“It is not true that ours is a generation of big babies”. With these words Jacopo Morelli, president of the Young Entrepreneurs of Confindustria, launched the second edition of the "Talent of ideas", a national competition promoted in collaboration with the Unicredit group.
Competing will be young people aged between 18 and 40 who want to transform their intuitions into companies capable of establishing themselves on the market. Some of their projects are still to be realized, others have just become reality. The initiative – presented this morning in Santa Margherita Ligure – aims to demonstrate that, despite the crisis, starting a business is not impossible.
“Every day we read not very encouraging data – Morelli told FIRSTonline regarding what was announced yesterday by Viale dell'Astronomia on Italian industrial production -. But we young people will fight to remove these obstacles”. The Talent of Ideas “is a unique project in Europe and a good sign for Italy. Also because more jobs are created with start-ups than with existing companies".
The competition mechanism is simple: for each of the seven geographical areas identified in the country, the three best business proposals will be rewarded with personalized funding and a master training programme. The three national winners will also receive a cash prize and will be able to access a mentoring-tutorship program managed by Unicredit. "We will make our contacts with private equity funds available to these young people - Gabriele Piccini, Country chairman Italy of Unicredit told FIRSTonline - and, as far as possible, we will also support them from a financial point of view".
According to Piccini, "good ideas are born every day: for this reason in 2010 alone we supported around 24 start-ups, disbursing 2,3 billion euros, i.e. 13% of total credit". Unicredit "is present in 22 countries and must contribute significantly to the internationalization of companies, holding meetings in the area and giving them support and in some cases even training".
Examples of success are three of the companies that won the first edition of the competition locally. Let's start with Techlab Works, a company that develops and markets video technologies for clinical data management and corporate security. Among the various functions, its computer systems are able to record the images of an operation in the operating room, to then store them in the patient's medical file. The company was founded in 2008 on the initiative of three under 30 engineers and today employs eight people.
Win (Wireless integrated network), which produces systems for remote monitoring of patients, also operates in the medical sector. Founded in March 2009, the company is a spin-off of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. To get an idea of the company's growth, just think that in all of 2010 revenues amounted to 68 euros, while in April 2011 they reached 200. In the same period, the number of employees rose from 4 to 12 and the patent was extended to the USA and the Bric countries.
A different but no less technological reality is that of the Fubles.com social network. It is an online community that provides members with a platform through which to organize soccer matches and other sports. Naturally, the meetings take place in the real world: there are around 500 of them every month and they involve over 25 people. Also in this case the fathers of the initiative are freshly graduated engineers, average age 25 years. To date there are 35 members, 1.100 teams and over 1.500 registered sports centres. Some lenders have recently invested a good 300 euros in Fubles. The iPhone application has been launched and a new version of the site for the world market will soon arrive.
These are companies that have made it, but for those entering the market today there are many obstacles. “First of all, you need to have the ability to take the path of innovation – Piccini explained -, not only at the start-up level; then there is the challenge of growth, because our businesses are too small; finally internationalisation, since domestic consumption is not growing. We must affirm the made in Italy: our attention must be focused on this”.
