New relation models for social innovation
Generating value and impact, meeting needs with effective solutions and limited resources, requires the involvement of many players who can contribute with ideas and resources, including financial resources, and the development of new forms of dialogue and collaboration, also to drive social policies.
Businesses can play a key role in these dynamics, facilitating the creation of networks and partnerships where knowledge and skills can grow and spread.
Developing these new skills will be the ground for the evolution on how the company’s contribution to sustainable development will be assessed. Even the concept of performance will be innovated; it will be coherently expanded to include the measure of the generated impact.
Snam stakeholder engagement in the territories
Being widespread on the Italian territory, Snam seeks an open dialogue to expand its knowledge and its relationship with the communities where it operates, to evaluate the peculiar aspects, needs and requests of all the stakeholders.
Snam has always kept the stakeholder engagement at the heart of its corporate citizenship model, with methods and goals which evolved over time.
Snam currently pursues an early, open ended, strategic and integrated engagement of its stakeholders with a view to building a sustainable business for the territories and creating value for current and future generations.
Its most recent stakeholder-engagement experiences regarded territories affected by particularly important infrastructure projects where the following actions were performed:
- analysis of the territory and analytical qualitative mapping of stakeholders, local associations, economic agents, trade associations, institutions, media;
- understanding the positioning and needs of each stakeholder;
- starting up a multi-stakeholder roundtable, engaging all stakeholders involved in the realization of the infrastructure;
- maintaining a quality dialogue with all the involved parties;
- identifying the value-based projects for the territory affected by the infrastructure.
A recent application of this model was the case of infrastructure that will be built in Apulia to interconnect the TAP (Trans Adriatic Pipeline – the pipeline which, from 2020, will allow Italy to import gas originating from Azerbaijan) to the national network, thus bolstering the diversification of sources and the security of the Italian and European gas system. The work was planned taking into account the results from an in-depth analysis of the socio-economic and environmental contexts and with the utmost compliance with safety standards and environmental constraints, taking into account also appropriate restorations of the territory.
Within the scope of this project, in 2017 Snam set up a work table, lasting approximately 9 months, which Involved all the area’s main production associations, including agricultural, tourism, and handicraft industry associations and universities, for a total of approximately 15 entities. Upon completing the work, the table proposed 2 different projects to be carried out throughout the territory: GreenWay, a “virtual” bike-pedestrian route connecting the territory’s excellent enterprises such as its free-time facilities, hospitality centres, handicraft and agricultural enterprises including also through the use of new technologies (web, apps, etc.), to enhance the territory and the local tourist activity; a school of higher education, i.e., an educational path for the new needs to develop competences in the tourism and hospitality sectors.
These experiences demonstrate how Snam’s ability to listen and engage has evolved to lay the foundations for understanding the demand for social innovation that could arise in the territories. Working with others in the project, listening to what the territory has to say, and answering requests to mould a constructive dialogue is a principle that will always drive Snam’s business from now on.