Presentation of the 2021 COTEC Report on Open Innovation

February 24, 2021

The 2021 COTEC Report on Open Innovation - Key factors for successful innovation in an Italian company, carried out in collaboration with Enel Foundation and Luiss University, will be presented today at 16:00 (CET) via a live webinar.

Carlo Papa, our Managing Director, will open the event with Andrea Prencipe, Rector of Luiss University, and Paolo Di Bartolomei, General Director, COTEC Foundation.

Based on the analysis of a sample of small and medium-sized companies, and taking into consideration the Italian industry’s best practices applied to innovation strategies, the study highlights how companies that simultaneously adopt Open Innovation practices and virtuous personnel management practices, see a return on capital employed (ROCE) that is almost double that of other companies. It confirms the evident notion that research and technological development can only be transformed into commercially rewarding innovation through people, able to combine ideas, inventions, and impact, via enlightened management choices, thus becoming the cornerstone of any successful enterprise.

It is one of the results that emerge from the 2021 COTEC Report on Open Innovation, presented by Valentina Meliciani, Luiss Professor of Applied Economics, and Carlo Napoli, Senior Researcher at Enel Foundation.

The second part of the report provides "innovation stories" by the member organizations of COTEC Foundation: Enel, Eni, Intesa Sanpaolo, Leonardo, and TIM. These are concrete success examples that illustrate how large Italian companies are able to effectively put the Open Innovation paradigm into practice.

The 2021 COTEC Report, thus combines the dissemination of scientific research results with examples of a business’ daily experience, underlining the will of large Italian companies to share their experiences from a system perspective, also thanks to the central role played by Enel Foundation in promoting relationships between universities and enterprises, acting as a trait d’union between the academic world and industry. 

The event will feature a roundtable with Henry Chesbrough, Executive Director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at Berkeley Haas School of Business, the ‘father’ of Open Innovation, who will be linking from California. He will be joined in the webinar by Cristian Fracassi, CEO of Isinnova, Pharmadome, and Camelot, Marco Gay, President of Anitec-Assinform, Alessandra Luksh, Head of the Startup Intelligence Observatory, Digital Innovation Observatories of Milan Polytechnic’s School of Management, and  Romano Stasi, Secretary-General at ABI Lab.

Read the report here and the article on the study here.