ASPI’s Chief Executive Officer Tomasi: ‘Among the key elements of our Industrial Plan is the networking of the country’s knowledge: a team effort that is crucial to meet the challenges of the future. A big company like ASPI can be a hub for local talent and ideas’.
The Autostrade per l’Italia Group’s transformation plan, which has reached its third year, continues along the path of open innovation: the synergies set up with the world of universities and research, as well as the various calls for talents to contribute to the shared objective of an increasingly safe and modern infrastructure landscape, are now a constant feature of ASPI’s new future.
An outward-looking openness to meet the challenges of the future was well represented by the initiative held today in Milan, which awarded the six projects selected as part of the Argo Innovation Lab, the platform promoted by MOVYON, the sustainable mobility technology operator and ASPI Group’s centre of excellence for research and innovation, and ELIS Innovation HUB.
Launched in May 2021, this call for ideas involved universities, research centres, startups, and companies in developing ideas and projects for technological solutions in the field of sustainable mobility and infrastructure safety. These included new systems for assessing the impact of heavy traffic and specific environmental conditions on bridges; methodologies for the sustainable management of network safety based on risk maps that consider natural, geo-structural, and degradation factors; and the development of reinforcement structures to carry out interventions without disrupting traffic on bridges. These are just some of the solutions developed as part of the proposed project ideas.
More than 50 project proposals were received in recent months: the universities and research centres promoting the winning projects include the Politecnico di Milano, the Politecnico di Torino, the University of Salerno, the University of Perugia, CIRCLE – Centre for Infrastructure Resilience in Circles as Livable Enviroments and EUCENTRE.
Each project was awarded a grant of EUR 35,000 that will support the development of the solution.
‘The programme has enabled the creation of fruitful co-creation opportunities with the best of the Italian research system. With their talents and ideas, they have proposed ambitious and concrete solutions under the banner of sustainability and infrastructure safety, elements that are at the core of our mission,’ stated Lorenzo Rossi, Chief Executive Officer of MOVYON. “We are proud to support the development of the award-winning projects, providing Europe’s largest open-air laboratory for their tests: the three thousand kilometres of motorway network managed by Autostrade per l’Italia”.
“ELIS Innovation HUB (an innovative reality of the ELIS Consortium) is pleased to have co-designed and supported MOVYON in the creation of the ARGO Innovation LAB project”, stated Luciano De Propris, Head of Open Innovation and Sustainability at Elis Innovation Hub. “With this initiative, we were able to build an open and collaborative innovation model with the world of academia and major centres of expertise, in order to generate concrete projects with an impact on business and society. We are confident that this model can be extended and expanded within and outside the company boundaries to generate more and more shared value in the coming years”.
“Open innovation”, states Roberto Tomasi, Chief Executive Officer of Autostrade per l’Italia, “is one of the key pillars of ASPI’s transformation plan, based on the principle that for a company to be truly modern and successful, it must create value. “Value” for us also means the sharing and connecting the knowledge of our country, working as a team to put ourselves in the best position to face the challenges of the future. This is why we are here today. At ASPI”, adds Tomasi, “over the past two years, we have established a structured framework of relationships with Italy’s leading universities, fostering deep project-based and organisational synergies. These collaborations aim to jointly develop increasingly advanced solutions for infrastructure monitoring and the training of future professionals. We believe that vision, values, research and the development of new technological solutions are inescapable prerequisites for true breakthroughs. And all this can ‘take off’ thanks to the industrial capacity of a large company such as ASPI, which is an hub for local talent and ideas”.