Made in Carcere: Scaling a Social Enterprise Business Model

"Officina Creativa" (Creative Workshop) is a social enterprise giving female convicts a second change: to produce fashion accessories branded as \u201cMade in Carcere\u201d (Made in Jail). The case deals with the struggles and the challenges that the founder of the company had to deal with as the business started to flourish and gaining social legitimation. Some questions were crowding her mind: Was it really possible to further scale up the organization\u2019s operations and impact? And if so, how? And why growing was so difficult for the organization

Vision-only fully automated driving in dynamic mixed-traffic scenarios

In this work an overview of the local motion planning and dynamic perception framework within the V-Charge project is presented. This framework enables the V-Charge car to autonomously navigate in dynamic mixed-traffic scenarios. Other traffic participants are detected, classified and tracked from a combination of stereo and wide-angle monocular cameras. Predictions of their future movements are generated utilizing infrastructure information. Safe motion plans are acquired with a system-compliant sampling-based local motion planner. We show the navigation performance of this vision-only autonomous vehicle in both simulation and real-world experiments

Association of kidney disease measures with risk of renal function worsening in patients with type 1 diabetes

Background: Albuminuria has been classically considered a marker of kidney damage progression in diabetic patients and it is routinely assessed to monitor kidney function. However, the role of a mild GFR reduction on the development of stage 653 CKD has been less explored in type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) patients. Aim of the present study was to evaluate the prognostic role of kidney disease measures, namely albuminuria and reduced GFR, on the development of stage 653 CKD in a large cohort of patients affected by T1DM. Methods: A total of 4284 patients affected by T1DM followed-up at 76 diabetes centers participating to the Italian Association of Clinical Diabetologists (Associazione Medici Diabetologi, AMD) initiative constitutes the study population. Urinary albumin excretion (ACR) and estimated GFR (eGFR) were retrieved and analyzed. The incidence of stage 653 CKD (eGFR < 60 mL/min/1.73 m2) or eGFR reduction > 30% from baseline was evaluated. Results: The mean estimated GFR was 98 \ub1 17 mL/min/1.73m2 and the proportion of patients with albuminuria was 15.3% (n = 654) at baseline. About 8% (n = 337) of patients developed one of the two renal endpoints during the 4-year follow-up period. Age, albuminuria (micro or macro) and baseline eGFR < 90 ml/min/m2 were independent risk factors for stage 653 CKD and renal function worsening. When compared to patients with eGFR > 90 ml/min/1.73m2 and normoalbuminuria, those with albuminuria at baseline had a 1.69 greater risk of reaching stage 3 CKD, while patients with mild eGFR reduction (i.e. eGFR between 90 and 60 mL/min/1.73 m2) show a 3.81 greater risk that rose to 8.24 for those patients with albuminuria and mild eGFR reduction at baseline. Conclusions: Albuminuria and eGFR reduction represent independent risk factors for incident stage 653 CKD in T1DM patients. The simultaneous occurrence of reduced eGFR and albuminuria have a synergistic effect on renal function worsening

How is social entrepreneurship possible? A multilevel study on social-entrepreneurial activity enabling mechanisms

ARTICLE 1 - Hybridization of diverging institutional logics through common-note practices An analogy with music and the case of social enterprises - ABSTRACT - Hybrid organizations exhibit high degree of innovativeness, but also instability due to the conflicting institutional logics underpinning their activities. We enrich the discussion on how to reconcile conflicting logics in hybrid organizations using the analogy with music theory. In particular, we get inspiration from a technique used to modulate conflicting harmonies by means of the notes they have in common (common-notes) to derive ideas on how to compose conflicting logics by means of the practices they have in common. We illustrate these ideas in the specific case of social enterprises, showing that practices able to “unblock” a marginalized individual’s value creation capabilities can be considered common-note practices allowing the social enterprise to fruitfully and sustainably combine commercial and social welfare logics. ARTICLE 2 - Made in Carcere: Freedom through empowerment for convicted women! - ABSTRACT - In this paper we analyze the case of Made in Carcere, an innovative social enterprise that creates and shares social and economic value with one of the most disadvantaged stakeholder groups in society: convicted women. Relying on an extensive database that covers eight years of activity, we propose a micro-level analysis of the processes adopted by Made in Carcere to empower its target stakeholders. We show that this complex effort is successfully unfolded through two macro-processes: the creation and management of a safe space, and allowing convicted women to reach and experience the external environment. Our work provides evidence of an exceptional organization that successfully confronts the restrictive and disempowering setting of prisons by empowering women through an innovative approach of human integral development. ARTICLE 3 - Mechanisms and boundaries of collective action in social entrepreneurship. - ABSTRACT - New frontiers in social entrepreneurship research are moving from the idea of the social entrepreneur as a single individual in favour of a larger model based on a multiplicity of subjects. In this paper we aim at moving this perspective onward and claim we should adopt a higher level of analysis considering the collective of subjects mobilized by the entrepreneur(s) to be really able to capture the social impact of the undertaken economic activity. Moreover, using a case study, we identify two mechanisms useful to draw the boundaries of such collective, the unit of analysis at the basis of this new perspective.ARTICLE 1 - Hybridization of diverging institutional logics through common-note practices An analogy with music and the case of social enterprises - ABSTRACT - Hybrid organizations exhibit high degree of innovativeness, but also instability due to the conflicting institutional logics underpinning their activities. We enrich the discussion on how to reconcile conflicting logics in hybrid organizations using the analogy with music theory. In particular, we get inspiration from a technique used to modulate conflicting harmonies by means of the notes they have in common (common-notes) to derive ideas on how to compose conflicting logics by means of the practices they have in common. We illustrate these ideas in the specific case of social enterprises, showing that practices able to “unblock” a marginalized individual’s value creation capabilities can be considered common-note practices allowing the social enterprise to fruitfully and sustainably combine commercial and social welfare logics. ARTICLE 2 - Made in Carcere: Freedom through empowerment for convicted women! - ABSTRACT - In this paper we analyze the case of Made in Carcere, an innovative social enterprise that creates and shares social and economic value with one of the most disadvantaged stakeholder groups in society: convicted women. Relying on an extensive database that covers eight years of activity, we propose a micro-level analysis of the processes adopted by Made in Carcere to empower its target stakeholders. We show that this complex effort is successfully unfolded through two macro-processes: the creation and management of a safe space, and allowing convicted women to reach and experience the external environment. Our work provides evidence of an exceptional organization that successfully confronts the restrictive and disempowering setting of prisons by empowering women through an innovative approach of human integral development. ARTICLE 3 - Mechanisms and boundaries of collective action in social entrepreneurship. - ABSTRACT - New frontiers in social entrepreneurship research are moving from the idea of the social entrepreneur as a single individual in favour of a larger model based on a multiplicity of subjects. In this paper we aim at moving this perspective onward and claim we should adopt a higher level of analysis considering the collective of subjects mobilized by the entrepreneur(s) to be really able to capture the social impact of the undertaken economic activity. Moreover, using a case study, we identify two mechanisms useful to draw the boundaries of such collective, the unit of analysis at the basis of this new perspective.LUISS PhD Thesi

Hybridisation of diverging institutional logics through common-note practices\ue2\u80\u93an analogy with music and the case of social enterprises

Hybrid organisations exhibit high degree of innovativeness, but also instability due to the conflicting institutional logics underpinning their activities. We enrich the discussion on how to reconcile conflicting logics in hybrid organisations using the analogy with music theory. In particular, we get inspiration from a technique used to modulate conflicting harmonies by means of the notes they have in common (common-notes) to derive ideas on how to compose conflicting logics by means of the practices they have in common. We illustrate these ideas in the specific case of social enterprises, showing that practices able to \ue2\u80\u98unblock\ue2\u80\u99 a marginalised individual\ue2\u80\u99s value creation capabilities can be considered common-note practices allowing the social enterprise to fruitfully and sustainably combine commercial and social welfare logics

The Role of Community Participation in Cross-Sector Social Partnerships

Communities, intended as self-organized informal groups, are much less structured than nonprofit organizations typically considered by Cross-Sector Social Partnership (CSSP) studies. Building on the empirical investigation of a real CSSP, this article offers an in-depth analysis of the ambivalent dynamics implied by partnership with such communities. Our findings indicate that the mechanisms that create room for innovative collaboration opportunities made available by these communities (such as co-innovation, pricing co-determination, co-financing, and democratic decision making) can also, over time, adversely affect the partnership and cause it to permanently lose its shared purpose. In our conclusion, we provide potential remedies for the latter scenario and discuss how they may enrich CSSP literature

Vision-only fully automated driving in dynamic mixed-traffic scenarios

In this work an overview of the local mo-tion planning and dynamic perception framework withinthe V-Charge project is presented. This framework en-ables the V-Charge car to autonomously navigate in dy-namic mixed-traffic scenarios. Other traffic participantsare detected, classified and tracked from a combinationof stereo and wide-angle monocular cameras. Predictionsof their future movements are generated utilizing infras-tructure information. Safe motion plans are acquired witha system-compliant sampling-based local motion planner.We show the navigation performance of this vision-onlyautonomous vehicle in both simulation and real-world ex-periments.ISSN:1611-2776ISSN:0179-973