THE ROLE OF DESIGN EDUCATION ON SOCIAL ENTERPRISES’ LEARNING PROCESSES.

This chapter aims at investigating how social enterprises can adopt a design driven approach in the development of socially innovative solutions and how ‘design for social enterprises’ is strongly related to learning processes that build both a new set of competences and a new culture. The author introduces the concepts of ‘micro-foundations’ and ‘absorptive capacity’ to discuss how this peculiar forms of innovation can be learned by the third sector and become a consolidated practice within the organizations. The discussion is based on a series of educational programmes developed by the Polimi DESIS Lab for consortiums of Italian social enterprises.