SECO, a leading high-tech manufacturer of computer miniaturization and “ready-to-use” IoT integrated systems, with shareholder FII Tech Growth fund backed by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, signs an agreement with SDA Bocconi School of Management in the field of Digital Innovation, aiming at identifying highly technological and innovative startups, both at national and international level. 

With its impressive 50 years of history servicing businesses, institutions, and the competitiveness of Italy’s economy in general, SDA Bocconi, recently acknowledged by the Financial Times as the 5th School in the world for "tailor-made" programs, wants to make available to businesses its extensive experience in the field of research and management training, orienting it to the specific needs of organizations, especially in these challenging times.  It does so by drawing on all the distinctive elements that have always characterized its mission and activity, including creativity and innovation, which are fundamental, especially in this time, to imagine new models and follow new paths.

The goals of SDA Bocconi have a shared sense of purpose with SECO’s innovative nature. Traditionally a pioneer in research and multiple disciplines, SECO is constantly committed to oversee cutting-edge topics, believing that the most profitable contaminations arise from diversity and the intersection between heterogeneous worlds that look in the same direction, as demonstrated by the many partnerships between industry, academia and applied research.

Fostering knowledge at an international level, supporting entrepreneurship and the innovation economy are therefore the shared values on which the partnership between SECO and SDA Bocconi was founded, whose primary objective is to accelerate the Digital Innovation process by creating a bridge between industrial firms, academic research and startups.
 
Within the activities that will nourish this cooperation, in fact, particular attention will be paid to a global "radar startup" project, with which SDA Bocconi will be able to facilitate SECO's match with high-tech and innovative startups, creating an acceleration platform for the development of entrepreneurship, talent, and a concrete comparison with the market.
 
«Through the SDA Bocconi startup radar, SECO gets the opportunity on one hand to learn about how their business segments are being shaped by new technologies and agile startups, and on the other to team up with those startups to deliver more value to their customers», states Markus Venzin, Dean of Innovation of Bocconi University.

 
Massimo Mauri, CEO of SECO
«We are deeply convinced that innovation must be pursued through investments to develop startups that succeed better than structured companies in working on frontier technologies," says Massimo Mauri, CEO of SECO, who adds: «In this respect, SECO's partnership with SDA Bocconi creates the prerequisites to develop an important digital ecosystem on the Italian scene. SECO is ready to invest in innovation through capital increases in startups that will be selected with the help of SDA Bocconi’s expertise».