A New Time

Letter from the Founders – April 21, 2020

Five years ago we started Italia Innovation with the aim of gathering the brightest talents and forward-thinking academic and business leaders from all over the world to understand the strengths of our economy, with the desire to then build its future together.

Over the past two years, our company has gained a new awareness.

Since 2018, thanks to the engagement of our academic directors, we have started focusing our programs on the manufacturing industry, involving Italian and international innovative players in case studies and new ventures focused on responsible and quality productions.

In 2019, we have reshaped our organization through three main initiatives.
Firstly, we branched-off our activities in California, opening a new company - California Innovation - and locally running programs and projects.
Secondly, we started a production studio to independently launch innovative products and services, following an entrepreneurial rather than a consulting approach.
And lastly, we started building open innovation teams to run our projects, involving companies, Maestri and alumni that over the years have joined our innovation programs, all the way from the project design to execution.

We are now at the beginning of a new time. A time for us to build on the learnings of our start-up efforts, a season which comes at a time where we are all experiencing a great deal of change and uncertainty.
In this new season we will pursue an even more open and participatory approach.

The initiatives of Italia and California Innovation will revolve around shared multi-regional projects, grouped under a broader platform: Inter Innovation. A platform based on an interdisciplinary, interdependent and international approach.

We will try to play an active role in this historic moment, contributing with our means to a virtuous reconstruction and rooting for a manufacturing renaissance able to overcome the issues and inconsistencies that had already started to emerge before the outbreak of this health and socio-economic crisis.
We have witnessed the backwardness of large-scale production processes and export models, and we will insist on the ignition of a globalization of knowledge rather than goods, collaborating with companies and talents for an evolution of capitalism in which a consumption mindset is replaced by an investment approach.
We will focus our actions on regional manufacturing clusters, first in Italy and California and then in other districts around the world, defining new quality and sustainability standards with experts as well as young innovators, in order to achieve a more widespread and less elitist adoption of these two standards with their intrinsic values.

The format of our programs will also evolve.

Before the outbreak of this emergency, we had already decided to take a few months to design new cultural experiences, with the goal to increase the level of interaction between international students and local territories, and to find more innovative and inclusive ways to involve the most deserving and talented people.
This crisis will inevitably give us more time to think, a time we will use to design new cultural formats, inspired by the most innovative media, and targeted to an highly diversified audience of mindful innovators.

In the coming months, we will dedicate ourselves to support the emergence of a new manufacturing renaissance, and for this reason in the past weeks we became obsessed with a question: What are we making for?

Pondering on the purpose of productions, we aim at supporting companies in reforming the global value chains with the creation of micro-ventures able to combine globally advanced know-how with regionally rooted supply chains.

This effort will also feature a series of editorial and academic activities, which will involve both local and international talents, under the guidance of academic and business leaders that have always characterized our initiatives.

We will also push our participatory approach, this time also through a deeper engagement with local and central government institutions, and a curatorial leadership held by Federico Fubini – deputy editor in chief of Corriere della Sera and the artistic direction of Francesca Sarti – founder of the design studio Arabeschi di Latte.

In the coming weeks this work will begin to emerge, and we are very much looking forward to stay connected with you.

Warmly,
Marco and Carlotta