Vicenza Newspaper / by Piero Erle
“They will be technology facilities created with businesses and for businesses.Of course, we will have a problem selecting from so many applications, but the response that is coming from excellent universities and businesses tells us that the path is right.”
This is how Stefano Firpo, director general for industrial policy at the Ministry of Economic Development, presented at Palazzo Leoni Montanari for the “Città impresa” festival the final sprint Italy is experiencing to bring “Competence centers” to life. In fact, April 30 is the deadline for the national call for proposals launched at the end of January by the ministry for candidates to win the 40 million in co-financing allocated by the state: 7.5 million maximum to pay for 50 percent of the center’s start-up, 200,000 euros to support 50 percent of expenses for each project. And since the call is for a public-private partnership, it will be necessary to have assembled a team of research facilities but also “big” companies that put in resources, turnovers, and patents already registered. This team then, Firpo points out, will have to be at the service “of a user base that are the SME companies. And it will soon have to be able to sustain itself by winning the EU calls, which are worth about 100 billion.” TRIVENETO’S CHOICE. Several front-row candidates were represented at the meeting: the Polytechnics of Milan (Marco Taisch) and Turin (Paolo Fino), the University of Bologna (Fabio Fava) and the University of Padua, with pro-rector Fabrizio Dughiero, who has been following Triveneto’s bid to have a “Competence center” funded by Rome since the beginning. “We have united,” Dughiero explains, “nine universities in the Triveneto region, plus two research institutions such as Infn in Padua (nuclear physics) and the Trento-based Bruno Kessler Foundation. In addition, we just closed our call for applications and received 60 applications from companies that want to team up with us. It may seem complicated to keep everyone together, but it is not about creating new facilities: they are already there, and excellent ones. If anything, we need to have some staff to manage the existing facilities and organize them in a way that makes them suitable for SMEs to work in.” The Triveneto bid has chosen to focus on “Smact” technologies: social networks, mobile (platforms, apps), advanced analytics (big data), cloud and internet of things. A way to give answers to both manufacturing and services-retail and large-scale distribution.
THREE “HUBS”. The “Competence center” devised by Triveneto aims at three “hubs” of labs, one per region, that will provide small businesses, as the state wants, with both guidance and training and industrial research. There will be the “demonstration lab,” the “training lab,” and the “co-design lab,” but “the goal,” warns Dughiero, “is not to fragment activities but to accompany SMEs on a continuous path: a company arrives at the competence center, realizes what technologies can be useful to it, decides it wants to do training for its managers and operators, and then the most important part is co-design and transformation. Here, in fact, lies the novelty: often the university does an experimental design and works it out but then just “shows the way” to companies. With the competence center we want those who have developed the project (and it will be a multi-disciplinary team, no longer divided among individual departments) to also be the guide that helps the company in the transformation-application phase that makes them identify partners, possible products: from the process to the final product.” So the Triveneto competence center will probably have a “hub” at the Fair in Padua, one at the Prom-lab in Rovereto, and the third at Amaf Friuli V.G.: “These are the places where we will put live-demos.” What about the criticism that came from Confartigianato Veneto for a “non-involvement”? “If they had read the ministerial announcement,” Dughiero replies, “they would have realized that it is the directive that requires that at the beginning we bring on board partners of a certain value. Then the center’s services will be available to SMEs,” in the logic of “I ring the bell” and explain what I need.