Facing the challenges of the future together: Leonardo participates in the “Innovation to Impact” event at Open Italy

02 March 2023

The new edition of Open Italy is now under way. An open and collaborative innovation programme for enterprises, startups and innovation enablers, the event offers large enterprises and innovative new businesses an opportunity to work together on the development of new solutions.

The open innovation initiative held at MAXXI Museum in Rome over the past few weeks saw the participation of Leonardo’s Chief Technology and Innovation Officer Franco Ongaro, numerous representatives of Leonardo’s technological area and key players in innovation in Italy. The event offered an opportunity to meet with the entire Open Italy ecosystem (https://open-italy.elis.org), an open and collaborative innovation programme established to promote dialogue among enterprises, startups, SMEs, innovation enablers, research centres, venture capitalists and young talents through implementation of concrete innovation projects.

In the 2022 edition of Open Italy, Leonardo was the major corporation implementing the largest number of co-innovation projects, accounting for eight of the total of 29 projects presented. In this innovative context, collaboration with Open Italy represents a key element of Leonardo’s approach to Open Innovation; in the year 2022 alone, the company implemented a total of 25 projects with innovators, a significant increase over the previous years.

Leonardo’s new approach in the pursuit of open innovation has led the company to implement more than 40 projects over the past two years, followed by 12 follow-ups. This is a concrete way of testing the applicability of external solutions to the context of the company, acknowledging their potential and identifying their direct impact on Leonardo’s way of doing business.

During the course of the event, all eight of the company’s projects were presented by their work teams, with specific opportunities for discussion with the entire community of innovators.  Moreover, the foundations were laid for the next edition of the initiative by setting up multi-corporate themed discussions to identify the innovation needs of 2023.