Diana Bracco: Promoting excellence through network creation (Press review)

Industrial research and technological innovation: these were the central themes of Confindustria Vice President and Gruppo Bracco CEO Diana Bracco’s visit to Elettra.

 

She was accompanied by Sergio Razeto and Paolo Battilana, respectively President and Director of Confindustria Trieste. Carlo Rizzutoand Alfonso Franciosi, respectively President and CEO of Elettra - Sincrotrone Trieste, welcomed Confindustria’s representatives together with Marco Marazzi, Industrial Liaison Office Manager.

“Dr. Bracco’s visit – comments Carlo Rizzuto – is particularly important for us, because it highlights what has become, in recent years, a cornerstone of our mission: synergy with the industrial world.”

This synergy is irreplaceable according to Diana Bracco as well: “Interaction with top-notch research institutions such as Elettra, which are highly competitive and with a strong international orientation, is a unique tool for our productive system. We need a shared commitment in order to increase the number of collaborative projects”, adds Confindustria’s vice-president, “and more generally speaking a strategy that can optimize and promote the many existing centres of excellence by linking them in a network. For this very reason, Confindustria carried out a national census of R&I skills: veritable maps overlaying territories with productive sectors”.

“Effective collaboration between research centres and the private sector, such as that represented by Elettra, is an urgent and necessary challenge for the survival of both private companies and centres in our region”, adds Sergio Razeto. “Our hope and our task as Confindustria Trieste consist of creating the conditions for this to happen. In order to do this, several years ago we set up an Innovation Commission drawing together private firms, research institutions, universities, and financial institutions around the same table to work together”.

The synchrotron light produced at Elettra is a highly powerful and versatile probe, which can reveal detail in materials that would otherwise be inaccessible, in numerous fields ranging from pharmacology to micro- and nano-technologies, and from catalysis to material engineering and environmental science. “Together with the skills we have developed over the years – explains Marco Marazzi – this probe becomes a source of new ideas and solutions contributing to the improvement of industrial processes. Indeed, interaction with the private sector is a constant and irreplaceable incentive for us to optimize the results of research and to address our skills towards solving the world’s most pressing challenges and concrete problems”.

During the visit to Elettra, several researches illustrated the potential of certain light sources of particular interest to the industrial sector:
Maurizio Polentarutti talked about the potential of X-ray diffraction techniques, particularly in the chemical and pharmaceutical fields; Lisa Vaccari described some of the results obtained by applying infrared light and fluorescence to the field of nutrition, with health and environmental gains; and Giuliana Tromba, on the mammography beamline, illustrated the potential of tomography in the biomedical field.
The visit ended in the Fermi experimental hall, where Michele Svandrlik, Project Director of the free-electron laser, presented the new light source.

 
Last Updated on Friday, 19 October 2012 12:31