Italy has leading firms in many sectors, including information technology, but it must build up an industrial ecosystem that enables this expertise to prosper, so as to create innovation, products and jobs. The most effective strategy to generate the necessary critical mass in IT is for Italian firms to scale up in size, and for start-ups and youth entrepreneurship in the sector to be supported. These were the views expressed in an interview with the Aspen Italia website team by Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, but also an entrepreneur and Chairman of the Strategy Committee for the Fondo Strategico Italiano.
Has Italy already missed the IT boat?
IT is a vast field, and there are certainly areas in which Italy is at the cutting-edge of research, such as theoretical computer science, where there are brilliant Italian research centers working on algorithm theory, semantics, and complexity theory. It’s a discipline related to mathematics and concerns the theoretical basis underpinning applications. In other areas, however, such as computer architecture, security, and web search, Italy does not currently seem able to compete with other countries.
Italy’s handicap, especially in applied research, comes down to the lack of a robust ecosystem to support research, and particularly the shortage of larger firms, which, throughout the history of IT, have always been the real drivers of innovation – witness the contribution of companies like Bell Labs, IBM, and Xerox PARC. On top of this, Italy is losing some of its large industrial groups without new ones emerging, and this process has inevitably also triggered a reduction in investment in innovation and research.
If the Italian IT industry is in a slump, how can services help it bounce back?
Services could help create demand that stimulates the growth of Italian IT firms. From what I’ve seen, there are signs of interest. Insurance and banking groups, in particular, are looking closely at the whole area of big data and semantic analysis of text to improve management and customer services. What’s more, certain Italian firms are spearheading advances in these fields, like Expert System, one of the world’s leaders in semantic analysis, and Hacking Team, top specialists in the field of active software security. These are small to medium-sized businesses, but they show excellent growth prospects.
So a firm’s growth prospects are a key determinant for investment?
Absolutely. In fact, I gladly agreed to become Chairman of the Strategy Committee of the Fondo Strategico Italiano precisely because the initiative was set up to strengthen Italy’s medium-sized firms by facilitating mergers and acquisitions between them. Pursuant to its establishing charter, the Fund only looks at firms running at a profit, those with a turnover of more than 200 million euro, and it focuses on investing by becoming a minority shareholder or through capital increases, with a view to supporting new initiatives for growth. All these efforts are aimed at addressing what I see as the main deficiency of the Italian ecosystem: the absence of large firms and of firms that grow and inject fresh blood into the industry, while at the same time creating jobs.
How do you think Italian IT start-ups measure up? What could help them grow?
I think that things are changing even in Italy, with a growing number of young people looking at the possibility of starting their own business. Of course, the Italian start-up market is still very small, and before it can make a name for itself it needs to demonstrate that it can produce success stories. This is no easy task given the harsh reality of statistics for the sector, which – even in California – see only one in 10 newly-formed companies surviving, with one in a 100 becoming successful. As regards training and education, although the Italian system has historically been more inclined towards studies in the liberal arts, this is not a problem in itself. Speaking from my own personal experience, as a former student of a high school specializing in classical studies in Milan, the Liceo Classico Manzoni, I had no difficulty in pursuing engineering studies at the Milan Polytechnic. What matters is not necessarily what you study in high school, but how you study. A rigorous approach, something which unfortunately is disappearing, lays the groundwork for young people to acquire effective techniques for later stages of study and research.
Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli has been teaching at the University of California at Berkeley since 1976, where he holds the Edgar L. and Harold H. Buttner Chair of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. He was a co-founder of Cadence and Synopsys, leading companies in the field of Electronic Design Automation (EDA). He sits on several boards in Europe and the United States. In Italy, he is Chairman of the Strategy Council of the Fondo Strategico Italiano (a state-backed private equity fund controlled by the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti) and of Italy’s national research oversight committee (CNGR) appointed by the Ministry of Education, Universities, and Research, as well as being a member of both the Scientific Council of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) and the Executive Council of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT).
