In the current European scenario – on the one hand the contraction of the markets, on the other the latest regulations on
the digital
transition (e.g. AI Act and Data Act) and
ecological
transition (e.g. CSRD, CSDD) – Italy would seem to be holding up, playing a strong game in the regulatory and economic fields.
In the last few weeks alone, there has been talk of a
fund for Artificial Intelligence
with a budget of one billion euros for the technology sector, and for the ecological sector,
Transition 5.0
, the package of measures worth 13 billion euros, has been approved.
For Italian startups, there could be good opportunities and prospects, but also obstacles.
For some time now, the sector has been thinking about the internationalization of startups to encourage competition. Even the founders, even before validating the idea, should already think about a market beyond national borders, but internationalization cannot apply to all innovative companies: in fact, the choice should be made based on the sector, target customers, and above all, on regulations that vary from country to country. “A startup by definition is not a company that has to grow: it is the micro enterprise that then becomes a small enterprise, then a medium-sized enterprise and a large enterprise.” According to Massimo Carnelos, head of the Technological Innovation and Startup Office, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, therefore, the startup by definition would follow “a logic defined as power low. It must have an exponential growth, i.e. very fast in a negative or positive sense. This is why there are niche operators,
venture capital
, because the startup cannot have access to bank credit, and only the VC fund thinks with a view to high risk tolerance for high returns in case the startup does well. So you only get this rapid growth if you have a big market.”
In the debate between techno-integrated and techno-apocalyptic, to quote Umberto Eco, there are those who reflect on transitions and strong regulations as an unstable brake on the scalability of startups, and those who see this as a flywheel. “Where there is regulatory fragmentation ,” explains Carnelos, “this can be an obstacle to the growth of companies. The European Union, the single market, harmonises the different legal systems so that economic actors can operate in a wider regulatory environment than the national one. This is the great process of the European Union, but it is by no means complete as far as the capital market is concerned, for example, where it is lagging far behind for what it could be. If the regulation is excessively detailed, then it means holding back innovation: the less there is harmonization between legal systems, the more there is an obstacle to the transfer of economic operations between one border and another, but at the same time the absence of regulation is the Wild West, and therefore a worse situation. In fact, the competitive market is not an unregulated market, it is the intelligently regulated market, which today we call smart regulation.”
The approval in March by the European Parliament of the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act), the law that regulates the use of artificial intelligence, after several revisions of the text, would therefore have put all member states in agreement. Exactly one year after the failure of
Silicon Valley Bank
, however, the hype about AI in the markets is reminiscent of the famous speculative bubble of American ESG investment funds, where these funds certainly played their part in the departure of the American startup bank. “What I don’t see in Europe ,” says Carnelos, ” is an AI boom, in the sense of companies able to create sufficiently powerful, structured models to scale the market. In Europe, there is a little too much talk about regulation and not enough about massive investments in what is now general-purpose technology.” If AI is not the sector with which Europe could compete with other international ecosystems, according to Carnelos with that of quantum sciences, because they would be “very promising in Europe and particularly in Italy. We have something to say here, because we have excellent academic and research skills. Yet, despite the fact that in Italy we are historically strong in the mathematical sciences, which are the basis of AI, on many occasions we have not been able to make an adequate technology transfer“. The same is true fors pacetech which, according to Carnelos, is still “a sector of academic and scientific tradition, but we remain weak because we have too many SMEs that cannot scale and we have a market that is still too dependent on institutional programs (ESA/ASI). In the U.S., they have taken a big step forward with the commercialization of space activities. Basically, thanks to Elon Musk’s gamble: with the reusable rocket even six times, he has in fact broken a taboo by revolutionizing a sector: before for commercial operators it was not economically sustainable, in fact in the US there was only NASA and today instead the same uses Musk’s rockets because it no longer has its own launchers”.
Even the Italian government would finally seem to have an interest in Italian startups: “Right now, with the MIMIT, the government is finalizing the revision of the
Startup Act
. We, as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, are involved in this exercise together with the national community of ecosystem actors. The bill is expected to reach Parliament in weeks. There are some important innovations, suggestions partly from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (especially for the internationalization part) and partly from the community, such as the simplification of the various forms of facilitation and the regularization of the entire sector in a smarter way.”
In short, 2024 would seem to be very proactive for our innovation ecosystem both at a regulatory and financial level. And Carnelos, “in order not to displease anyone”, has already identified some very promising Italian startups: “In Milan there is a startup that is starting to introduce quantum semiconductors. And without naming names, there is enormous potential here. Then there are startups that have grown a lot in recent years and speaking of space, since it is known, we can mention the name of D-Orbit
.”
Moving then to the sector, “apart from
Stefano Buono’s
nuclear scaleup with small modular reactors, there is a rooke Roman startup that makes AI applied to the procedures for the validation and authorization of nuclear power plants. Obviously, the problem in Italy is that we don’t have nuclear power, but they have a good project and their target market is the rest of Europe and the USA. Nuclear power is considered by all to be an indispensable part of energy diversification in decarbonisation. Italy then made a choice, but all the research and development part still remains.”
International promotion and support for growth
Today, Office XI directed by Carnelos deals with two macro-objectives: the promotion abroad of the startup ecosystem and its strengthening and growth through collaboration with Mimit.
The promotion abroad of the national innovative ecosystem is carried out by bringing startups abroad, foreign investors to Italy and importing VC funds through the programs of the ICE Agency: “The mission is to ensure that Italy becomes an attractive place to come and innovate.”
In addition, the Office follows emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biotech, cybersecurity, i.e. those technologies that enable or determine the future of the country, helping them to grow through foreign markets.
“We have set up a working group on the internationalization of the Italian biotech industry and we are working on identifying strategic directions that can help biotech players, both companies and research, to establish themselves and find capital and markets. This work includes various players such as Enea Tech Biomedical. In the coming months, we are thinking of delving into artificial intelligence from a dual perspective: AI as an enabling technology where our SMEs must always be ready to adopt it, otherwise they risk losing out on international markets; to be, not only as a user country of AI models that are made abroad, but to be producers of such models ourselves, thus fostering the growth of Italian companies that independently develop artificial intelligence models. Further down the line, we would like to delve into another sector: that of quantum science.”
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ©