With MADE, Milan Consolidates its Leadership as Innovative City

By Pierluigi Olivari
ANIE Automazione Managing Board

Finally, the competence centers are at the starting line. Someone perhaps no longer hoped for this, thinking that they had fallen into oblivion after the previous government had promulgated them thinking of the needs of the national industry, and which lacked – let’s talk above all about SMEs – the strategic support to be able to consciously face a structured path of digital transformation.
Well, today the national ecosystem 4.0 can finally count on eight competence centers, eight excellences born from the model of public-private collaboration whose task is to involve and guide the tens of thousands of Italian companies along the path of innovation with training programs, consulting support and design skills. Among these excellences there is MADE, the competence center led by Politecnico di Milano, which won the call issued by MISE last year. Focused on advanced manufacturing, MADE will start its activities in September of this year in a former industrial structure of 2,000 square meters located on the university campus of the Bovisa district, an area of great technological ferment where PoliHub, the accelerator of the university that incorporates more than one hundred entrepreneurial initiatives with a high rate of innovation, and the Joint Platform Italy-China, which sees the PoliMi collaborate with the Tsinghua University in Beijing on robotics, automotive and industry 4.0, already stand. The MADE project has already involved 39 companies, in addition to the universities of Bergamo, Brescia and Pavia, public bodies such as INAIL and other institutions. Among the “founding members” of MADE are also member companies of ANIE: it could not be otherwise, since some of them, without fear of denial, can be considered real forges of innovation 4.0 ante litteram, with solutions and technologies that have even anticipated by decades the current trends of industrial automation. The primary mission of MADE – which starts with a total budget of 22 million euros over three years – is to intercept the needs of tens of thousands of SMEs in Lombardy and Italy, providing them in the medium term highly qualified support for assessment 4.0 projects, digital transformation and technical training. The MADE business plan aims to involve 15,000 companies, especially SMEs: a very demanding but stimulating challenge. We like it very much and for this reason we are ready to take it on with all our energy.