Gioconomics

Gioconomics is a creative business development
programme for voluntary organisations to start
up and incubate social enterprise.

The competition
Gioconomics is one of the winning entries of the
International Social Innovation Competition,
Naples 2.0, an Initiative promoted by the London
based charity Euclid Network (for third sector
leaders in Europe) and funded by the Unicredit
Foundation. The competition established many
strategic partnerships with key local
organisations (Project Ahead, Libera, Maestri di
Strada and Caritas) and attracted hundreds of
designers, entrepreneurs and social innovators
from all over the world in response to 6 different
challenges. In September 2011 seven projects
received seed funding to start working on the
development of their ideas over a period of four
months.

The challenge
The local host for the Gioconomics project, the
association Gioco, Immagine e Parole, has been
active for the past 18 years in the South‐East
area of Naples, around the quarters of San
Giovanni a Teduccio, Barra and Ponticelli working
on social and cultural activities to promote the
inclusion and increase civic participation of local
young people, reaching out to their families and
the wider community. These areas are
considered to be among the most deprived ones
in Naples, facing high unemployment, economic
deprivation and criminality. The current scarcity
of resources, the decreasing availability of
funding opportunities and the barriers
represented by the bureaucratic Italian voluntary
sector are only some of the challenges the
association faces.

The winning team
Naples 2.0 competition represented an
opportunity for Gioco Immagine e Parole to
collaborate with an international design team to
develop a sustainable business strategy to
increase the reach and impact of their current
work. The winning team consists of three
designers, Mylene Jonker, Jonas Piet (from the
Netherlands) and Vincenzo Di Maria (from Italy),
who share a background in ‘people-centered
design and innovation processes’. Their joint
portfolio up to 2012 includes projects in field of
SROI evaluation, service design and service
transformation, design research, communication,
social innovation and enterprise, spread over 10
different countries.