UNIVERSITIES AND INDUSTRY: NETWORKS TO CO-INNOVATE

The global economic crisis is affecting the evolution of the global economy. There are very few large companies in Italy, whilst there is an enormous range of small and micro-enterprises. Italy’s entrepreneurial system, like Europe’s, is finding it very difficult to cope with this crisis. In contrast, Asian economies are fighting back with a newly invigorated competitiveness that is based on factors that up to now have been lacking, such as an enormous commitment to research and development. Small companies are being forced to cut costs and come up with complex strategies based on the efficient management of existing production capability, combined with the innovation of their products, in the hope of responding to the stimuli that the market is sending out at an increasingly rapid rate. This is where the theme of business networks and cooperation comes in. The relaunch of Italy’s industry is linked to the improvement of the operational quality of small companies taken as a whole, but this also applies to centres of knowledge production, which have become important sources of value for manufacturing industry. That is why the business network model – based on a convergence of cultures and languages and on consistent, mutually agreed strategies for technological development and innovation – has proved to be a winning concept. Apart from creating new managerial skills, the challenge is now to train human resources who can operate on a global scale, people with an entrepreneurial spirit who are able to integrate and convert experience and knowledge from a number of different fields. In such circumstances, the tendency to strengthen the links between industry and universities has become stronger, as it is seen as a strategic way of increasing opportunities for growth for both sides (providing academia with training and research and providing companies with opportunities for innovation). What’s more, thanks to its multidisciplinary and universal nature, design has become a possible strategic link, a bridge connecting companies and academia with the aim of activating research and making it accessible, even to manufacturing businesses that would otherwise suffer from the structural limitations that are intrinsic to their small size, and thus encouraging innovation. In this way, design becomes a catalyst for common networking actions, helping to manage them, as well as a driver that can internationalise a local industrial system that is asked to operate at a highly complex technological level. So, investing in innovation is a crucial step to regain competitiveness, specifically employing design to “strategically lead industrial processes”: the methodological model for business networks has been experimented with RoldResearch. R.R. was founded as an initiative by three historic companies located in the Milan area, which together decided to become Institutional Participants in the Foundation of Milan University Politecnico. The R.R. approach is innovative because it is based on pre-competitive research that is not immediately targeted to the development of products and production methods. They have activated far-reaching sensor archiving research to establish a structured approach to innovation, which up until now had been inaccessible to these three companies. R.R. bases its activity on the principles of multidisciplinarity and cultural contamination, providing different tools for creative processes, technology scouting and idea generation.