Social innovation: the future is already here

Some days ago we made the pilot course on entreprenership in the framework of the European SENPOWER: Empowering young adults with special educational needs. Our partners from AEVA, SHIPCON, Piattaforma SUD, and INNOVACIJU VIURAS, attended the course. It is a pilot activity focused on how to teach entrepreneurship to people with Dyslexia, Dysgraphia, Dyscalculia, and ADHD. Once the training sessions were over, we decided to visit the Valencian company  Estudio Inclusivo S.L.L., that works to create a working environment that allows channeling diversity through labor integration processes in the digital sector, developing different types of software to be able to adapt websites and jobs to people with functional diversity. In fact, they just launched one of its flagship products: a web accessibility wordpress plugin.
During the visit they explained to us the difficulties and challenges of managing a team of people with functional diversity, because among others, it is necessary to adapt the workplace to individual needs, considering all the personal and family factors surrounding the worker, to include them in decision making. For instance, if I have to go to the physio one hour a day, I must adapt my work schedule for that, or in case I can not spend more than 4 hours in the office doing a task, then I will have to adapt it. They make business management with people as protagonists, at the core of decision making. As they explained in the meeting, they make pure social innovation, because they have not found any precedent and every step they take needs research, reflection, trial and error. They work with passion, from the belief that people with functional diversity have the right to work and above all, they have a lot to contribute to society, because diversity always adds up.

CAPAZIA , a Valencian business shuttle focused on projects led or co-led by people with functional diversity. They explained their pre-acceleration program, which this year celebrated the second edition, and as a novelty over the previous year, it also hosted start ups that, without being led by people with diversity, deliver products for them.

Picture: Maruo Xesteria, CEO of Capazia, explaining the business accelerator program

They explained to us the modifications they had carried out between one edition and the previous one, about how they worked and about the companies that had left CAPAZIA, about their challenges and opportunities. It was a really interesting afternoon, in which we learned as a company and also on a personal level, that innovation will be inclusive or it will not be.