19 Mar I as in Innovation

A good idea alone does not generate innovation. It is the necessary foundation, but it represents only the beginning of a journey that can be quite long, leading the idea from the laboratory where it was created to its diffusion in society.

When an idea meets technique, it produces an invention, which can be protected through a patent or safeguarded as know-how. However, even a good invention is not sufficient to create innovation. What is needed is for the innovation to enter society, be disseminated, and ultimately assimilated—that is, effectively used and incorporated into a business model that can expand and scale.

The innovation process therefore has three fundamental aspects:

• Generation, in which new products, services, or processes are conceived and developed;
• Dissemination, in which discoveries move from the laboratory to the market;
• Assimilation, in which discoveries are incorporated into scalable business models and impact society, which therefore benefits from them.

No technology is immediately accepted by the majority of people; rather, its adoption follows a typical curve (Rogers’ curve) that may be more or less accelerated but always maintains the same pattern: first it is accepted and used by a small group of people—innovators and early adopters—then by the majority, and finally by laggards, segments of the population that, due to culture or choice, are more reluctant to accept the changes that a new technology brings.

The factors influencing the adoption of an innovative product are diverse, both economic and cultural-social, but the pattern is replicable for every technological innovation, from smartphones to induction cooktops, from wearable devices to artificial intelligence services.

Since its establishment, INFN has been committed to frontier research, where theoretical discoveries and advanced technologies work in synergy to advance knowledge, and therefore possesses enormous potential for generating new ideas and inventions. The Institute is also engaged in the dissemination of new technologies; however, for these technologies to truly enter the market and be assimilated, collaboration with industrial entities is necessary to make new products and services available on the market and accessible in terms of cost and ease of use.

In this regard, the principles of open innovation come to the rescue—a distributed innovation process based on managing knowledge flows entering or leaving the organization, in which innovation is generated by accessing, exploiting, and assimilating knowledge flows that cross the Institute’s boundaries.

In particular, for a research institution, innovation is open primarily outward: knowledge is made available to companies that can use it to create products to bring to market. The flow of knowledge from INFN to industry must obviously be managed, paying particular attention to protecting the Institute’s intellectual property and reputation. This task is delegated to INFN’s technology transfer structures, which have various tools at their disposal, such as:

• Licensing of inventions covered by patents or protected as know-how;
• Support for the creation of INFN spin-offs;
• Establishing collaborative research agreements with companies.
• Funding measures to increase the technological maturity of research products.

Alongside these well-established and widely used tools, INFN’s technology transfer office has recently organized, in collaboration with Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, a training program aimed at providing research personnel with knowledge and skills useful for bridging the “valley of death” that often opens between scientific research results and their commercial use.

Innovation is therefore a process that begins with a good idea and continues with its dissemination until society gradually assimilates the new technology and benefits from it. Various actors are involved in this process who, in an open innovation perspective, collaborate with each other. INFN’s role is to be the engine that generates new inventions and makes them available to the productive sector through the typical tools of technology transfer.