Why we fund a university scholarship

As a Benefit Corporation, we've written four common benefit purposes into our bylaws. The third spells out our commitment to promoting dialogue with our stakeholders and our intent to spread a culture of ethical design, including by helping train the people who will carry innovation forward after us.

That's where our commitment to equity in education comes from, translated each year into a scholarship we make available to the designers of the future. This year we've changed the shape of that grant again, launching it in partnership with the University of Bologna.

"It's not just a matter of principle in our bylaws," says Ilaria Mauric, Tangible's Impact Manager. "Talent isn't distributed as evenly as the opportunities to put it to use. Looking only at merit risks rewarding people who already had the conditions to get there, which is why, for us, equity of starting point matters more than merit."

There's also an integration goal behind this choice: helping people who are just entering university or the workforce actually get there. It's a way of connecting with people we'd otherwise be unlikely to cross paths with. We don't know what path the recipient will take, and it's not our intention to know that in advance. But if this initiative helps create a chance for that path to cross with ours, perhaps as colleagues, we can only be glad of it.

Why this course

Among the courses we considered with the university were artificial intelligence and advanced design, but this year we chose Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge.

It's a course that brings together the humanities and computer science, with a genuinely international cohort, so it feels close to how we work. We gave weight to that profile, because a course where disciplines already talk to each other is the most coherent ground for what we try to do every day.

Size matters too. The course we chose has around a hundred students enrolled each year, against the hundreds or thousands in the other courses we were weighing, and on an audience that size, a single scholarship is a concrete possibility rather than a remote chance.

The scholarship

There is one, worth €2,500 gross, for a student in the second year of the master's degree in Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge.
In the first year, the dropout rate is high, and the grant risks reaching someone who leaves just a few weeks later. In the second year, by contrast, credits already recorded show that the person is actually attending and intends to continue.

The call was drafted by the university, which also manages the ranking: the score combines credits earned, weighted average grade, and financial circumstances calculated through the ISEE.
There's no company jury, and we have no say in who wins. The money doesn't even pass through our hands, we donated it to the university, which awards and disburses it.

Merit remains the criterion the university selects by, but equity is what we asked to be added inside that criterion. The ISEE enters as part of the score, not as an eligibility requirement, with a threshold aligned to the no-tax income bracket.

What this grant is for

Along the way we understood something we hadn't anticipated when we started: Italy's right-to-study system works, and it covers access. Someone with a low ISEE gets exemption from university tuition fees and can access regional grants or housing services.

What the public system covers less well is the cost of staying inside it, the price of transport and books, everyday expenses, everything that makes it sustainable to study instead of work.
That's why the scholarship comes with no conditions, and whoever receives it decides how to use it, with no restrictions on spending and no need to report back.

It's a choice that looks minor and says something about how we look at our impact. A resource tied to a goal that we define is worth less than a resource that enters someone's life and eases the pressure where it's actually needed. The student knows where it's needed, we can't.

How we arrived at this form

This is the third version of the same initiative, and the two before it explain the choices we made this year.

In 2024 we gave it its first form: three scholarships worth €2,500 in total, for recent high-school graduates with a grade average above 8.25, awarded on a combination of merit and financial need. We wrote the call ourselves, together with the school, and made the draft available to other companies who wanted to do the same. On that occasion, applications came in without difficulty.

In 2025 we republished it, identical. Same criteria, same amount, but by the deadline not a single application had come in. A result like that can be filed away in two ways. One is to put it down to circumstances, the other is to ask what was missing from the mechanism we'd built.

That mechanism depended on a third party's motivation to exist, and we hadn't designed for that. No one was responsible for distributing it. The call didn't live inside an infrastructure that would circulate it on its own, so every year its reach had to start again from zero. The timing, too, was about as bad as it could be: the end of summer coincides with the transition between two paths, when recent graduates are choosing a university or moving cities, their attention elsewhere.

That's where this year's two choices come from. Moving to a university means the call lives inside an infrastructure that circulates it without depending on us, and choosing the second year means the resource reaches someone who has already shown they want to stay. The same lesson, applied twice.

We can't be certain we've found the right structure, but we have a more solid mechanism than before, and a lesson that's brought us here.
As with other paths we've taken, we know that impact is an ongoing practice, one that corrects itself as we see how it behaves in reality.