Innovation needs technology. From research to product: a three-stage vector where universities, technology transfer centres and Industries must play an integrated role, as Andrea Lacaita explains

Andrea Lacaita Director of the Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione (DEI)

In the last years innovation has been the core of political and economical issues. The equation "Innovation = Development" has become a keyword, quite easily expressed. Nevertheless, it remains something vague when related both to research and industrial policy. What kind of innovation is it? Does innovation regard only organizational and process issues or require a technological leap, necessary to increase products' value so to effectively compete in the global market? Technology underestimation is a specific Italian cultural problem, made worse by the general focus on the Anglo-American model of financial and immaterial economics.

As a consequence of this, our country has silently assisted to the progressive destruction of its industrial assets. Still today both the relevance of technological innovation and the necessity of continuous investment in basic research are heavily undervalued. This is not the same in other European countries. In the last years Germany has been demonstrating the effectiveness of a completely different model. After the unification, Germans have begun to enhance their scientific background to combine science and industrial innovation, supporting all the people involved in the process: starting from the Max-Planck Institutes, focused on basic research, to universities and centres able to transfer the results to the industry.
Therefore, Germany did not abandon anyone of its traditionally leading manufacturing sectors, but took the opportunity to satisfy a new demand for durable and high-end consumer goods coming from Europe and the new countries of the world economics.

What is happening in Italy? There is a lack of technological vision on innovation and a substantial indifference about the resources and facilities necessary to develop new technologies and bring them to the market. The capability of finding out the winning path is determined by the talent of the single entrepreneur, the richness of competences available on the territory and a little bit of luck. For many companies it is difficult to find the right way and when they look for technological advancements, they often ask support to universities. As a consequence of this, Italian universities do not only have to hold the institutional role of updating and transferring basic competences into higher education, but they have also to take part into a technological transfer process, up to the product industrialization. This is absolutely a huge mission that risks to be inapplicable if not appropriately shared among institutions with different missions and characteristics.

Developing and effectively transferring innovation to companies is possible only through the application of a three-stage system: universities, technological transfer centres like CEFRIEL, enterprises. This is what we have been implementing at Politecnico di Milano in the ICT sector, recently made more visible through the constitution of the ICT Institute. Today the ICT Institute has more than 700 researchers and innovation engineers. It combines and coordinates all the realities that have been created around the Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione (DEI) in the last 20 years: the DEI, the Faculty of Information Engineering, consortia like CEFRIEL and Corecom, seven spin-off companies. The purpose is to cover the whole chain, from research to higher education and technological transfer to the industry.

This structure aims at helping companies to find the right way, putting them in contact with the right organization able to give them support on technological innovation. These centres can suggest leading-edge solutions, exploiting the tight relationship with university labs where researchers are developing the technology of the future.