Around 350 cooperators from 24 countries attended the Global Innovation Coop Summit in Torres Vedras, Portugal, to explore how cooperatives are innovating and responding to global challenges.
Held on 27-28 October, the event included a range of plenary sessions and workshops featuring cooperative leaders, academics, researchers and practitioners.
Paulo Rangel, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Portugal, delivered a keynote address during the event’s opening session.
“Although they are not something new, co-ops are the most sophisticated form of social innovation,” he said.
International Cooperative Alliance president Ariel Guarco also addressed the audience via a video message in which he described cooperatives as “the greatest social innovation of modern day.”
“That innovation is still very relevant today,” he said, encouraging all sectors and regions to “deepen intercooperation to jointly face global challenges”.
The summit explored how to tackle global challenges through cooperatives, focusing on three core phases: empowering individuals and communities to act, building trust through transparency and accountability, and co-creating inclusive, long-lasting systemic change.
Throughout the event, speakers highlighted that cooperatives need to adapt to new economic realities but must do so while maintaining their cooperative ethos. They also pointed out that while innovation is associated with start-ups, cooperatives are the best model to develop and adapt new technology and give people and communities better negotiating power.
And cooperatives have a different way of approaching innovation, proving that it is possible to do business without destruction.
“Among the most pressing issues co-ops know how to create is trust, real trust among people,” said Cooperatives Europe president, Gouseppe Guerini. “For us, innovation means promoting human progress.”
Mr Guerini explained how European co-ops are innovating while meeting the EU’s regulatory requirements. This includes multi-stakeholder cooperatives, which have enlarged mutuality, renewable energy co-ops, which democratised energy ownership, and platform cooperatives like Smart in Belgium, which enable independent workers to work and get social security.
Similar examples of cooperatives innovating were showcased throughout the summit, from SOCAPS in France, to Coopernico in Portugal, or Acodea in France.
The event was hosted by Caixa Agricola, whose Chair, Manuel José Guerreiro, argued that far from being an enemy, the digital age can be cooperatives’ ally.
“Our social and civic capital gives us the ability to humanise the digital world, to maintain an authentic perspective without losing sight of what's essential: being who we are, without succumbing to the temptation to be like others,” he said.
“We celebrate this meeting. We celebrate the dream that drives us forward. We celebrate the power of simple things: looking, trusting, cooperating. In a world that needs bridges and not walls, cooperativism remains the most humane path and the most intelligent option,” he said after the event.
