Innovation
After a century as Italy’s automobile capital, Torino has diversified its vocations and concentrated on productive sectors that demand high technological knowledge at the same time. Investing in production of elevated immaterial value based on research and innovation: this is the path that the city’s economy has undertaken in order to design its future. Four fields have been selected as strategic: automotives, Ict (Information and Communication Technology), aerospace and finance. Automotives was and remains – albeit in a different form – a strong point of the city’s economy as well as that of the Region.
The concentration of companies, a recovered competitiveness and spheres of specific, excellent specialties such as design – protagonist in Torino not only in the automotive sector with such names as Bertone , Giugiaro and Pininfarina – or research on sources of alternative energy like hydrogen, are the ingredients of a renewed pivotal role on international markets. Information and Communication Technology has its first “wireless” district of Southern Europe in Torino - Torino Wireless – aside from several research centres like those of Microsoft, and Telecom Italia’s Tilab.
The aerospace sector in Torino and Piemonte features a well-organised industrial system of companies specialising in aerospace - Thales Alenia Space, Alenia Aeronautica, Avio, Selex Galileo and Microtecnica – aside from a research system that makes use of Universities and the CNR (National Research Council) specific research centres. The considerable tradition in the field has recently brought about the stipulation of an agreement between the Piemonte, Campania and Puglia regions for the founding of Italy’s first aerospace destination-district.
Lastly, finance is the engine essential to the guarantee of a system’s growth and the existence for a group like Intesa Sanpaolo – which has become a tri-banking centre in the Euro area, guaranteeing favourable conditions for investments.
These are the strategic lines that will lead the city’s 228,000 businesses that export goods annually for almost 16 billion euro (with an import surplus of 4 billion) towards becoming increasingly competitive in Europe and throughout the world: in fact the challenge of internationalization is the test rig for Torino’s new economy. A challenge – that of being protagonists in Europe – that is being played as much on a corporate level as it is one pertaining to institutes: Centro di Formazione dell'Organizzazione Internazionale del Lavoro (International Labour Organisation Training Centre), the Istituto per la Ricerca sul Crimine e la Giustizia (Crime and Justice Research Institute) and the Staff College delle Nazioni Unite (United Nations Staff College) as well as the European Training Foundation of the European Union are already located in Torino.