Innovative Startups and Open Innovation: which opportunities with the new Italian regulation

The Italian government has now activated a new fully operational set of rules, which aims to create favorable conditions for the establishment and the development of innovative enterprises oriented towards high-tech and high-skill sectors. This new regulatory framework also allows existing firms to increase their competition capacity by setting up new business activities, and to empower their technical and technological know-how by structuring effective relationships with the research sector, in order to design and develop new products, processes and services. The workshop will provide a broad spectrum of information related to Italy’s Startup Act, on the one hand for researchers and inventors, by giving to their projects and ideas new opportunities to be implemented and financed; on the other hand for entrepreneurs, by endowing them with new tools that will make their business more competitive. It will also shed light on Open Innovation’s operational perspective, since this model may represent an ideal pattern for all the players involved in the startup ecosystem to blend their processes, timing and goals. Having an effective relationship with many different actors with diverse plans, interests, skills, mindsets and processes plays a pivotal role for enterprises. In such a multilevel business contest, networking activities become crucial as long as the ultimate goal is, either to identify and select technical and technological solution providers for co-designing and co-developing new products and services, or to find investors for supporting innovative startups. Empowering these activities and improving the governance of open innovation processes are challenges for both the research sector and enterprises.