As newly elected President of Cooperatives Europe, Giuseppe Guerini brings a powerful voice to the global cooperative conversation. In this exclusive Q&A, he shares his vision for trust as a transformative force, the role of cooperatives in a shifting geopolitical and economic landscape, and why international platforms like the Global Innovation Coop Summit matter more than ever. From grassroots collaboration to digital innovation, Guerini explores how cooperatives can build meaningful partnerships and global impact — while staying deeply rooted in their communities.
1 Global Innovation Coop Summit (GICS): What motivated you to take part in GICS 2025 as both a panelist and a workshop facilitator?
Giuseppe Guerini (GG): The reasons are various, from the most banal: I was asked and I accepted because GICS is a very interesting context for those who, like me, live cooperatives in an all-embracing way. Engaging as a speaker allows you to bring a contribution of content and representativeness as President of Cooperatives Europe, while engaging as a moderator and animator of other panels allows you to learn from the other speakers and forces you to actively participate in the forum experience, transforming it into a cooperative experience and not into one of the many conferences where speakers arrive speak and leave.
2 GICS: Why is it important for European cooperatives to engage in global events like GICS?
GG: Being involved in what’s happening in the world is crucial, even more so today when the world seems to be repeating itself in nationalisms on the political level, while the multinationals of financialized and digital capitalism are occupying every market space, standardized and crushed by a consumerism devoid of humanity. In this context, cooperatives must aim to be the “multinationals” of humanism and solidarity.
The propensity for the international dimension of cooperatives, as a movement, was immediately evident, given that just a few years after the establishment of the first cooperative, the ICA was founded in 1895.
In this context, European cooperatives, engaging with the world, can exchange and grow cooperative culture, knowledge, and awareness.
In this, the added value of the GICS lies in its focus on innovation. Being able to identify fertile ideas, the seeds of change, and the seeds of transformation is essential for every business, and even more so for cooperatives, since in cooperatives, innovation and change are people-centered and must be fueled by participatory processes with a high relational content.
If capitalism was characterized by “creative destruction,” based on the disruptive mass of capital, the cooperative model is based on “generative creativity,” based on people. This is why cultural development and relationships are so important. And the GICS is, above all, a meeting place.
3 GICS: The session “Building Trust Together” explores how cooperatives can expand their global impact while staying locally rooted. What does this mean to you in today’s context?
Trust is a fundamental, precious and sensitive value. Cultivating trust is indispensable for social life but also for economic relations. Building trust requires direct relationships and reputation, or ‘trust brokers’ certifying the trustworthiness of a transaction. Today, this function in the digital marketplace is often performed by platforms or digital distributed ledger technologies.
Cooperatives have very similar intrinsic characteristics to both digital platforms (i.e. they create relational networks) and TLDs (i.e. they create diffuse chains of trust).
Combining the potential of digitisation with that of co-operatives opens up the possibility of realising a global system that nevertheless maintains strong territorial roots. In other words, it allows local thinking to act globally. Here we must try to spend our innovation potential
4 GICS: In your workshop “Building Impactful International Cooperative Partnerships”, you’ll explore practical strategies. Could you share one or two inspiring initiatives that show how global cooperation makes a difference?
GG: The simple fact that cooperatives continue to exist and operate in a world that has rewarded rampant capitalism is in itself an indicator of the positive impact of cooperatives, which continue to demonstrate that a people-based economy remains possible.
We hope that other experiences will emerge from this panel, while from what I have observed, I will cite two examples of innovation and transnational impact: the European network RESCOOP, which is making an extraordinary contribution to the spread of renewable energy production cooperatives. The second example is the Platform Cooperativismo Consortium, which is mobilizing many young people around the idea of combining cooperatives and new technologies. But I am convinced that by exploring the experiences developing across the five continents, we can find many other interesting experiences.
5 GICS: What do you hope participants will take away from your contribution to GICS 2025?GG: Mutual kknowledge and good ideas. A boost of trust in the cooperative movement, sparks of creativity, and a wealth of enthusiasm to try and nurture the seeds of innovation.
