The Lemon Paradigm

Giuseppe Perrone Local Group Calabria

Anna Laura Orrico Undersecretary at the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities of Italy

Italy is one of the countries that suffered the most from the outbreak of COVID-19, being seen as the “worst-case scenario” in the eyes of many countries while preparing for what’s to come; but is this the only thing worth looking up about Italy in times of a global pandemic?

Leaving aside widespread heartwarming moments of hope, like the practice of singing from the balconies, Italy has undergone an incredible digital transformation. As an example, smart working in the public sector has risen from 10% to 80% up until August, making us realise that not only it is a possibility, but also that it can prove itself to be a better solution in most cases; resistance to change has been put aside, leaving us with the chance of giving a shot to new technologies and methods that, in a normal situation, we were too scared to experiment.

We discovered the power of the “Open Innovation” concept, with companies coming together by sharing their patents to create, in record time, new tools for the fight against the virus. A famous example of cooperation has been the one demonstrated by Isinnova - an Italian startup who designed respirator valves to be installed on Decathlon’s scuba diving masks, and made their patent available for free - and Decathlon, who gifted 10,000 of those masks to the country’s healthcare system. Given its ease of production, this patent is now used in many foreign countries.

Necessity also brought many forms of innovation to the cultural and educational sectors. Schools and universities, as one of the environments with the strongest resistance to change, who have always been reluctant to the use of remote tools, have been forced to move out of their usual comfort zone, and are now starting to discover that such tools are not that bad after all, and that although some concepts can never be transposed to a remote setting, the understanding that some can is a valuable realisation. The hashtag “#iorestoacasa”, “I stay at home”, created by the Ministry of Health has also been a simple way to discover how we can use this forced confinement for our own cultural enrichment, as it has been used by various cultural institutions to promote their newly discovered ways of connecting to a locked-down audience. For museums, parks, and galleries that usually work with visitors onsite, the need for a paradigm shift helped to develop new ways of connecting to their audience, creating new settings that go from virtual visits to online concerts. The great success of those initiatives also sparked new ideas to maintain this remoteness as an available option for the future, when Covid will only be a bad memory. Supporting this, the government decided to invest millions of euros in the development of a digital portal to close the gap between art institutions and those who cannot physically visit the premises.

“La necessità aguzza l’ingegno” - Necessity sharpens ingenuity, says an Italian proverb; this outbreak made us reconsider our priorities, jump years ahead in terms of adopting technology and reminded us what to do when life gives you lemons... Keep squeezing.