The Future of the Co-operative Model: Creativity, innovation and research

Crisis highlighted that innovation, creativity on products, production process, governance and financing are essential elements of the productive organization to face problems and grow up.

Cooperatives and social economy organizations have been in many occasions creative and innovative to all functional stages for the benefit of the members and the socio economic environment that they are engaged. The broad interpretation of cooperative principles gives cooperatives flexibility in designing their governance and financial structures, which are extremely efficient in the pursuit of global strategies. In such activity (agriculture, finance, heath, education…), cooperatives and mutual successfully innovate to adapt the social and economic crisis. What are their advantages and weaknesses?

Aims of the Conference

The first aim of the conference is to highlight experiences of cooperatives and social economic organizations on creativity and innovation. For that, the conference wants to bring together researchers, policy makers and practitioners from different cooperative and social economic fields and different countries to debate about the amazing creativity that cooperatives harness to innovate and develop new solutions for their members.

This conference has another aim that is to highlight the research on cooperatives and social economy. Which the main axes of research and graduate programs on these fields are, which the orientation of the research can be at the future and how different research axes can collaborate in order to have more efficient results. Researchers in charge for graduated programs and research centers but also students at graduate programs are welcomed to discuss these issues.