Good insight!
Ah, Tiago – you zeroed in on a real sickness of a large chunk of Italian society. Yes, the territory is highly subsidized (and Basilicata is far from the most subsidized of regions, for technical reasons that I will explain if you are interested). The tragedy behind this is that, as you point out, the best and brightest in the Mezzogiorno – like the young, idealistic, smart people in Casa Netural, not so different from the Edgeryders community itself – focus their attention on public spending, and end up spending time and energy in doing things they they would otherwise not do, but that are written in the bandi (“calls for grants applications”, or “call for proposals”).
Interestingly, when the unMonastery crowd mapped out Matera’s criticalities as perceived by Materans, noboby mentioned this point (Ben’s report). I think it takes an outsider to see it: locals see public spending and bandi as a good thing there is not enough of. And you can see their point too.
Not sure about the open innovation proposal. I feel like you need to convince a core of Materans to let go of the bandi model altogether, then work with that core… but I may very well be wrong.