New Vision's project, to be developed during year 2010, deals with the issue of measuring well being in modern societies.
What should societies – and policy makers – look for? Can happiness be an effective alternative to GDP when it comes to measuring quantity of well being and the fairness of its distribution? But also: who can define what happiness is? Is “progress” still a valid notion towards which science and economy should be oriented?

In the global market for innovation the future of Italian and European universities is closely linked to their ability to adjust to internationalization: Vision addresses this topic during the annual conference on universities, organized in conjunction with Nova, Air and Urania, with the help of recent data provided, among others, by OECD and the Lisbon Council. Universities are the object of continuous assessments measuring their prestige and results. Moreover, universities can no longer be considered independently of the national, regional and thematic environement, in which they operate.

Vision has launched the "Kyoto of the Cities", a project with the objective to explore the possibility of engaging major cities in an international agreement on environment - related goals and explore strategies for CO2 emissions in housing, waste management and urban transportation. The project's results will be delivered at a conference taking place on the 26-28 of March 2009 in Naples. Anyone interested in the project or the upcoming conference can obtain further information by writing to kyotoofthecities@vision-forum.org.

Can a Euro Wide referendum on the treaty be an option between the two alternatives that have been mainstream so far (the "treaty is dead" one voiced by euro sceptics and the "go ahead any way with the national parliaments' ratifications" suggested by the euro federalists)? Is it realistic to call for Europe to "focus on what the citizens want" without giving to Europe the power to deliver, or to ask for more power without accepting that this must come with more representation?
These are some of the questions upon which Vision and Prometheus will hope to raise fresh ideas in a debate to be held in Brussels on 5 December.

Media and their contents have been deeply affected by the impact of ICTand in turn have been changing the way communities react to power or how they use communication formats for their own agenda. This backgrounder establishes the framework Vision wishes to use to pursue research on the questions raised. The following was also released and first presented to an academic audience on 28th and on 29th June at the RC47 Conference Globalization,Identities and Experience of Localities, held at La Sapienza in Rome.

Energy and energy related issues have been recently dominating the international political debate. Vision's analysis starts from the idea that “energy” and “climate change” are not only huge problems per se, but also as the most colossal failures of democracy, of global governance, of the very idea of justice and fair redistribution of the costs of individual behaviours that is essential for a social contract to develop and for a community to exist.

Europe is 50 years old and many questions are still open. What does Europe stand for? "Visions for Europe" is the new ambitious project aiming to propose different "visions" for the future, and find some of the answers we are looking for.

What does Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) exactly mean? Because there’s a systematic divergence not only between business and social responsibility, but also, and more importantly, between business and the business ethics, between companies’ shares value and companies capability to generate economic value.

Four years after the launch of Lisbon Strategy, the objective to make Europe the most competitive knowledge-based economy within 2010 seems to be very distant. After the initiative of the Lisbon Council and in the same days of the signature of the European Constitution, Vision is presenting ten proposals in progress that could, if realized simultaneously, make Europe reach its ambitious target transforming what was mistakenly considered an economic process in a social transformation aimed at introducing the idea of “innovaiton” as one of the values on which develop a new European model.

This project is in fact the follow up of the collection called The Moral Universe (2002) which addressed the question of the crisis of Morality in modern societies. Vision, together with Demos, is now working on the question which is the natural continuation of the previous one: are we facing a crisis of Rationality?

The UN is experiencing its most dramatic crisis since it was established in 1945. Meanwhile, nation states seem unable to fill the vacuum. Whereas the American commitment to fighting ‘global terror’ through a series of costly localised wars is to be questioned from an efficiency standpoint, this not enough for the French to reject ‘preventive’ action in favour of a Cold War concept of international legitimacy.

This position paper is on the value of expectations. Expectations as a driver of a massive change like the one PAs are experiencing. And in this sense it is a rather new perspective that Vision is taking to the question of the impact of the Internet on advanced societies.

Vision, a new Italian think tank, is taking a systematic look at the impact of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) on a number of crucial sectors in our society: Healthcare, Transportation, Education, Security. Having decided to begin with perhaps the most sensitive sector of all, healthcare, the first phase of Vision’s project objective is to evaluate the likely impact of (ICT) on Healthcare and to identify the institutional and organisational changes needed to realise its potential.

Internet Era will make even clearer a factor which seems to escape to the debate Devolution: there is no given distribution of power among different institutional levels that we can consider invariable in time and space. In Time because technologies change continuously the optimal level at which it is convenient to allocate a given political activity. In Space because what appears to be reasonable in a given context will not be so in a different one and, for instance, it is absolutely obvious that, for instance, two Regions within the same State or two municipalities within same Region can have a totally different performance.

Demos and Vision, two of the leading European think tanks, presented together - during the OECD Global Forum on e-government held in Naples Italy, March 12-17  – the initial findings of a research study on “The (Inter) Net Impact on the Health Divide”. The project outcomes were delivered during a number of sessions attended by senior officials of the Healthcare and Technology ministries of a number of OECD and LDC countries.

Vision nasce da due precise intuizioni: la prima è che la politica, intesa come capacità di risolvere problemi collettivi e complessi, è, sarà, la determinante fondamentale della velocità, quantità, qualità, distribuzione di progresso che riusciremo nei prossimi anni a realizzare. A questa intuizione se ne affianca un’altra altrettanto elementare e "ragionevole": abbiamo bisogno di più politica ma sarà una politica completamente diversa nei processi e, forse, in gran parte nelle persone.

A questa pubblicazione sono "attaccati" diversi obiettivi: il rilancio di Vision come luogo di "protezione" delle idee e di elaborazione di soluzioni a problemi complessi, l’avvio di una partnership progettuale tra think tank europee (Vision con la policy unit inglese Demos e la federazione di clubs francese Convictions), la sistemazione di una serie di riflessioni di natura diversa sulla questione a nostro avviso centrale della definizione della nozione stessa di benessere in una Società avanzata. Queste aspettative diverse e tutte ambiziose sono però collegate tra di loro da un’intuizione di fondo: la variabile che più di qualsiasi altra farà la differenza nella quantità, nella qualità, nella diffusione di progresso, sarà nei primi anni del prossimo millennio la capacità della politica di leggere, di governare fenomeni sociali, economici di straordinaria complessità.