The key challenge for MIND is to transform the area into a well integrated and accessible piece of the city that ensures livability and quality of life, while becoming an international hub of excellence for research and innovation around the nexus between preventative health, wellbeing and sustainability.

This challenge entails aspects such as identity co-creation, development of a multi-faceted and collaborative community for research, social innovation, trust and relational capital creation across the diverse tenants that will settle in the area, creation of new services, facilities and amenities that can drive access, attraction and anchoring of people in places.

There is great potential for experimentation and learning initiatives on green practices and healthy habits and lifestyles, nutrition, precision medicine, and many other related subjects. MIND can become a point of reference at regional and local level on life sciences both at the level of research and practice.

MIND should not just be designed for inclusion, but should also be growingly perceived as a place where dialogue happens in constant collaboration among actors in and outside the innovation district. The integration of MIND in the surrounding community, bringing its own identity, may also support the redefinition of the fragmented identities of the surrounding areas.

Three innovation missions set the ground for the meanwhile strategy of the pilot:

1. Vibrant Community Disseminating Knowledge: this mission aims to create an osmosis between MIND and the territory through the active exchange of knowledge, skills, resources and initiatives. This might happen with dissemination activities of the scientific knowledge produced at MIND, combined with the attraction of companies and organisations’ expertise in the area, for the activation of a collaborative process of mutual enhancement.
2. Conscious and Sustainable Lifestyles: this mission aims to promote awareness, health and well-being through green practices and open air activities in order to make MIND a place of well-being, but also a cultural reference in this sense. This can be done first of all through the education of the community – inside and outside MIND – and then through educational, recreational, creative and environmental activities that put these issues into practice.
3. Accessibility & Identity: this mission aims to make MIND a recognizable and accessible place starting from its boundaries, by expanding the points of contact and entry from neighbouring municipalities and the broader city, while enhancing the discovery of the surrounding areas, towards a greater integration of the district into the city.