Money is essential, but courage is even more so. This is the message that emerged during the conference “Galilei, Volta, Colnago. We invented everything. But today?” as part of Pavia Innovation Week, with speeches by Andrea Carlo Ferrari, Professor of Nanotechnologies at the University of Cambridge, Donatella Sciuto, Rector of Politecnico di Milano, Alberto Sangiovanni Vincentelli, President of ChipsIT, and Paolo Granata, Professor of Book and Media Culture at the University of Toronto.
THE LESSON OF GRAPHENE
The Graphene Flagship is a European Commission research program on graphene. A bold investment, because it is long-term (more than ten years) for which funds of 1 billion euros have been allocated. Prof. Ferrari, Director of the Cambridge Graphene Centre at the University of Cambridge, member of the Management Panel of the “Graphene Flagship” and co-founder of CamGraPhIC, a company that, working with graphene, is capable of developing “ultra-high bandwidth and low-latency optical interconnections” that “reduce costs and energy consumption of generative AI, cellular networks, and strategic data transfer.”
“The most important thing is not the funds, but the temporal continuity,” explained Ferrari. The numbers back him up: an industrial return five times higher than the investment and a success in technology transfer ten times above average. The news of the day is that CamGraPhIC has received funding of 211 million euros from the Italian State, thanks to a derogation granted by the European Commission to state aid regulations. A project that brings research on this fundamental material to Italy, in Pisa and Bergamo, and will involve collaborations with universities and research centers.
TOP-DOWN OR BOTTOM-UP?
The experience of the Graphene Flagship teaches that the European Union, if it wants, can finance and bet on innovation even in frontier research. However, the European model is generally a ‘top-down’ model different from the ‘bottom-up’ approach of Silicon Valley.
“In the USA the market drives the creation of enterprises,” observes Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni Vincentelli, today president of the Chips.it foundation and professor at the University of California Berkeley. In the USA, he helped found Cadence and Synopsys, leading semiconductor companies. According to Prof. Vincentelli, Europe’s real problem is fragmentation. “Italy is too small, there is no market to create large companies. We must stop giving five cents here and five cents there.” For Vincentelli, innovation requires a creative “magma” that only a continental ecosystem can nurture.
THE RIGHT TO EDUCATION: THE CINDERELLA OF PUBLIC SPENDING
Before research and development comes education. The base of the value pyramid in which our country still invests too little. With university investment stuck at 0.9% of GDP, Italy continues to perform “miracles” with scarce resources, underlines Donatella Sciuto, Rector of Politecnico di Milano.
The alarm concerns especially the ordinary financing fund (FFO), which does not allow planning, and the paradox of “eligible without scholarships.” “The Politecnico invests its own funds to cover this gap, taking resources away from research,” denounced Rector Sciuto. With demographic decline looming (a significant drop expected in 2028), the challenge is to become attractive to foreign students, focusing on degrees in English and modern teaching models.
THE ITALIAN WAY DOES NOT INVENT BUT MANAGES TO “DO BETTER”
The legitimate doubt is that Italy not only has a funding problem but also a branding problem, a difficulty in telling its story and perceiving itself as an agent of innovation, projected into the future, and not just a consumer. According to Paolo Granata, Professor of Book and Media Culture at the University of Toronto, the sociopolitical narrative suffers, but the “brand of Italian-ness” remains an unstoppable force. It is not just design or aesthetics; it is what Granata defines as “The Italian Way”: the ability to incorporate values of beauty and intuition into what is produced. Quoting Aldo Manuzio, the “Steve Jobs of the Renaissance,” Granata recalled that Italian innovation often does not consist in being first or doing more, but in “doing better.”
THE PROVOCATION OF EREWHON
The debate closed with a provocation. The writer Samuel Butler, in the novel Erewhon, wrote: “the man who writes his commitments in a notebook entrusts part of his brain to it.” The sharing and protection of intellectual property define a pendulum within which knowledge swings. The answer to the question “How to protect what is shared?” seems to lie in the strength of infrastructures and the ability of the State to act as an enabler, following the example of realities like TSMC in Taiwan. Italy has the skills and, paradoxically, today also has the funds (thanks to the PNRR). In a well-known refrain, the biggest obstacles are bureaucratic in nature and in the fragmentation that has long hindered national potential.
