Since 1 January this year, Project Life has entered the debate on disability with force, presenting itself as a paradigm shift that goes beyond the healthcare perspective of the individual to focus on what is lacking in order for them to live, work and participate fully in society. This approach echoes the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and, at least in its intentions, attempts to function as an enabling infrastructure rather than a remedial measure.
However, if we look at it from a typical business perspective, one that seeks signals, KPIs and sustainability even before good intentions, some anomalies emerge that are difficult to ignore. The trial began in nine provinces on 1 January 2025, was extended to another eleven on 30 September 2025, and is now active in a total of twenty provinces, with a further extension to forty provinces planned for 1 March 2026. Yet, despite a very public narrative, structured data remains inaccessible: there are no readable progress reports, no simple and comparable reporting on territorial costs and benefits, and we do not know what the measurable impact is on employment, autonomy, and reduction of welfare dependency, i.e., on those indicators that transform a vision into a replicable model.
This point is crucial, because if Project Life aspires to be more than just a cultural narrative, it must demonstrate that it can influence the creation of a new workforce, with comprehensible rules and verifiable results. In the case of disabilities considered ‘mild’, there is a risk of creating an artificial category of ‘protected’ workers, treated as fragile even when they are not, with a double distortion: on the market, because roles and expectations become crystallised, and on people’s identities, because the label ends up being worth more than competence. In these cases, it is not the person who needs to be ‘fixed’, but the organisation of work that needs to evolve, rethinking tasks, processes, tools, times and performance, as truly innovative companies already do.
At the other extreme, in the case of more complex disabilities, the limitations of an approach that is overly focused on the individual are clearly evident. Without structural interventions in terms of mobility, physical and digital accessibility, local services, support, housing and urban planning, no personalised approach can succeed, because the obstacle is not the person, but the environment that forces them to expend energy to do what others take for granted. In the world of innovation, we know that a product cannot be scaled up if the infrastructure is inadequate, and autonomy cannot be built by asking people to adapt to a system designed to exclude them.
Then there is an absence which, in economic terms, weighs heavily like an undeposited balance sheet because no clear documents are being released on the progress of the experiment, with results, critical issues and course corrections. In the start-up world, failure is not a scandal, it is part of the process, but it only becomes a learning experience if you measure it and talk about it. Here, the legitimate feeling is that an attempt is being made to keep a very high promise with a machine that, without a profound rethink, risks becoming costly, fragmented and ineffective, and therefore difficult to sustain over time.
Yet there is one point that is often treated as marginal in the debate, when in fact it is central to the country’s competitiveness: a large proportion of people with disabilities can generate direct economic value if given the right conditions. Work, business, self-employment, new professions, solutions born out of concrete experience of barriers and daily adaptations, not as romanticism, but as better, more efficient and often more universal design. The problem is not a lack of talent, but an imaginary that continues to place people with disabilities in the role of recipients of policies, rather than economic actors, and a system that invests more in storytelling than in the material conditions necessary to unleash skills.
If the Progetto Vita challenge truly wants to speak to the world of business and innovation, it must demonstrate not only that it is inclusive, but also that it is effective. It is not enough to say that the model is changing; we need to show where it is changing, how much it costs, what it produces, what it reduces, what it enables, and above all, for whom. Only then can it become an infrastructure for social and economic transformation, capable of increasing participation, productivity and quality of life. Otherwise, it will remain a good intention, interesting on a cultural level, but irrelevant to those who have to make decisions, create jobs and take the risk of doing business every day.
The author is president of LADI, the Free Association of Disabled Entrepreneurs.
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