The University of Milano-Bicocca was established on June 10, 1998, to serve students from Northern Italy and relieve some of the pressure on the over-crowded University of Milan. Groups of professors and researchers chose to come and participate in the enterprise. They were driven by their enthusiasm for the new, and by the chance to broaden academic horizons without having their work undermined by traditional methods of education. From the start, this very fertile climate became a unique training ground, which offered something new even in the most traditional disciplines. In few years has created an extensive network that includes many world-famous universities, research centres and top corporations.
Interuniversity Research Centre for Public Services (CRISP) was constituted in 1997 and made official the pre-existing cooperation and synergic activities among professors and researchers from several universities and departments. CRISP is located at the University of Milano-Bicocca. CRISP conducts research in Labour Market services, public services development and demand analysis; economic systems dynamics analysis; unbiased methodologies for quality estimation of services and technology innovation.
CRISP has developed an important activity of research and consultant for Public Authority at regional, national and international level. The main mission of the centre is to support policy makers and decision-makers in taking informed decisions through the innovative use of information coming from statistical, administrative and web sources. The experience of study and research, in particular in the field of Labour Market, has led to the realisation of prototypal and structural application to manage the information with innovative Business Intelligence systems and analytics. These applications are currently used by CRISP partners (mainly public administrations). In particular, in recent years, the centre has collaborated with several regional and national government agencies to develop a statistical-computing platform for the representation and analysis of administrative data from different sources. The most significant areas in which the analytic approach and statistical analysis models were applied to the data are: – Labour Market & the education/VET field; – Regional health system; – Policy evaluation. Starting from the initial idea it was engineered a quite complex system, consisting of multiple modules and composed of several areas, which enable the analysis and visualization of information, including innovative ways, such as geo-referenced maps and wiki systems.
CRISP is involved in the following: management of the Regional Labour Market Observatories Lombardy and Piedmont Regions, as well as about 20 provincial level observatories in the north part of Italy; participation in a Lombardy and Piedmont Regions sponsored project on the evaluation of active Labour Market policies; establishment of an observatory on human capital dynamics within the companies of the Province of Monza and Brianza; participation in a project on the evaluation of higher education attainments sponsored by a consortium of Italian universities; a regionally-sponsored project on the use of Web 2.0 technologies for innovation in government services; a regionally-sponsored project on the evaluation of active Labour Market policies, and a municipality sponsored project on the Statistical Information System for the analysis and design of social services. CRISP is also a member of two scientific European networks, including the EN RLMM – European Network of Regional Labour Market Monitoring, and the RESER – European Association for Research on Services.
