Virtuous Connections
How an Innovation Ecosystem Spawns and Grows
My latest book explores the connections I have investigated in the study of the technological pole of the University of Naples Federico II, Italy. Since 2016, this campus has hosted a series of partnerships with multinational and regional companies for digital training and applied research for Industry 4.0. I have researched the process and results of University-Industry collaborations in the volume edited by Il Mulino. The Italian title translates into English as Virtuous Connections. How an innovation ecosystem is born (and grows).
The first ‘virtuous’ connection I focus on is the relationship between teachers and learners. This relationship emerges out of the digital training academies undertaken, since 2016, with Apple, and other technology giants such as Cisco, Deloitte, Nokia, Tim, Capgemini, and large industrial groups of advanced manufacturing, such as Leonardo, Medtronic, FS, Autostrade per l’Italia. Currently, ten academies provide digital training to undergraduate and graduate students, and mid-career professionals, but also to participants with no university degree or STEM profile. The aim is to fill the digital skills gap existing in the Italian production system — as reported by international agencies such as the OECD and other national business associations. The demand for the training has so far been very high and growing. Learners from all over Italy and the world are welcome within the diversified offerings available within the academies. For the Apple Developer Academy alone, international students come from 37 countries in 2019. Women have increased significantly, from 15 percent in 2016 to 29 percent in 2021.
The training aims to create digital skills with applications in different industrial specializations, for example, in the aerospace with the Aerotech Academy with Leonardo, in the pharmaceutical sector with the Medtronic Academy (named MAKE), in ICT with the 5G Academy, and the CyberSecurity Academy in collaboration with Nokia, Tim, and Capgemini. Digital techniques and technologies make up most of the teaching hours (450). Curriculums include also a strong orientation for soft skills — in management, organization, and leadership. The participants learn how to analyze stakeholders’ and customers’ needs, how to generate innovative concepts, how to create value-added prototypes, how to corroborate the validity of their ideas through relevant simulation models, and how to realize their ideas concretely.
This pedagogy combines computer science with entrepreneurship education, which business schools have not provided to date. Academies’ continuous education also responds to the mission of co-creating knowledge for social impact. This is a distinctive feature of the training the university has valued as the inspiring principle of teaching and learning for empowerment and social responsibility. Many social impact projects have stemmed from collaborative activities between the Apple Developer Academy and multiple international NGOs within the PIER program. For this key innovative feature, the academies' experience has become a finalist project, titled Digital Academies for Inclusive Learning, among 25 initiatives recognized both by the European Commission in the 2020 RegioStars Award, and the OECD Higher Education INNOVATE program.
The innovation lies in the Challenge-Based Learning approach, which stimulates learners to follow their passions and bring about their ideas through digital applications, tools, and services for companies or the public on platforms. Learners face cognitive and psychological challenges: participants have to manage their frustration, performance anxiety, and the risks associated with entrepreneurship. This experiential learning process involves participants in digital problems faced in companies, or workplaces, to create a product, a service, or contribute to an applied research project.
Learning is interactive and iterative. Learners collaborate with peers, mentors, business managers, investors, and all other actors they meet with during hackathons, contests, or business fairs over the training period. Learners self-evaluate their achievements and the progress made against the objectives, including the gaps to be filled. Self-assessment is a novel element of digital academies that aligns with the open innovation model and undermines the vertical relationship between learners and teachers, which traditionally leaves teachers the assessment of student learning. But self-assessment is also an opportunity to overcome the often superficial ritual the participants experience in completing training evaluation questionnaires at the end of any course. Self-assessment is crucial for training managers to monitor and adjust training. Yet, this requires empowering learners to realize their own cognitive pathways so that they can express an informed and responsible judgment. Interviewees among the participants report that the most stimulating learning situations occur when they carry out group work, take the risk of presenting their results at company fairs, and hold job interviews.
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The results are promising: both learners and employers highly appreciate the training, although it does not yield academic credits or professional certifications. Job placement rates are on average 80 percent over the past five editions, both at the regional and international levels, confirming the usability of digital training in the local and global labor market.
Another ‘virtuous’ connection I explored is the relationship between researchers and entrepreneurs in the labs at the technological center of the University of Naples. Researchers-entrepreneurs’ relationships have emerged since 2008 with the redevelopment of a peripheral area in the eastern city of Naples. The San Giovanni ecosystem builds on the ashes of Cirio, the former tomato processing factory. Today, modern modular buildings house about fifty quality measurement and certification labs and joint labs where researchers work together with entrepreneurs on R&D projects. University-business collaborations pursue a social investment in a degraded context and attract young talents — both students and researchers — to repopulate the voids of deindustrialization.
Researchers collaborate with local entrepreneurs, drawing on the tacit know-how of the manufacturing industry once present in the area. This multidisciplinary legacy has enlivened both the academies, and the labs aimed at the measurement of the quality of life, the environment, the materials, and the networks that extensively use enabling digital technologies. Labs intertwine multiple disciplinary fields — from biology to physics, from chemistry to computer science, and the various branches of engineering. In collaborative relationships between researchers and entrepreneurs, learning occurs through an open, complex, and non-linear knowledge production system. As a reputed institution, the university operates as a system of rules and relationships capable of guiding the behaviors and interactions between public and private actors. The university establishes networks between companies, research centers, and foundations to solve concrete problems of urban regeneration and regional development.
Finally, the ‘virtuous’ connection between entrepreneurs and researchers I explored within the many firms I visited to investigate the digital transition of some companies in the region. I conducted almost sixty interviews with entrepreneurs or CEOs of 54 companies, including innovative SMS and digital start-ups and large manufacturing firms in the aerospace, mechanics, and food industries. Interview findings support that those companies, which have introduced a digital transformation towards Industry 4.0, benefit from scientific collaborations with universities or other technological agents in the area. Scientific collaborations include hiring academy participants, sending employees to training sessions, networking during hackathons or boot camps, and developing a brand new digital academy, or a joint lab for R&D programs. The companies that have pursued collaborations with the university or other scientific and technology agents present a significant pool of women in the management team, especially within family-owned businesses. And the gender factor proves statistically significant for regional firms’ innovative performance and technology maturity, as opposed to the education title of business owners or CEOs.
The study of connections confirms the value of developing entrepreneurship and ‘intrapreneurship’ (Audretsch, 2014; Audretsch et al. 2021). This requires first strengthening internal know-how by exploring and processing information gained externally. Then, the integration between internal and external knowledge occurs through a strong focus on human resources and the training of skilled labor, and through R&D investments and collaborations. In fact, connections require caring and time. Attracting talents and creating digital knowledge do generate value: new hi-tech jobs, basic and advanced digital skills, indirect and induced employment in the region, and higher firms’ productivity provided that the regional labor market is flexible and efficient. This value is not always exploitable and quantifiable in market values. Actually, short-term advantages may jeopardize the sustainability of the long-term growth and development strategy.
The analysis of the Social Return on Investment (SROI) I conducted in the book can support the assessment of the social impact of university-led innovation, complementing the focus on quantitative variables with the analysis of dimensions that cannot be estimated in financial terms. Considering returns and costs of investments encourages actors to include practical points of view in choices involving university research, and teaching according to an entrepreneurial mindset keen on facilitating the “virtuous connections” between academia and industry.
Selected references
Audretsch, D.B., From the Entrepreneurial University to the University for the Entrepreneurial Society, in «The Journal of Technology Transfer», 39, 3, 2014, pp. 313–321.
Audretsch, D.B., Lehmann, E.E., Menter, M. e Wirsching, K., Intrapreneurship and Absorptive Capacities: The Dynamic Effect of Labor Mobility, in «Technovation», 99, 102129, 2021.
Marra, M., Digital Academies for Inclusive Learning, case study prepared for OECD-European Commission HEInnovate Program, 2020, https://heinnovate.eu/en/resource/digital-academies-inclusive-learning-university-naples-italy.
