Will a better Italy emerge from the frescoed halls of the Castelbrando fortress? That's what he hopes the community of the Ambrosetti Club (founded in 1999 and made up of 300 business leaders), which in the suggestive location among the hills of the province of Treviso gave birth to first edition of the Technology Forum.
An event, immediately nicknamed the “Cernobbio of technology”, entirely dedicated to innovation, right in the heart of the North-East, where the great Italian excellences are concentrated and where the Us Air Force, guest of honor of the event which has as main partner Treviso Technology.
The contribution of the US Air Force was exemplary of one of the key aspects of the Forum: the "technology transfer", ie all the background in the fields of physics, information technology, electronics and chemistry that can be offered through the "recycling" of high military technology.
But not only. Over the two days in the Veneto region, the community gathered contributions from the country's public and private actors, with interventions from the academic and scientific world (research and universities are at the center of the challenge for innovation) and from the political world: Alessandro Fusacchia also spoke on behalf of the Monti government, advisor to the Minister for Economic Development Corrado Passera and coordinator of the task force for innovative startups.
“The mission of the community – he said Valerio De Molli of Ambrosetti – The European House -, which meets here at the end of a 10-month preparatory work, is to strengthen the dialogue and encourage the development of relations between the industrial, scientific-technological, financial and institutional communities to promote growth opportunities, development and a culture of innovation widespread in the country”.
Generic proclamations, which however at the end of the Forum's work were translated into concrete proposals. Innovation is in fact the first challenge of the future, first of all because yet another battlefield with emerging markets, which have made progress in science and technology a priority. In the last decade, for example, China has increased investments in research and technology (150 billion euros in 2011 alone) by 20% a year, double the growth rate of its GDP; South Korea by 10%; but also India, Brazil, South Africa and the other fast-growing economies in the world have invested in ambitious plans (training, incentives, selected immigration, etc.) to reposition themselves as autonomous producers of innovation that is no longer hetero-directed.
Italy, on the other hand, as often happens, is lagging behind. But not as badly as one might think. Italy is in fact considered a "moderate innovator" by the European Innovation Scoreboard: there are companies that innovate, there is innovation in technologies and products and there is scientific research considered among the best in the world. It is a country that innovates. There are companies that innovate, there is innovation in technologies and products and there is scientific research considered among the best in the world.
However, the comparison with the other EU states loses: Italy has half the innovation intensity of the EU average and a quarter of that of Japan, and in the old continent it ranks 18th for high technology. Not to mention investments, even those half as much as their European colleagues, who invest 3% of their GDP in research and development against Italy's 1,53%. AND high tech exports are affected: according to Eurostat data, in Italy it represents 6,8% of the total (9% in 2000); in Germany 14%, in the United Kingdom 18,2%, in France 19,7%.
The solutions, therefore, or at least the proposals of the Club Ambrosetti community that emerged at the end of the journey that culminated in the Treviso event. There are five main terrains on which to intervene: the national innovation strategy; investments in innovation (including incentives, to be optimized and rationalised, according to Alessandro Fusacchia); the development of SMEs (which represent 90% of the Italian productive fabric), research-industry cooperation (the central theme of various interventions which focused attention on the fundamental role of universities); and the widespread culture of innovation.
On the basis of these reflections, the Forum came to formulate 7 concrete proposals:
a) Define the national innovation strategy, with an institutional referent and a clear responsibility, through a long-term view, which unequivocally defines the technological and social project of the country and the areas in which it intends to excel;
b) Stabilize with simple and coherent mechanisms and make the automaticity of the tax credit for research and development activities permanent of companies;
c) Simplify, standardize and reorganize tools and procedures (few, clear, simple, fast) putting the public funds available at various levels into a system (central and local) allocating them with a multi-year and meritocratic logic. In this case, funds are needed focused on a few priority areas and funds for applied research (absolutely priority) separate from those for basic research;
d) Define the criteria for identifying innovative companies on a rigorous basis and for these to provide incentives and concessions that are as automatic as possible and facilitated access to capital also by merging public and private resources into instruments/funds;
e) Equip universities and (public) research centers with tools and resources for technology transfer activities, and measure their performance also for objectives related to the latter.
f) Promote the presence of PhDs in industry with research-industry exchange programmes for PhDs with tax exemption for the entities that send and host them or for those who hire them (if start-ups);
g) Throwing visibility and "education" actions on the values of innovation and of undertaking and modernizing skills and training, also creating a public-private fund to support and encourage the scientific-technological training of the most deserving young people and their participation in work with mechanisms that strengthen relations with companies.
