Sustaining Innovation Ecosystem

77Lab is happy to welcome yet another distinguished Guest Blogger, Emil Abirascid (@emilabirascid). Emil is chief editor of Innov’azione, author of Imprese e start up and Percorsi dell’innovazione. He also writes for Nova – Il Sole 24 Ore and Wired Italia. A full profile is available at www.abirascid.com.

There is no doubt start-ups today leverage technology and new media to grow their business particularly in times when people are cutting costs and seeking for the most cost-efficient business-tools.

In Italy, fostering the innovation ecosystem is the mission of the projects which were created to help innovative start-ups meet industrial and financial partners to become known in the marketplace.

A sample of these projects is the magazine Innov’azione, a bi-monthly publication produced by the Italian association of technology and scientific parks (Apsti) available in print and online version at www.lobbyinnovazione.it. The business network ‘Imprese e start up’ (www.startupbusiness.it) is backed up by the Milano Chamber of Commerce, the meeting point for the Italian innovation community where entrepreneurs, enterprises, investors, incubators and Universities can share information, opportunities and experiences.

Percorsi dell’innovazione is the area dedicated to Italian start-ups within Smau, the main Italian technology trade show that takes place every October in Milan, which will also be organized in other Italian cities including Bari, Brescia, Padova and Bologna starting this year. These projects are working together in order to offer new entrepreneurs a wide platform to promote their ideas and projects to attract investors and find industrial partners.

In Italy, the number of start-ups has flourished during last few years, I began to follow this ecosystem closely back in 2005 launching the first edition of Percorsi dell’innovazione and since then all figures have increased: the number of start-ups, the number of risk capital investors such as venture capitalists, business angels, seed capital funds and the amount of money available in funds has also grown exponentially.

An increasing number of Universities started to consider the creation of spin-offs and technology transfer offices as a good opportunity. The role of incubators both within Universities and Science and technology parks is considered today as a key aspect of the ecosystem for the innovation that eventually becomes an enterprise. Currently, there are even privately owned incubators and an increasing number of large and medium size companies based in the country are showing a growing interest towards the innovative start-ups phenomenon and their ideas.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Other Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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