CERN Accelerating science

Now in its fourth edition and already a milestone in the Italian Innovation panorama, Innovation For Change (I4C) reaches its fourth edition with the kick-off held in February at the Agnelli Foundation.

I4C is an initiative created and promoted by Collège des Ingénieurs Italia, Polytechnic of Turin and CERN IdeaSquare - dedicated to experimental innovation. The purpose of I4C is to promote the creation of start-ups that are able to identify innovative solutions to global challenges - in line with the United Nations development objectives - through a 5-month "action learning" program, focusing on entrepreneurship and innovation and addressed to both the PhD fellows of Politecnico di Torino and MBA fellows of Collège des Ingénieurs Italia.

During this coming 5 months of the I4C, the teams will have access to the technologies of CERN, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) and Politecnico di Torino, in order to identify innovative and scalable solutions to one of the 8 challenges proposed by the "Challenge Owners", a selection of institutions and big companies in the industrial world strongly committed to supporting sustainability and innovation.

The teams that will take part in I4C can count on the support of a vast network of expert mentors: entrepreneurs and professionals belonging to the promoting institutions and large companies, who will accompany the 50 talents during the evolutionary phases which will lead from the idea to the project development.

Thanks to the success of the last editions, the initiative considers companies and institutions of the calibre of City of Turin, DSM, Enel, Ferrovie dello Stato, IREN, the new Power Electronics Innovation Center (PEIC) of the Polytechnic of Turin, REDA, and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO). The challenges of these partner companies were presented at the Agnelli Foundation in Turin during an engaging and dense kick-off event. This was concluded with an extremely interesting testimony by Raffaele Mauro, CEO of Endeavor Italia, on the theme of impact innovation: a great way to give the right charge to the teams before work begins.

Teams and sponsoring companies will meet again at CERN in March and May to evaluate the progress of the projects.

The interdisciplinary teams will then have the opportunity to pitch their innovative solutions and present the results of their work during a dedicated event in the first edition of the Italian Tech Week, which will be held in Turin from 25-28 June 2019.

As members of the final jury, Fabiola Gianotti (Director General of CERN), John Elkann (President of Agnelli Foundation) and Francesco Profumo (President of Compagnia di San Paolo) will be present.

For more information

CERN/IdeaSquare: IdeaSquare is a specialised CERN experimental innovation centre which hosts research and development projects on detection technologies and collaborates with interdisciplinary Master level education programmes. Located near the Globe of Science and Innovation, it offers ad hoc meeting spaces and rapid prototyping facilities for innovation-related projects. The aim of Ideasquare is to put people in touch to give life to new ideas, projects and prototypes in an open context, contributing to the activities of the CERN Technology Transfer Group through innovative products and solutions of global importance.

CDI Italia: Collège des Ingénieurs Italia (https://www.cdi.eu/it/) is an independent institution of excellence for young engineers and scientists and is part of the European network of the Collège des Ingénieurs. Founded and promoted by Fondazione Agnelli, Fondazione Edoardo Garrone and Fondazione Pirelli, CDI Italia is based in Turin.

Politecnico di Torino: Politecnico di Torino was founded in 1906 and originates from the School of Application for Engineers founded in 1859. It is accredited by international rankings as one of the leading technical universities in Europe, with about 33,000 students, 14% of whom are foreigners, from over 100 countries.

The Polytechnic proposes itself as a centre of excellence for training and research in Engineering, Architecture, Design and Planning with close relations and collaborations with the socio-economic system.  It is in fact an all-round Research University, where training and research integrate and form a system, to provide a concrete response to the needs of the economy, the territory and, above all, the students, with a view to the strong internationalisation of teaching, research and technology transfer activities, with collaborations with the best universities and research centres in the world and agreements and contracts with large international industrial groups, but also with local companies, where it is proposed as a reference point for innovation.