Utility companies allied to young people – Il Sole 24 Ore

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This entry was posted on June 8, 2014 at 15:03.

You can imagine a smart city as a friendly community, a place made cozy by the technology that enables the creation of a new generation of services for citizens. Solutions for mobility, energy, transport, culture, tourism, thanks to the participation of the users are able to respond to our needs concrete, everyday. To realize this vision of intelligent community is necessary to stimulate a part of the ongoing dialogue with citizens-users to actively involve them in the development process, the other to define the networks of relationships and agreements between different actors in the ecosystem, before all the young, innovative companies.

In recent years it has been developing a real market for startups in Italy although still limited in size and value than the major countries of the G8. Thanks to the new standards and the dissemination of a wide range of tools – programs incubation and acceleration, coworking spaces, specific training courses and so on – are surveyed in 2014, more than 2 thousand companies registered with the baby registry of innovative firms. Therefore, there is a flow of new ideas for mid-high quality that they can rely on a good supply of accompaniment for the first phase of development but are confronted with the lack of supply of capital that supports the growth and especially with the difficulty of activating partnership industrial, essential to achieving their biggest market.

The first issue of the market is a central problem because there are still few industries that work in a structured and stable companies with young people, offering them the opportunity to test and develop their own products. In the absence of this growth factor in the national innovation ecosystem is necessarily suffering from a disease that is particularly acute in Italy and spread throughout Europe.

Therefore, it is necessary to stimulate new processes of relationship between the undergrowth and young dynamic startups and industries that can grow them as Iren Group. There is a clear alignment of incentives in this process because on the one hand young companies can test their products on the field and the other large companies have access to a pool of new products that do not have a direct impact on its internal structure, at least in the short term. The risk decreases, it speeds up the process of procurement of innovation, limit the effects of failure and compresses the time of evaluation.

Another new element is extremely important, is the development of models as a tool for social innovation bottlenecks corporate innovation, in particular of hybrid models of corporate social responsibility and social innovation able to compute and exploit the innovative capacity in the definition of corporate social responsibility activities. The aim is to overcome the logic of subsidiarity with pure entrepreneurial attitude that allows projects to grow young companies that demonstrate that they have a real impact not only economic but also social – the phenomenon is particularly evident talking about environmental sustainability -.

Iren Group has decided to play an important role in promoting the growth of this new ecosystem, through a reading of the citizens’ needs and offer fast new services related to commodities (energy, water, gas , waste). Adopting strategic marketing models based on the analysis of data generated by digital systems (smart city, big data, open data) and the involvement of users in the definition of needs and solutions, Iren aims to capture instances innovative local and enhance the startups that best suit you. Some concrete examples have already been implemented to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the new real strategy (please read the articles retrieved by side). These early examples confirm that the model can work effectively and encourage the development of a wider and more structured relationship with the world of innovative startups. Iren Group can not, however, develop the market alone. It is essential to define a new rational side that allow the mobilization of private capital and the other dealing with a territorial government willing to promote innovation, not only technological but social.

Lorenzo Benussi policy advisor Consortium Top-Ix
Francesco Profumo is president of Iren

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