Alfonso Fuggetta, CEO of CEFRIEL

Our General Meeting is a means to become active innovators and not just spectators.
The path CEFRIEL is moving along: three new programmes, which enable us to enrich our current activities with new initiatives 

Alfonso Fuggetta, CEO of CEFRIEL

Our annual General Meeting is a privileged opportunity to directly learn from key players of the business and research fields. It is a means to become active innovators and not just spectators, or even worse critics.

Innovation means being able to try, risk, learn by making mistakes, start again, improve ourselves. I believe this should be always the daily working style in CEFRIEL. Therefore, today we have the opportunity to increase our knowledge, in order to improve and give the best in all our activities.
CEFRIEL is moving along a path that is well represented by three new programmes, which enable us to enrich our current activities with new initiatives.

We are improving the way we cooperate with companies. On this basis we have promoted a new initiative, called InnoLab, which represents a new way to develop projects with our customers. This model aims at creating innovation together with companies, working with various units managers, from marketing to production, in a multidisciplinary way. Thanks to this cooperation, we are able to deeply understand their needs, recognize their areas of excellence, highlight new opportunities through technological innovation, and provide the complementary know-how to develop products and services.

InnoVision is the new initiative to outline the technological evolutionary scenarios and the market innovation challenges. It is not simply a data collection and analysis, as others are, but a comprehensive study of the complex phenomena focused on technological trends and evolution.
Since market strategies are influenced by technological changes, the economic competence is not enough to properly understand the current scenarios. It is necessary a strong technological knowledge as well.
The InnoVision programme foresees a series of white papers dedicated to the analysis of strategic problems in specific sectors. The first paper will concern the networks structure, while the following ones will be about software market, digital rights management and shared knowledge management.

Last but not least, this General Meeting is the first event of the InnoTalk programme, a series of meetings to exchange ideas with people working at the cutting edge of innovation and research. In the next months these meetings will be regularly organized, so to have the opportunity to learn from the successful experiences of leading Italian protagonists.

The guests of this first InnoTalk are the representatives of some successful Italian companies: Francesco Casoli, Piergaetano Marchetti, Mario Moretti Polegato, Pasquale Pistorio, Andrea Pontremoli. Moreover, with Professor Giorgio De Michelis we had the opportunity to analyze the ICT role in the development of the "Made in Italy". Besides, there was an unexpected surprise: the visit of Claudio Domenicali, CEO of Ducati Corse, who celebrated with us the victory of the World Championship and explained the importance of team working, combining individual excellence with organizational capabilities.

A further initiative is represented by the ICT Institute, the result of a joint effort of all the Information & Communication Technology areas of the Politecnico di Milano: the new Institution includes the Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione (DEI), the Faculty of Information Engineering, the two Consortia, CEFRIEL and CORECOM, and several successful spin-off and start-up companies. The ICT Institute gives the possibility to cover the whole path, from basic research to innovation and education, up to the creation of new companies.

In addition to this, in 2008 CEFRIEL will celebrate an important event: its first twenty years. On the 15th of January 1988 CEFRIEL was founded and became operative on the 3rd of October 1988.
We would like to tell CEFRIEL story along these twenty years through various initiatives. On the 15th of January there will be an institutional celebration of its foundation, followed by a series of InnoTalks. These last ones will take place until the 3rd of October, when we will organize a meeting for all the people that have contributed to forge CEFRIEL as it is today.

CEFRIEL is creating, step by step, a real innovation network. We are boosting a new company in Singapore and cooperating with some organizations to support local realities asking for our experience. This means we have created a model that can be useful to others: being really able to satisfy companies innovation needs.