, technologies are a candidate to play an important role, even if, as already mentioned, technologies are not the only and the main “ingredient” of the new recipe. However, in a world in which technological aids are becoming increasingly pervasive, it is important to have a very clear map of what these tools can do, as well as to identify the risks associated with their careless use. It is a matter of neither demonizing nor acclaiming, but only of knowing the tools available and understanding how they can be used to accomplish the objectives that one has in mind when imagining harmonic innovation.

References 1. European Commission, White paper on artificial intelligence: a European approach to excellence and trust. https://ec.europa.eu/info/files/white-paper-artificial-intelligence-european-approachexcellence-and-trust_en 2. Condliffe J, How can we optimize AI for the greatest good, instead of profit? https://www. technologyreview.com/2017/06/07/151356/how-can-we-optimize-ai-for-the-greatest-good-ins tead-of-profit/

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3. AI for Good Foundation, What if AI were developed to serve humanity rather than commerce? https://ai4good.org/about-us/ 4. Council of Europe, Bookmarks. A manual for combating hate speech through human rights education. https://rm.coe.int/bookmarksen2020-web2/16809e5789 5. AITR, What is responsible tourism. http://www.aitr.org/turismo-responsabile/cose-il-turismoresponsabile/ 6. Di Franco M, The art of play and its educational value. https://site.unibo.it/griseldaonline/it/did attica/marcella-di-franco-arte-gioco-valore-educativo#:~:text=The%20play%20%C3%A8% 20a%20language,learnings%20of%20technical%2Dcognitive%order 7. NIST, Cybersecurity framework. https://www.nist.gov/cyberframework

Harmonious Innovation, the Only Possible Strategy for Sustainable Growth Giorgio Scarpelli

Addressing the topic of innovation is always fascinating. It demands an imagery of positive factors such as passion, determination, creativity, courage, curiosity, etc. Innovation starts with ideas. The embryo of ideas is our dreams and it is legitimate, in dreams, to have no limits (even if their transformation into reality requires discipline and rigor) and to dream of things that make us happy. The happiness we strive for is the result of a proper balance between all the dimensions of our lives. We seek wellbeing not in the economic sense that was once intended, but in the sense of being truly well. It is easy to transpose this aspiration from an individual dimension to a collective consciousness. It leads the entire society to give itself new rules, to reward virtuous behavior and gradually exclude those processes and behaviors that appear disharmonious. This new awareness requires us to radically rethink the process of creating corporate value. Sustainability, circular economy and social innovation represent central elements for business, in manufacturing as in services, in large companies as in startups. There are therefore a series of challenges to be faced collectively, which require combining economic growth with sustainability, if necessary reconfiguring business models or developing new ones. All this in a scenario in which changes linked to the exponential growth of technologies follow one another, making it even more complex to define appropriate strategies for the future. Technological change is advancing at an unprecedented rate, most recently on the Covid-19 pandemic-induced push for digitization. The relentless pace of technological innovation is shortening the business lifecycle and forcing management to make decisions and commit resources much more quickly. After all, the trend of an aging population and inadequate fertility rates persists. On the one hand, this G. Scarpelli (B) NTTDATA Rende (CS), Castrolibero, Italy © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Cicione et al. (eds.), Harmonic Innovation, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems 282, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81190-7_14

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increases the need for technology linked to the automation of an increasingly wide range of services, and on the other generates a gap between those who can easily access technology and those who have objective difficulties in using it, such as the elderly population. And today it is technology that connects us globally and enables unlimited mobility of trade, people, capital and information in the various areas of a complex, multifaceted, diversified and complicated world, leading to changes in markets and customers, who are increasingly educated with sophisticated needs, aware, informed and demanding. A non-inclusive technology, therefore, appears totally unacceptable both ethically and from an economic and social point of view. The world therefore has to confront social, environmental and financial challenges of unprecedented scale and complexity. No one can solve these problems alone. If you want to be competitive, you must be innovative. This is a perspective that is bringing together an increasing number of organizations and companies on a global scale, and that has been designed by the United Nations in the form of the so-called Sustainable Development Goals. Sustainable innovation must be considered the core element of new business strategies. The good news is that reconsidering economic growth models consistent with sustainability goals generates new market opportunities worth around $12 trillion (source: United Nations). Innovation and sustainability are increasingly linked and overlapping. Businesses and leaders of the future must be able to grasp and interpret this new way of doing development and creating shared value. For companies, this means a commitment to fair, impartial and equitable behavior, which takes into account the economic, social and environmental repercussions of their actions and is expressed in Social Responsibility, Business Ethics and eco-sustainable production strategies. For example, if we look at the manufacturing industry we are still engaged in building the model of Industry 4.0 but there is already talk of Industry 5.0, in which technological issues run in parallel with the issues of sustainability. Collaborative robotics, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence are seen as opportunities to improve production processes, the welfare of workers and environmental impact. The factory model becomes open and permeable to innovation, easily adaptable to change and able to positively fuel the growth of the entire territory in which it is located. The magnitude of these transformations requires a type of innovation that can’t just be incremental. It requires a new mindset, new business models and new technologies. Companies must be prepared to meet this challenge. And to do so, they must invest in human capital, in restructuring the organization’s operational processes, in eliminating any friction to internal and external collaboration and in promoting ideas at all levels. It is possible to develop a sort of “Innovation readiness” to understand and measure how ready a company is to confront this scenario. The foundation of a company’s attitude towards innovation is made up of four intangible assets that are in fact four characteristic elements of the company culture: the attitude towards knowledge sharing, the attitude towards collaboration, inclusiveness and lateral thinking. The more these elements are pervasively present, the more the company will be able to

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progress along the path of innovation. They are mirrored in the behaviors and attitudes of individuals and influence the entire business organization. As far as people are concerned, we can make a list of the characteristics that we could define as “Individual Innovation enablers”, such as: the perception of a common identity, flexibility, dynamism, curiosity, ethics based on shared values, emotional intelligence, a transparent attitude, the willingness to leave the “comfort zone”, being prepared to take the initiative, the attention to seize opportunities. Similarly, and as a direct consequence of individual attitudes, also the business organization can be measured on the basis of factors such as: inter-departmental collaboration, creativity, internal and external connections, widespread sense of community, freedom of expression, absence of fears and concerns, openness to dialogue, structuring of competencies without “silos”, acceptance of diversity, complementarity of roles and structures, team motivation, fairness as a preliminary remark to any comparison, absence of disparities, transparency. These elements ensure that there are no stops on the transformation processes that a company must put in place. Innovation is precisely the predisposition to transformation that directs change in an evolutionary and non-sectorized sense, and that can take place, depending on the circumstances, gradually or in a clear and disruptive way, as sometimes happened to survive radical changes in the business scenario or the emergence of new technologies. The oriental culture defines three transformation models, called “KAIZEN” (incremental transformation that guides the evolution of an organization in a progressive and non-traumatic way through the gradual introduction of changes); “KAKUSHIN” (more sectorial transformation that places, for example, brand new products and services alongside consolidated lines of business, aiming to renew the value proposition of an organization); “KAIKAKU” (radical change of one’s own business model, necessary to survive disruptive factors that can potentially destroy an entire sector). Obviously the “KAIZEN” transformation model is the one to adopt in the majority of cases. It can represent a connotation of constant innovation for a company. The KAIZEN transformation model provides a capacity for strategic planning enabled by the adoption of smart models and processes, conducted with short iterative cycles, based on experimentation of the new and on the acceptance of failure as an opportunity for growth: “lean thinking” as a step of constant change which the company must go through and which can be organized in cycles of four phases. The first (“Understand the direction”) concerns the definition of the strategic direction towards which to move; the second (“Grasp the current condition”) aims to objectively define the current state; the third (“Establish the next target condition”) sets the next target to in order to move towards the established direction; the fourth (“Iterate towards target condition”) consists of the implementation (execution) of the set target and in the evaluation of the effectiveness of the addressed objective and of the possible need to define a further iteration phase towards the achievement of the established strategic objective. But, as mentioned earlier, the magnitude of the transformations of this time of ours requires more than just incremental innovation. It’s a time for big choices. It’s the time to be brave and let established habits and practices go to embrace a

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scenario that is emerging with the disruptive force of epochal changes. A change determined primarily by the response that technology is giving to an unpredictable and unexpected fact that has accelerated the processes of digitalization by decades, and from which there will be no turning back. And obviously the resources of a single entity, company, nation or social community cannot suffice to master such complexity. As far as companies are concerned, we are talking about the ability to transform themselves into a collector of opportunities made possible by a network of relationships. They turn it into an Open Innovation Hub: an open and collaborative ecosystem, practical in focusing on challenges, where sustainability is one of the strategic drivers, which is based on digitalization and adopts Design Thinking as a method and technologies as an operational tool. The greatest emphasis is often placed on technologies. They are often associated with innovation, so much so that innovation is sometimes identified simply as the ability to proceed rapidly in the adoption of state-of-the-art technologies. But technology itself is not the end; rather, it will achieve its purpose when it is used without people being aware of it. The deepest technologies are the ones that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of daily life until they become indistinguishable. After all, technologies and digital data allow us to exercise a new form of creativity to give life to a society in which everyone can build their own lifestyle and pursue happiness according to their personal expectations and aspirations. Combining digital transformation with the imagination and creativity of different people will facilitate not only problem solving, but also value creation for the entire society and the planet. Computers are now everywhere at all times and embedded in everything around us. The device “disappears” into the enriched environment of our daily lives. Computers are no longer just work tools but essential elements of our world. Even the places in which we live may have a new appearance. Until now, we have lived in social contexts that are often unbalanced. City centers revolve around work and commercial needs, leaving room for aggregation, entertainment and shopping only at certain times. Other districts, as well as immense rural areas, are simply places where “nothing happens.” Smart Working and the relocation we are becoming accustomed to will gradually change this scenario, recreating the balance and expanding the places where we will live and work. The same “smart cities” will therefore no longer be static physical points but digital ecosystems, rich in services for “5.0 citizens”, who are responsible, informed, connected and attentive to the impact of their activities on our ecosystem. The challenge, therefore, is to invent technologies that can be transparently integrated into everyday life without anyone being excluded. Computational capacity and distributed intelligence in the environment require interoperability and integration of data, from the Cloud to sensors, to make optimal use of information. Providing a solution to data integration means being able to create knowledge and move from a concept of technical information for a few specialists to distributed knowledge for everyone.

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The benefits that result from a connected society are significant, disruptive, and transformative. However, along with the many benefits, the connected world represents an attack surface. The more digital transformation advances, the more dependent processes become on technology, which exposes new vulnerabilities. For this reason, the adoption of technology must entail the adoption of security countermeasures, which are also both effective and “transparent” to the end user, for a digital world that builds relationships based on trust. Not only that, in a world in which the physical and digital dimensions are increasingly integrated, it is necessary to be able to transfer some categories hitherto considered purely human to digital spaces. In digital relationships mediated by technology, it is necessary to reconstruct the empathy of human relationships. The interaction with an artificial intelligence, for example, which is able to learn, must reach a level of simplification of cognitive effort and create a pleasant experience to surprise users, anticipate their needs and propose alternative solutions to facilitate their work and their lives. The concept of Transparent Technology aims precisely to “dilute” technology in the objects around us, so as to bring the benefits of the digital world into the one naturally perceived by human beings, without the technological content manifesting itself or altering the nature of human–human or human-world interaction. Internet of Things and Machine Learning provide “senses” and “intelligence” to objects, respectively, but an unresolved question is how humans can interact with “augmented objects” in a natural yet effective way. This is not just a “user experience” issue. If, for example, we analyze the increasingly important role acquired by artificial intelligence in supporting choices and in making decisions, it would be clear that categories hitherto considered typically human, such as ethical issues, the correctness of interpersonal evaluations, the absence of prejudices, are factors to be approached in the same way as more technical issues related to the processing capacity of information, performance, maintainability of the system, etc. But artificial intelligence expresses its possibilities on the basis of the data on which it is trained. An informative base that contains inherent elements such as discriminating factors, racial or social prejudices will cause the artificial intelligence behavior to be vitiated by these elements, even if not appreciable by a purely human evaluation of the data base used for the “training” of the system. These are the new challenges induced by digital transformation. In order to solve them, we need new ideas and approaches, which can be often recovered outside the most structured business organizations. This is why Startups represent a central element of the Open Innovation model. Not only because they bring good ideas but also because they implement them with that load of curiosity, passion, courage, enthusiasm and determination that are essential ingredients to implement a real transformation. After all, Startups experience a very dynamic situation, often unstable and precarious, looking for their own dimension in an increasingly competitive market. This is why Startups need partners able to support and accompany them towards the market, with long-term perspectives, in the mutual respect that is part of the ethical dimension of business without which nothing lasting can be built. Innovation thus becomes synonymous with contamination. And the attitude to contamination is the essential element of the transformation we need. This is the basis of the model of open and harmonic innovation that inspires us. It is the alternative

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that allows big companies to work by creating constructive relationships with each other, start-ups and universities to create innovations that are truly fundamental to the challenges they face. For central and local government bodies to reconsider resources and growth trajectories for the common good. Ultimately to create a system in new ways to generate value and well-being. Open innovation ecosystems allow all of these players to combine their strengths, budgets, and best practices to invent new solutions to the challenge of creating innovative, inspiring, and transparent technology. Contamination, then, is the way to share the road to success. Which means: leaving the comfort zone, taking risks, betting on the new, opening up and welcoming, travelling along a stormy and arduous path without being afraid to take the plunge, aiming for the top.

The Role of Ethical AI in Fostering Harmonic Innovations that Support a Human-Centric Digital Transformation of Economy and Society Massimo Ruffolo

As widely recognized, artificial intelligence is deeply impacting on all aspects of our daily life [1]. Technologies like machine learning, deep learning, intelligent process automation, natural language processing and understanding, intelligent document processing, conversational systems, chatbots, and computer vision are changing the way we work, spend our leisure and entertainment time, access health care systems to get treated, buy and use financial and insurance services, make our purchasing in physical and online stores, travel for work and tourism, live in our cities and homes, book a restaurant or order food. More importantly, AI technologies are changing the way we communicate and interact with each other and participate to the social life. AI is reshaping all industries worldwide generating huge innovations and advantages. For example, precision medicine, precision farming, fintech, and insurtech are transforming agriculture, health care, and financial services. AI algorithms adoption has been boosted, in recent years, thanks to the advent of deep learning [2] and the AI democratization effort of universities, research institutes, and R&D departments of the technology giants. For example, Google released as open source the algorithm BERT [3] in 2018. This algorithm constituted a breakthrough in the area of natural language processing and understanding because it ignited a huge research and development effort that is moving this area of computer science forward to reach results never seen before. Immediately after BERT, AllenAI presented first GPT-2 [4] in 2019, and then GPT-3 [5] in 2020. These algorithms achieve human-like language generation capabilities and GPT-2 is available as an open source software. Facebook AI Research open sourced the Detectron framework [6] for computer vision in 2018. This framework enables machine learning engineer and data scientists worldwide to create sophisticated computer vision applications.

M. Ruffolo (B) Altilia.Ai, Start-up incubator TechNest, University of Calabria, Piazza Vermicelli„ 87036 Rende, CS, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Cicione et al. (eds.), Harmonic Innovation, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems 282, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81190-7_15

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Beside the benefits of a wide AI adoption in industry, there are aspects of AI that are raising concerns. For example, the media industry is deeply influenced by artificial intelligence algorithms that pose questions about press and expression freedom. Hate speech, fake news, fake video and audio, that sometime are spread on social media with the help of AI algorithms, are creating worries in our societies. The research community and tech giants are asked to heavily invest in methods and approaches capable to tackle phenomena like these. Furthermore, it is well known that all of us are subjected to a deep behavioral profiling [7] based on data that tech giants such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, etc. collect while we use search engines, social media, ecommerce platforms, streaming TV services, mobile devices, etc. Data collected by tech giants completely covers all aspects of our life and describes, in a very accurate way, our preferences in all the aspects of the life comprised our political orientation. In other words, tech giants know who we are better than us. In this scenario ethical AI [8, 9] is attract growing attention from scholars, researchers, practitioners, parliaments and governments worldwide. The scope of ethical AI is to ensure that AI generates harmonic innovations capable to improve freedom, transparency, democracy, fairness, and definitely benefit our society. Ethical AI includes some sub areas like: (i) explainable AI (XAI) [10–12] that refers methods and techniques that allow to make predictions generated by machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms understandable by humans. (ii) Trustworthy AI [13, 14] that studies training methods resulting in fair AI models free from bias and compliant with regulations and privacy policies. Trustworthy AI also considers aspects related to environmental impact of AI algorithms, for example, an open issue is how to reduce carbon footprint in training and running deep learning algorithms at large scale [15]. The importance of ethical AI is testified by the fact that most important research communities, regulators and technology companies worldwide are building ethical AI coalitions, recommendations and dedicated research departments. Some examples of research departments and scientific coalitions worldwide are: “Ethics of AI Lab” at University of Toronto [16], “Human-Centered AI—HAI” at Stanford University [17], “Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence” at MIT [18], “Società Italiana per l’Etica dell’Intelligenza Artificiale—SIpEIA” as a consortium of Italian universities that is focused on implications of AI and on how to build an ethical AI [19]. Public regulators are paying growing attention to promote ethical AI. Many governments and parliaments are fueling the debate about ethical AI and producing regulatory recommendations about the ethical usage of AI. The document “The ethics of artificial intelligence: Issues and initiatives” from the European Parliament deals with the ethical implications and moral questions that arise from the development and implementation of artificial intelligence technologies [20], and the document “Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI” from the European Commission [21] are two examples of the effort made by European Union to make AI more ethical. The importance of ethical AI is demonstrated by the fact that also tech giants are adding dedicated teams in their research departments. In particular, Google has an ethical AI team that operates within the Google Research department.

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In order to better understand the importance of ethical AI in next years, it is noteworthy to cite here, events that are taking place in the Google ethical AI team since December 2020 [22] when Timnit Gebru, the coleader of this team, submitted an article titled “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” [23]. Jeff Dean, the director of Google Research, first asked Gebru to retire the paper and then, when Gebru refused to comply such a request, Dean fired her from Google Research. Without going deeper into details of this event, it is important to understand why the firing of Timnit Gebru is generating so much attention in the scientific community and in the public opinion worldwide. The two leaders of the Google ethical AI team—Margaret Mitchell and Timnit Gebru—were engaged in the effort to highlight, from within a tech giant, that even if AI can be seen as an import tool to improve many aspects of our live, it can also generate some important threats because it can distort the reality and create different problems to our societies. The Gebru’s article, in fact, describes some critical aspect related to the usage of language models based on “transformers” [3], i.e. deep learning algorithms invented into Google Research labs and open sourced by Google to make everyone able to use them worldwide. Beside very helpful applications (like machine reading comprehension, question answering, sentiment analysis, text classification, language generation, topic modeling, entity extraction, etc.) that are possible usage of such technology that may raise ethical concerns and that the scientific and practitioners community as well as regulators worldwide have to face. They have trillions parameters and need huge amount of energy to be trained. More precisely, the CO2 emission generated to train BERT [3] from scratch has been equal to the entire life of 5 cars. This fact clearly makes evident the need for working on the efficiency of AI algorithms because their wide adoption can pose environmental problems. Language models, in particular, learn what humans let them to learn. Without strong and effective supervision, the training of AI algorithms can generate bias and distortions (example of AI learning from hate speeches text or creating fake news are already available in literature [24]), marginality of minorities, etc. Regarding this last aspect, because language models like BERT [3] and GPT-2 [4] (also called “transformers”) learn mainly from English texts they tend to make other languages, and particularly linguistic minorities, marginal. Computer vision and advanced natural language processing algorithms like GAN in [25] and GPT-3 in [5] can generate realistic fake videos and texts that can be used to build fake posts to influence masses and impact on political and social life worldwide. AI has an enormous innovative power. As all powerful tools in the hands of human kind, AI needs to be developed and adopted in an harmonic way to get a more inclusive, fair and democratic society. The development of ethical AI regulations that can lead to trustworthy, explainable, interpretable, non-biased algorithms, that improve our daily life without configuring a threats, is one of the main challenge that researchers, governments, institutions, and companies worldwide will have to face in next years with the growing adoption of AI.

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References 1. Colback L (2020) The impact of AI on business and society. Financial Times, 16 Oct 2020. https://www.ft.com/content/e082b01d-fbd6-4ea5-a0d2-05bc5ad7176c 2. Schmidhuber J (2015) Deep learning in neural networks: an overview. Neural networks, Elsevier. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0893608014002135?casa_t oken=2yPRYCoxNL8AAAAA:QwJYBSkb9cHo-MYk_FP9afVrKryL9jb0fxyytPb1Odqh TmoeR9L_0yzHce5xs_Jiyz_PuRyRpQ 3. Devlin J, Chang M, Lee K, Toutanova K (2019) BERT: pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In: Proceedings of the 2019 conference of the north American chapter of the association for computational linguistics: human language technologies, vol 1. NAACL-HLT 2019, Minneapolis, MN, USA, pp 4171–4186. https://arxiv.org/pdf/ 1810.04805.pdf 4. Radford A et al. (2019) Language models are unsupervised multitask learners. OpenAI Blo. http://www.persagen.com/files/misc/radford2019language.pdf 5. Brown TB et al. (2020) Language models are few-shot learners. AllenAI. https://arxiv.org/pdf/ 2006.10029.pdf 6. Girshick R et al. (2018) Detectron. https://research.fb.com/downloads/detectron/ 7. Zuboff S (2018) The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs, NewYork 8. Jobin A, Ienca M, Vayena E (2019) The global landscape of AI ethics guidelines. Nat Mach Intelligence 1:389–399. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0088-2 9. Tolmeijr S, Kneer M, Sarasua C, Christen M, Bernstein A (2020) Implementations in machine ethics: a survey. ACM Comput Surv 53(6):132. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.07573.pdf 10. Turek M (2018) Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). DARPA. https://www.darpa.mil/pro gram/explainable-artificial-intelligence 11. Explainable AI (2019) The royal society. https://ec.europa.eu/futurium/en/system/files/ged/aiand-interpretability-policy-briefing_creative_commons.pdf 12. Gilpin LH et al. (2018) Explaining explanations: an overview of interpretability of machine learning. In: IEEE 5th international conference on data science and advanced analytics. https:// ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8631448 13. Floridi L (2019) Establishing the rules for building trustworthy AI. Nat Mach Intell 1:261–262. https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-019-0055-y#citeas 14. Smuha NA (2019) The EU approach to ethics guidelines for trustworthy artificial intelligence computer law review international. 20(4): 97–106. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? abstract_id=3443537 15. Dhar P (2020) The carbon impact of artificial intelligence. Nat Mach Intell 2: 423–425. https:// www.nature.com/articles/s42256-020-0219-9?proof=t 16. Ethics of AI Lab, University of Toronto. https://ethics.utoronto.ca/ethics-of-ai-in-context-eai c4e/ 17. Human Centered Artificial Intelligence Lab, Stanford University. https://hai.stanford.edu/ 18. Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). https://www.media.mit.edu/groups/ethics-and-governance/overview/ 19. Società Italiana per l’Etica dell’Intelligenza Artificiale. https://sipeia.diag.uniroma1.it/ 20. The ethics of artificial intelligence: issues and initiatives. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/Reg Data/etudes/STUD/2020/634452/EPRS_STU(2020)634452_EN.pdf 21. Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI. https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/eth ics-guidelines-trustworthy-ai 22. Google’s co-lead of Ethical AI team says she was fired for sending an email. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/03/googles-co-lead-of-ethical-ai-team-says-she-was-firedfor-sending-an-email/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmN vbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAHgpwuZudeep84QeNLKzF4Q9AeL_ftVaAqJNhxi1t yOWs4B7M7VgWToj7RF2Tf2HRqY4qFl05g9QNbYdA8FfB8uhzmW-MJ6iGXYTmENc H82dXCFRGFeNE-A-b_cKqMsjuXhicivvZ7ZWjpBENqP4S3zbNLIm1S2xdiZ6VPZz mdWx

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23. Bender EM, McMillan-Major A, Gebru T, Shmitchell S (2021) ACM conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (ACM FAccT). To appear. http://faculty.washington.edu/ebe nder/papers/Stochastic_Parrots.pdf 24. Microsoft silences its new A.I. bot Tay, after Twitter users teach it racism [Updated], TechCrunch, 2016. https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/24/microsoft-silences-its-new-a-i-bottay-after-twitter-users-teach-it-racism/ 25. Siarohin A, Lathuilière S, Tulyakov S, Ricci E, Sebe N (2019) First-order motion model for image animation. In: Conference on neural information processing systems (NeurIPS). https:// papers.nips.cc/paper/2019/file/31c0b36aef265d9221af80872ceb62f9-Paper.pdf

On the Harmonic Industry Luigino Filice

Some years ago, I had the opportunity to see a nice painting by Laurence S. Lowry dated 1949, entitled The football match. The painter, who lived in the United Kingdom at the beginning of the twentieth century, is famous for nice scenes from the north of the country, known at such a time for strong industrialisation. The painting, which was auctioned by Sotheby’s for more than five million euro, depicts the suburbs of Manchester where some people are playing a football match watched by crowds, with chimneys smoking in the background. The field is just a rectangle surrounded by fans, while the warehouse built from the typical red bricks are depicted in contrast with the grey of the sky, which allows us to see just a couple of other factories behind and then nothing more… The painting has been described as the ‘landscape which perfectly captures the spirit and drama of a town gripped by the excitement of the Saturday football match’. When standing in front of the painting, I remember my feeling perfectly: I forced my eyes to focus on the field, the players and the fans, but the smog won, attracting my gaze towards the sky. ‘Pollution is the price to pay in order to be free to play football’, I claimed. More specifically, I thought of industry as the necessary evil for producing richness, a sort of weight scale in which the grey of the carbon is the counterweight of the yellow of the gold. Although I have not introduced my definition of harmony, surely that is not harmonic. Today, industry is substantially different with respect to the above cited painting, but some similarities remain. Factories remind us of cold places with lots of pipes, sombre people in blue work suits, noisy machines and big smog columns.

L. Filice (B) Dept. of Mechanical, Enegy and Management Engineering, The University of Calabria, 46/C Bucci Bridge, 87036 Rende, CS, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Cicione et al. (eds.), Harmonic Innovation, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems 282, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81190-7_16

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I want to guide the reader around an unusual journey within today’s industry, to try to answer a very complex question, but I would also like to change the reader’s point of view. Modern industries are not the ones associated with England after the second World War; today you can travel from the long window in the Ferrari plant in Maranello to the Japanese garden within the Hitachi-rail plan in Reggio Calabria. Everywhere, workshops are clean and bright, workers dress in colourful work suits, the outside areas have green gardens and some spaces are dedicated to services (cafeteria, gym, nursery), depending on the factory size and, of course, management inclination. When I decided to write this, the question on the table was: can industry be harmonic? Of course, I’m not referring to the walls, the LED lights or the presence of a nursery. The question is a little bit more complex because it evokes the essence of industry today and its impact in a wider sense. In my opinion, harmony is what you feel when you hug your children, when you hear a J. S. Bach symphony, when you’re watching the red August sunset on the Mediterranean Sea. Can a worker feel something like that within their company fence? I imagine the worker waking up for their first work shift, let’s say 6.00 a.m.–2 p.m. 5 a.m. out of bed, a quick shower to warm up the brain, change into work clothes when their family are still asleep, the weather is awful and outside it is completely dark. Ten kilometres by car, checking-in by sliding the badge across with a stunted ‘Ciao!’ at the entrance and a quick coffee (at last very hot) at the cafeteria, with an acceptable croissant. Later, after eight hours in the workshop waiting for 2 p.m., there is the siren to go home, interspersed by a few breaks to avoid union complaints. Is this accurate? Fortunately, not. There’s another story that I would like to relate, which is what I’ll do in the next few pages. Let’s forget our sad worker for a while, awake at 5 a.m., and give this text some harmony. It is interesting to see how harmonic innovation taxonomy (Francesco Cicione, Luca De Biase ‘Innovazione Armonica – Un senso di Futuro’, Rubbettino, 2021) summarises company goals, from the closed innovation approach to open innovation and, finally, to harmonic innovation. The closed innovation paradigm was basically founded on profit. The preferred methodology was to develop new solutions, protect them with patents, implement them in the manufacturing process and, finally, to earn more money. But innovation, in the above view, was a toy for few people. Today, the world is deeply changed. Anybody can innovate, starting with the customer and their valuable experience. But we have also plenty of universities, laboratories and research centres, and of course, a number of start-ups all over the world, with their potential for knowledge and technology in all fields of industry. This is the reason why the internet has dramatically boosted the role of open innovation: today, everywhere, everybody knows the technology needs of a candidate company and can compete for innovation using several easy-to-use open innovation platforms… This is really disruptive compared to closed innovation: knowledge is

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Fig. 1 The 3C model explanation

not something to hide and protect, but something diffuse. The experience of COVID19 is proof of the above vision: the development of a proper vaccine in less than one year is also due to knowledge sharing among laboratories all over the world! So, in open innovation, the goal is to produce value instead of to produce profit, thus considering the industrial outcome in a wider sense. Harmonic innovation clearly defines what that value is: the common good. Looking at the same taxonomy, it is very important to see how some items decline from a harmonic innovation viewpoint. The method evolves from collaboration to hirality within community networking (important in open innovation). I’d also like to underline the origin and triggering action of harmonic innovation, which is the research of meaning. It disrupts the ambition and opportunity which characterise closed and open innovation respectively. Lastly, the approach becomes interdisciplinary, boosting the contamination of knowledge which reminds us of the harmony of Italian renaissance. Returning to the common good concept, I think that any reader more or less agrees with the following claim: common good is more important than value or profit but, nevertheless, it is difficult to implement the concept. However, one way to estimate the advantages of harmonic industry for people may be seen in the following Fig. 1. As described above, the harmonic industry, based on harmonic innovation, evolves from value production to people wellbeing. This is possible using the 3C model in which we can say: • Chorality: this is not only a way to engage with any stakeholder. Chorality means to act as if in a chorus, in which everybody looks at the other and any voice out

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of tune can affect the entire performance. But, if every voice is tuned, the result is… harmonic! • Communication: industries have to communicate to their market but, more generally, their values to society. Harmonic industry requires increased consent, otherwise people’s perceptions could be confused with extra costs for the economy, and this is absolutely regrettable. • Carbon neutral: this is a focal point. We can discuss this for as long as we want, but we have to agree, one way or another, that harmony cannot exist without a balance between manufacturing and the planet, both present and future. So, we have to plan all activities carefully in order to reach the carbon neutrality. A harmonic industry must be also clean. In more general terms, what I think in terms of public satisfaction is si j = s j

hp j + rj hpave

(1)

where sij is the satisfaction indicator of the man, ‘j’. This is equal to his salary, sj amplified by the ratio between his harmony perception (hpj ) and the average value (hpave ) of the same analysis domain (colleagues, for instance). To this product is added the term rj which is the value of the resources (not only money but also the valuation of time and/or other efforts) that the person ‘j’ is able to share with other people in order to boost the progress of society. For the sake of simplicity, a worker who appears vexed and, for instance, whose harmonic perception is 50% of the average and who does not want to spend their time or other resources on society will end up with a satisfaction indicator equal to half of their salary. On the other hand, for a worker who feels they are in a harmonic ecosystem and whose rate is 20% over the average value, if they are available to spend 10% of their worktime on society, they will have a satisfaction indicator equal to 130% of their salary. Note that they will feel useful for building a harmonic society 2.6 times more than the other worker (130% vs. 50%)! Our common life experiences suggest that if we take into account and would like to increase the common good, we have to renounce something. We can pay more taxes for other people’s welfare, new hospitals or schools, we can donate money for a good cause, or we can spare time as volunteers, making what is usually called happy degrowth. But is that the only direction? I think we may be acting in the wrong way here because in this case we adopt a sort of redistribution of richness, which is why many distinguished economists say that this model cannot work: because of human egoism. But here, I’m saying something different: the focus is not to give other people part of our goods, but we should instead try to build new value together. Because harmony is a value in itself! Follow me into industry, let’s get over the factory fence.

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Of course, first of all, industry produces money by selling the goods produced. People are available to pay money, so they buy products which make them happy. This is actually a strong simplification, but it seems to work… So, if everything works in the right way, industry is able to produce value. But now we would like to discuss more than just the economic aspect of value generation. In fact, we should consider all the impacts of value creation because environment and social aspects are today growing in importance for everyone around the world. The question I ask now is: who are the recipients of this value generation? To use a not very elegant and fairly common word, who are the stakeholders? Actually, I prefer to talk about the ‘meaning-holders’, because this explains the reason why industry exists according to the taxonomy we introduced before. To summarise, without any prejudice, I can list four different categories which would be interesting to delve into. For each of them I will introduce two limitations, like two masses on a weight scale that the meaning-holders will have to manage, depending on their characteristics, capacity, nature, education and discernment. First category: the entrepreneur, who moves from profit to responsibility. An old, but evergreen, definition of a company says that it is an organisation that is able to make money. This is true, but it is also a very poor, really rough definition of a company. It is the same if we define a man as an organism able to breath and eat. It actually seems to define very little. At the same time, it is very reductive to consider the entrepreneur as a man enslaved to industry just to make money. Profit is of course one of the key indicators of company success, but something is changing in the global perception. The war to increase productivity year by year is probably ending in some areas of the world. If we look at the gross domestic product (GDP) increasing in European countries before the pandemic, we had very few percentage points and 3% growth was considered very good. This is the result of several factors. Worker quality of life is now taken into account more than in the past, salaries increase, pollution regulations require new investments in cleaner technologies, citizen welfare requests increase, goods can circulate freely around the world, and so on. Thus, some new needs arise and sometimes we give less priority to GDP. As proof, we strongly condemn, without any justification, some countries whose GDP grows by two digits but whose people work without even minimal human rights, with safety just as an industrial option and pollution not considered to be a current problem. This is because other countries polluted a lot in the last century so they think they have the same chances for development, at any cost. So, how can entrepreneur move within this scenario? They probably have to convince themselves of some choices regarding the values on which they would like to base company development. Then, the company has to communicate (remember the 3C model) these values because customers today are mature enough to have their interests driven not only by price. A general rule does not exist but, today, the market can now reward companies with new values that are considered important by customers due to new sensibilities

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derived from education, experience, global trends and unpredictable events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. It is not only a matter of ethics, because this is not limited to how we act. I suggest another word. Equilibrium? Something a little better. How about harmony? Because it also expresses how we feel. Second category: the worker, who moves between hard work and wellbeing. A good teacher, some years ago, gave me a good, simple example that demonstrates the role of the worker in a company compared to the owner (better yet, the entrepreneur): instable equilibrium. It is well known that, in physics books, instable equilibrium is depicted as a ball placed at the top of a convex surface (like an overturned bowl). Any disturbance, even if it is very small, will move the ball away from the bowl and, therefore, from the equilibrium point. The teacher also said that the glue which keeps the ball in that unstable position is the worker’s salary. Beyond the metaphor, are entrepreneurs and workers really part of different worlds, put together just by the mutual convenience of an exchange of money and hours of work? My humble opinion is that this is, again, a poor view of the global phenomenon. I will again refer to Laurence’s painting to emphasise my reasoning. Industry is like a football team. Everybody has their own role to play but each player is crucial for the whole team’s success in the cup competition. Thus, the worker is definitely part of the team. This may be true and but the real question is different: does the worker feel like part of the game? In my opinion, you are proud to belong to an organisation if you are fine within this ecosystem. It is not a question of how many hours you work or if you have twenty-eight or thirty days of holiday. Of course salary, flexibility, equipment and benefits are part of the feeling of wellbeing but I’m old enough to know that people often decide to change to a different company with 20 or 30% less salary because of a better work-life balance, thus increasing their satisfaction indicator sij (see Eq. 1). Less money, more wellbeing! But, again, there is no sort of general standard. In fact, the perception of wellbeing is individual, so it is again a sort of balance between the ‘duty to do’ and ‘the pleasure to be part of’. Of course, company governance has a great responsibility as far as workers’ wellbeing is concerned, but I think that such a responsibility is not only down to the managers. Everybody should contribute to creating a better world and, thus, a better workplace (value rj , Eq. 1). This is not only considering ‘the glass half empty or half full’, according to an Italian proverb, but also the ability to understand that tasks cannot regulate any aspect of the worker-company relationship. Also, in such a case, intangible assets have extraordinary importance for building a serene relationship in which the exchange of money and working hours is only one part of the game, where the worker is proud to belong to a company and the company consider the worker to be their most important resource, not like one labour unit but as an individual who makes the effort to make the factory a success. Some months ago, I had a valuable experience that probably explains my thinking better than a hundred words I could write. As part of a group research project, I was able to visit the Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles plant in Melfi, a small town in

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the Basilicata, a region in southern Italy. Currently, the Melfi plant produces some successful FCA (today Stellantis) vehicles with the brand Fiat and Jeep: the Fiat 500 X, crossover of the famous Fiat 500, which was developed on the same platform as Jeep Renegade, and also the Jeep model Compass. In addition, now they also produce the plug-in hybrid versions of these cars, known as 4xe, according to the new market trends in Europe and beyond. During the lunch that was held in the company cafeteria, some workers were seated close to me and we briefly discussed Italian politics, a typically good topic when talking to Italian people for the first time. At the end of the day, my table companion was at the checkpoint and we left the plant together. I asked more about his role in the plant and he suddenly said: ‘follow me!’. A newly manufactured Jeep Renegade, painted a very trendy ‘American-army’ green, was parked outside the fence. He spent about twenty minutes showing me the complexity of the sheet geometries, the techniques for welding the metal parts very accurately, tricks to hide the process traces, since his job is metal stamping in the car body workshop. During his talk, he caressed the metal and looked me in the eyes to be sure that everything was clear to me. This guy presented the car as a company product that he contributed to building… Proudly! And harmonically! I conclude that, depending on what management thinks about the market, satisfaction is not only a matter for customers… Third category: the customer, who moves between expense and happiness. Customers value the entire production cycle. Designers, suppliers, manufacturers, sellers: everybody lives in the hope that the customer will pay for their work, swiping their credit card at the cash desk. It is nice to think that a good design, a nice product or a well posted picture on a website is just a ‘grain of hope’ until the customer receives a SMS which confirms the money transfer! But how can the customer contribute to ‘mentally building’ a harmonic industry? The customer plays the important role of final judge. They decide whether a product will be successful or definitively fail. Again, it is a matter of equilibrium. As we said, the entrepreneur invests capacity, money and organisation, the worker invests time and effort, and the customer puts their money on the table to buy… happiness. OK, maybe happiness is not exactly the right word to describe the satisfaction of some basic needs (eating, for instance) but if we think about the latest smartphone, a zero emissions car, clothes, or a 50 inches 4 K TV, how do you feel when you call, drive, suit up or watch? Industry, therefore, helps people to feel free, to feel beautiful, to feel powerful. Man needs to state his role in society, for his dignity, to feel useful to the progress of society. Again, we have a window in which the customer can move. From one side, the customer gives money, from the other, they take happiness. We know how in our society it is dangerous when equilibrium is not reached. Stingy people tend to

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accumulate money for the fear of becoming poor while other dissolute people expend a lot of money in a compulsive way, filling rooms and rooms with useless stuff. But if we think about our experience, industry allows us to buy a house for our family, a fireplace for long, cold winters, a car to pick up our children from school, a laptop to work everywhere, and a kitchen to cook a nice ‘pasta alla carbonara’! Things are part of the space we live in: their amount, their value and their usefulness are part of our lives and contribute to us living harmonically in both our space and time. Fourth category: the society, which moves between consumption and future. If we think about industrialised society, the first thing we imagine is that industry produces richness and, unfortunately, other consequences (as L. Lowry teaches). Now we are lucky because just some years ago, industrialised and civilised were more or less synonyms. Fortunately, today it is different! However, if it is a common idea that industry means richness, understanding other impacts on society is more complicated. When we talk about sustainability, which is today a sort of ‘mantra’ for any opinion leader in industrial matters, it is well known that the economic impact is just one third of the problem. Indeed, sustainability can be a concrete way to implement the harmony concept! The environment is now thoroughly taken into consideration (at least in universities, during Greta parades and at some international summits). However, today the equation seems to be: ‘industry = pollution’, and so we have to invest in technologies that pollute less to do the same or, as somebody says, to do more polluting less. This is true, but we also have to understand that pollution depends not only on the amount of CO2 produced by companies, but also on our human habits. Let’s say, as a provocation, that high recyclable polymer is a plastic that we don’t use and the greenest car is the one we leave in the garage. Again, believe me, I will not surrender to the happy degrowth charm. When you play in an orchestra, what happens if an instrument is out of tune? You hear in a harmonic concert that not only are all the instruments perfectly tuned but also if the director is able to harmonise all the musicians before them. Because everybody can influence the orchestra. In society, we have the same phenomenon. Every action has a consequence on other members. If we think that our resources are finite, we will understand that if we consume something today we are, contemporarily, taking that something away from the future. Social sustainability is a way to answer this question: if we do action X, are we aware about the consequences for everyone, today and in the future? Again, it is a matter of equilibrium. Industry is able to supply nice examples. Carbon neutral industries are costly, but today we have technology available to produce in equilibrium with the environment (see the 3C model again). Are we willing to spend more money if the products we buy are produced by a plant with a zero carbon footprint?

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We can obtain energy from fossil fuels or renewables. Are we ready to invest in these environmentally friendly technologies? Although we live in what we call a progressed society, hunger is not eradicated. Are we ready to sustain a country’s welfare to allow any citizen to have at least basic rights? Industry can make resources available for progress but the management of these resources is subject to joint responsibility. Again, in an orchestra, nobody can play alone. On the contrary, everybody must hear the others in order to produce a harmony. Together. What’s more, the definition of sustainability as stated by the United Nations in 1987 (G. H. Brundtland committee) is extremely current: ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs’. This should be our mantra. It is extraordinary that we have the technology to do that. It is like a warehouse where you find old musical instruments. They are just pieces of wood and brass, covered by a thick layer of dust. But, if you look again from a new point of view, they can play any symphony. Returning to the beginning of these few and poor sentences, I expressed my examples of harmony. What is a hug if not a trade-off between force and time? What is a symphony if not an equilibrium among arches and wind? What is a perfect sunset if not a harmonic dose of light and colour? Therefore, a harmonic industry may exist by combining personal wisdom and community interests and treating others as part of the same (football) game.

Harmonic Innovation. The New Paradigm for Digital, Green and Social Transition Antonio Viscomi

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The order of the intense and prolonged works of this seminar suggests that we should try to share some reflections on harmonic organization, bearing in mind, however, that a great deal—really a great deal—has been said in the speeches that preceded me. I do not aim at the ambitious project of formulating some kind of conclusion to our discussion; that is, of enclosing topics that are complex by extension and problematic intensity in a few words, but by the complete awareness that conceptual innovation, the change—if you like—of heuristic paradigm, passes through the wise interweaving of perspectives, knowledge, cultures, visions—some time ago we would have said also of Weltanschauung—marked instead, from an academic point of view, by barriers and clear boundaries. In fact, rather than setting itself at a border point, harmonic innovation occupies a borderland. That is what it is: a place of transition, to represent openness and integration and to allow practices of hybridization, where instead the boundaries have to do with the closure of identity and practices of distinction, with little tolerance for nuances and uncertainties. Even in business organization. Even in the organization tout court. Precisely because of its position in a borderland, it is necessary to avoid having distorted resonances or inertial approaches weakening the new element embedded in the conceptual framework of "harmonic innovation". In this perspective, the first element to pay attention to is given by the term "harmony", whose ambiguities are certainly not veiled by the suggestive and euphonic character of the same term, such as to refer to an ideal world in which everything resonates and vibrates without being out of synch; it is not by chance that Harmony is the mythical daughter of a renewed union of Ares and Aphrodite.

A. Viscomi (B) Faculty of Law, University of Catanzaro “Magna Graecia”, Campus “Salvatore Venuta”, 88100 Catanzaro, Italy e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] HiRe - Harmonic Innovation Research B-Corp, Arezzo, Italy © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Cicione et al. (eds.), Harmonic Innovation, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems 282, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81190-7_17

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The fact is that harmony has a plurality of meanings so much to expose itself, if not well understood and specified, to the typical instrumentalization of every neo-language, that is the one for which—as you would remember—war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. As far as we are concerned, I believe it is important to point out from the outset that the term “harmony”, even (and indeed especially) when referring to a productive organization, has more to do with issues of "sense" than with the need for "consent". This, in fact, concerns the means; that, instead, concerns the ends. If we look closely, consent can be sought, sustained and consolidated even with proactive instruments (think of economic incentives) or coercive ones (by resorting also to punitive instruments). In short, it can be traced back (or scaled down) to the assumption of behaviors that are even only externally consistent with an expected code, without any regard to a sort of internalization or intimate adhesion to that same code. Sense, on the other hand, if considered in its belonging to the order of ends, imposes adequate consideration of the very meaning of individual and collective actions, of their deepest raison d’être as embedded in the sphere of experience, whether individual or collective. This distinction seems extremely necessary when the complex scenario of a productive organization is in the background. In this specific context, in fact, the use of the signifier “harmony” could lead to significant misunderstandings. The productive organization is, in fact, the typical place of conflict. Suffice to think of the conflict between authority and freedom: the very invention and legal construction of the subordinate employment agreement, as an instrument of integration of individual performance in a work organization, has had the historical function of founding and legitimizing, limiting it, the exercise of the employer’s powers; that is, of allowing, recognizing and protecting the exercise of a position of authority. To this end and in this way, it has been possible to transfer what is rooted in the concrete organizational foundation to the formal level of the agreement. And think again of the conflict between capital and labor: the industrial conflict has historically been, and in part continues to be, the driving innovation force. It is now generally recognized that the urgent technological innovation is correlated (also, obviously, but not only) to union struggles for better working conditions. It is not without significance that by some, now in times past, the law of collective labor relations has been reconsidered in the same way as international law and the same collective agreement assimilated to a sort of peace treaty, albeit temporary while waiting for a new conflict put in place with that formidable weapon that is the strike. It seems to me that these brief recalls are sufficient to highlight the need for a strict control of the argumentation in order to avoid that the desired harmony may be resolved, in the end, with the instrumental elimination of the conflict of the productive organization through an emphatic exaltation of consent, if not of the identity of interests between subjects engaged in the same productive enterprise. It is worth remembering how the formulation of art. 2094 of the Italian civil code of 1942, in which the subordinate worker is defined as a "collaborator" in the enterprise (with all the ideological significance innervated

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in considering the conflict between capital and labor resolved in the perspective of the superior interest of national production), then finds its real limit in art. 2086, according to which the entrepreneur is the "head of the enterprise" on which "his collaborators" depend "hierarchically". Harmony is therefore the result of the transformation of a plurality of subjects into an ordered collectivity, organized on the military model, with a head, his hierarchical lines, which operates through orders whose execution is supervised by sanctions. For these reasons, in my opinion, “harmony” is a term that asks to be appreciated in relation to the sense, the final value of the poietic action, creative and transformative at the same time, that animates, inspires and conforms a productive organization. It is not a matter of squelching the conflict, but rather of understanding the very perspective in which that conflict finds reason and meaning, going beyond the mere technical, technological and technocratic data and its claimed and exclusive rationality. To this end, it could be useful to look at the regulatory framework and compare art. 2082 of the Italian Civil Code with art. 4 of the Constitution. The former defines the entrepreneur as the person who professionally organizes human, instrumental and financial resources "for the purpose of producing or exchanging goods or services". Mindful of this rationale, the distinctive feature of entrepreneurial work is obviously that of technical and organizational rationality with respect to the market and this is why it is assumed that the entrepreneur is, as mentioned above, the hierarchical head of the company. Article 4 of the Italian Constitution, on the other hand, takes a completely different view of labor, not only and not even so much as an object of contractual exchange, but rather as an instrument for the realization of one’s talents and participation in the construction of the common city. For these reasons, work is not only a (social) right, but also—and this point is often overlooked—an (individual) duty towards the community. "Every citizen"—so says art. 4— “has the duty to carry out, according to his own possibilities and choice, an activity or a function that contributes to the material or spiritual progress of society". In the constitutional perspective, labor, protected in all its forms and applications (art. 35), is not only a technical activity but, if anything, a human experience that becomes most significant if and when set in a wider dimension. In this same perspective, harmony is no longer the result of the imposition of limits (such as, for example, the social utility mentioned in art. 41 of the Constitution as a limit that private economic initiative cannot go beyond), but becomes a direction of sense, such as to recompose in an ordered universe what elsewhere appears to be the chaotic effect of industrial conflict and, even before, of a merely incremental most often autistic economic initiative. In the perspective of sense, harmony is given by the suitability of the productive organization, understood as a technical factor, to operate proactively not only for the generation of value, but also for the promotion of the development of the human being and his/her potential, as well as for the social growth of the community in which it operates. Harmonious, therefore, is every innovation capable of contributing to the construction of a good society, of thinking about

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the common good; that is, how to ensure the set of those conditions of social life that allow both groups and individual members to reach their own perfection more fully and more rapidly. This is, as we know, the classic definition of the common good. For this reason, it can be said that harmonious innovation, insofar as it is attentive to the common good, goes beyond the purely corporate dimension to give back and return to individuals and communities. “Can industry give itself ends?” Adriano Olivetti asked in his speech to the workers of Pozzuoli. "Are they simply found in the profit index? Isn’t there, beyond the apparent rhythm, a destination, a vocation even in the life of a factory? We can answer: “There is a purpose in our everyday actions. And without the first awareness of this end it is vain to hope for the success of the work we have undertaken.” For this reason I believe it is reasonable, after having pointed out its pertinence to the order of sense rather than to that of consent, to propose now, albeit in a brief way, a second element: if harmonic innovation is consistent with a demand for sense in human experience then it calls for overcoming the logic of interest and takes on the different perspective of inter-being. It is not a question, let it be clear, of denying the diversity of individual or group interests in the name of a superior interest that dissolves everything, nor of adopting a perspective that the overcoming of conflict intends to lead back to and reduce the synthesis of opposites. If anything, it is a matter of understanding the radically—I would say ontologically—relational dimension of experience, and even before that of human presence in the various vital spaces in which it takes place. And also understand (and almost say: finally) the consequences of assuming a precise anthropological image as a parameter on which to model our living together. Just think of the evolution of economic research where it is now increasingly evident, on the one hand, that it is impossible to consider the idea of an individual, rational, omniscient agent who always seeks only the maximization of his or her interest (a monad, in short) as fundamental and, conversely, on the other hand, the progressive spread of the ambitious project proposed by the theorists of behavioral economics; that is, to bring together the acquisitions of economic, political and psychological sciences in a unified theory of individual and multi-person decision theory. In view of this, it is necessary to avoid the error of drawing on traditional economic essays without realizing that the manual conceptualization of the free market not only does not exist but probably cannot exist in reality. For these reasons, too, there is a growing call for a stronger ethics of responsibility (towards creation and the creatures of today and tomorrow, always operating in contexts of limited rationality) as an alternative to recourse to the easier ethics of conviction (et pereat mundus, someone would have said). After all, I think it is well known that the consolidation, in the field of the theory of games, of a particular analytical and heuristic consideration of the "strategic rationality" at the expense of the one traditionally called "parametric": the latter—as is well known—synthetically describes the maximizing behaviors adopted by individuals in the assumption that individual actions leave unchanged the environment

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in which others also make their choices; that, instead, takes its cue from the fact that the choices of individuals, insofar as they modify the surrounding environment, are conditioned choices; that is, choices whose outcome depends on the interactions established with the choices of other operators. Being in relationship is therefore constitutive of human experience which is meaningful and generates value when it does not close in on itself but opens itself to encountering what surrounds it. It took us many years to understand that organized economic activity also bears the burden not only of the commitment to avoid damage to social utility, but also, in a more meaningful way, of taking on social responsibility, in this way meaning the integration of ethical concerns within the strategic vision of the company, whether we are talking about CSR— in order to more effectively manage the problems of social and ethical impact within their internal and external scopes of application (this concept was first expressed in 1984 by R. Edward Freeman in his essay "Strategic Management: a Stakeholder Approach")—or looking in the different direction of the B-Corp where companies give up being organizations that extract value from the world for their exclusive benefit to become companies that not only give back but generate value for all stakeholders, first and foremost for the community of reference. The Italian legislative formulation specifies that benefit societies are those which, in the exercise of an economic activity, in addition to the aim of sharing profits, pursue one or more purposes of common benefit and operate in a responsible, sustainable and transparent way towards people, communities, territories and environment, cultural and social goods and activities, bodies and associations and other stakeholders. People, community, environment: from interest to inter-being. I believe that these brief remarks are enough to confirm the fact that only that innovation which is capable of generating sense by placing inter-being at the center, that is, the awareness of the constitutive dimension of being in relationship with people, the community and the environment in which it operates and therefore of the responsibility that derives from it in the perspective of the common good, deserves to be qualified as harmonic. Even innovation, as open as it may be, remains closed within the proprietary and extractive logic of the company which, for these purposes, opens up to the outside world. Vice versa, harmonic innovation proposes that the same ends of the productive activity are rethought and introjected in a generative logic by the company that, for this, gives itself (and not only opens itself up) to the outside world. It is quite evident that the harmonious approach to innovation is rooted in a precise anthropological representation and in an ethical aspiration: to create the optimal conditions for a good life, capable of allowing the various dimensions in which human experience is manifested to be realized in an integral and integrated way. After all, however, isn’t it true that economics, as a practical science that deals with the relations between men concerning the production, exchange and consumption of material goods and services, was already developed, for some essential features, by the ancient philosophers as part of politics? And

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isn’t it true that political economy as an autonomous discipline began, so it is believed, with Adam Smith, professor of moral philosophy in Edinburgh, author of the treatise The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he discusses the "sympathy" that cements cohesion among members of society? For this reason, reasoning about Harmonic Innovation necessarily leads us to reflect on a model of humanism capable of reconnecting the soul of man to technological development and orienting both to a responsible openness towards the world. This is why we need a new humanism, capable of taking charge of others and caring for the world. And we need it now that the potentialities and risks of digital innovation, artificial intelligence, big data, and indeed simple data, which now seem to be the gold standard of the twenty-first century, are starting to become evident, even to the general public. However, it is quite clear, and I am about to conclude, that assuming a perspective of this kind does not mean proposing an ideal model of society to be regarded aesthetically as a praiseworthy utopia, but rather attempting to elaborate a framework within which the essential elements of economic and juridical-institutional life are allocated and shaped. To realize this, it is sufficient to propose a few examples. Think, for example, of the legal configuration of the meeting between employer and employee, traditionally ensured by an agreement of exchange that defines reciprocal rights and duties, in turn qualifying as an employment or self-employment agreement. In an organization oriented to harmonic innovation, the participation of the worker in the productive project of the company and the responsibility of the employer towards the working community called to realize that same project represent elements exceeding the mere logic of exchange, yet still not fully decipherable with the glasses of the positive jurist, nor—and this is a serious point to be taken into consideration—with those, even if possible, of the inspection authorities. The fact is that generating value by enhancing the participation of workers in the work objectives clashes with the question that for a long time—for too long—the jurist has been asking himself: does that worker work in a subordinate or autonomous way? Because from the answer to this question, as can be guessed, radically different—and in some ways, indeed in many ways, opposite—consequences derive. The issue, for example, of work via platform shows how traditional tools do not always help to understand (let alone govern) digital innovations. The fact is that labor law was born to divide the hand from the press, to prevent the press from crushing the hand. But now? Now that the hand and the press talk to each other with machine or deep learning procedures, with sensors such that robots are now cobots, that the human is now increasingly plus, empowered? And what can we say about company codes, i.e. those documents in which the mission is intertwined with the company’s vision and which pose and impose on workers’ behaviors, even in their private lives, that are consistent with the ethical perspective that the company believes to privilege and embody, so much so as to suggest the doubt that the contractual exchange no longer includes only work and pay but also other and different elements? And this is without considering the fiscal and corporate aspects that

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pose even more relevant problems: just think of the spread of forms of work for equity that translate personal work into a participation in the creation of corporate value, or the need to consider the specificities of start-ups marked by the high possibility of failure, as a normal fact of the creative game, yet considered by the legislator, except for small traits, as traditional businesses. It is clear that in the absence of an adequate legal-institutional framework, innovation will be slowed down and harmonious innovation will be brought back into the realm of a logic that has now passed. And perhaps, on closer inspection, this is the real question. There are those who, while setting sail, always look back, as if to measure the distance, because that distance also marks their fear. And there are those who, instead, while setting sail look forward to the open sea; whether calm or rough, they know that the route must be traced by looking at the point of arrival, not the point of departure. My hope is that in the face of the great transition that marks these times of ours, we will drop out the attitude of those who look to the past, trying instead to find new paths. Harmonic Innovation is a possible path, for those who believe that the future cannot be created without rediscovering the profound unity that gives meaning to human experience. And it is a path that is compliant with the Constitution, which indicates the road to a well-ordered individual life and collective organization. It is Article 2 that traces the boundaries of this path, where it requires the Republic to recognize and guarantee the inviolable rights of man, both as an individual and in the social formations (including the company) where his or her personality takes place, but also to require the fulfillment of the mandatory duties of political, economic and social solidarity. Fundamental inviolable rights and mandatory duties of solidarity. From the "I" to the "we": this is the necessary paradigm shift that makes human experience, be it individual or collective, harmonious.

Copyright, Francesco Cicione – Entopan