Design school as incubators of social entrepreneurship

This paper aims to reflect on the intersection of design education, research and social enterprise incubation within a design studio run as part of the Master in Product Service System Design at the Politecnico di Milano, School of Design. Entitled "Accidental Grocers", it aimed to explore the potentialities of service design applied to “Local Distribution Systems” to provide the city with local food. Students were requested to rethink the way we do food shopping and to propose services based on collaboration, making use of existing assets, and creating unusual connections between profit and not-for-profit, amateur and professional, market and society. Following previous experiences, the studio was related to an on-going action research project to create short chain food services. The experimentation field was a district of Milan, where students were encouraged to establish direct connections with citizens. The most distinguishing feature of this studio was to simulate the conditions for incubation in an existing context, by testing potentially viable services. So the studio gradually led students to create ready-to-use solutions for the next step of forming start ups in the protected environment offered by research, within the framework of social innovation.