When science meets policy: G7

by Vittoria Colizza

I am proud and honored to be part of the I-7 Innovators’ Strategic Advisory Board on People-Centered Innovation. This is an engagement group launched during the G7 Summit in Taormina in May 2017. An experiment proposed by the Italian Government for the Italian G7 Presidency of 2017, its aim is to attract attention to the multi-faceted challenges that Innovation poses to Governments and Societies with a need for a concerted action across countries. ​

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Each country and the EU have designated their team of experts – a great honor and responsibility to be part of the Italian I-7 team of innovators! Our team is led by Diego Piacentini, Government Commissioner for the Transformation of the Digital Agenda for Italy – a super brilliant, extremely dynamic and unstoppable explosive mind. Diego is Senior Vice President at Amazon and he’s taken a leave of absence to take care of innovation in Italy, with the very ambitious goal of digitally transforming the public administration – a commitment that he’s taking one step at a time with an efficient and successful approach. There’s hope :)
I found myself in the mix of stimulating, challenging and exceptional brains - the rest of the team: Eric Ezechieli, co-founder of Nativa; Riccardo Sabatini, Chief Data Scientist at Orionis Biosciences; Thomas Ermacora, architect-urbanist, futurist & technologist; Raffaella Rumiati, Director of the iNSula lab at SISSA.

We were selected at the beginning of Summer 2017 and worked throughout Summer to prepare three documents on the Italian perspective around the following themes:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI). How can AI help governments make better decisions and deliver policies and services more effectively?
• Big Data: from regulation to active management. How can a more proactive approach to Big Data lead to smarter countries?
• The changing nature of society: the future of work. How could innovation help to deal with upcoming social and demographic changes?

 
I was assigned the Big Data challenge. In the month of September we received the contributions by G7 countries and we met with all I-7 Innovators to discuss these issues at the I-7 Day on September 25, a meeting taking place at Reggia di Venaria Reale, near Torino, together with the ICT and Industry Multistakeholder Conference and the opening of the Ministerial Meeting on ICT and Industry.
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It's been an awesome however challenging experience.
In one day and two sessions only (morning and afternoon), we presented and discussed the key points related to each theme, reaching a consensus across countries to propose practical action points for governments to address the Innovation challenges – all in real time! Our work was then summarized into the I-7 Chair Summary, the conclusions of the I-7 group, which was presented by Diego Piacentini to the Ministers at the end of the day and in occasion of the opening of the Ministerial Meeting on ICT and Industry. Here’s a glance at how the day went:

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​And the dialogue between science and policy actually worked: in the official report of the Ministerial Meeting, the G7 takes note of the recommendations that we formulated. So proud that part of the Big Data document that I wrote was finally merged in the I-7 Chair Summary – a non-trivial legacy of Science and Innovation on Policy.
 
Look forward to seeing this experiment continuing next year under the Canadian Presidency.