EDITORIAL

In a Country where innovation has been too often interpreted as a mere occasion to recycle second-hand technologies, sometimes the most effective research results come from small, local companies that succeed in building actual excellence networks by actualizing their ideas with passion and constancy.

These innovative small and micro companies perform applied research with the typical market-driven fluidity and found their base in dynamic structures - adaptive and quick.

But the real strength of these enterprises is the ability of networking: communicating and confronting to build-up chances of collaboration using complementarities as an opportunity of expansion instead of a reason of contrast. There where the old trend was to flatten the offer, reducing the competition to question of marketing, thus seeing in each and every other actor a competitor to beat, new, really innovative companies succeed in exploiting their "biodiversity" creatively by looking for contact points to reach a critical mass and to improve their offer, transforming and adapting, if necessary, in a way that large structures could hardly handle.

These kind of companies, however, because of their small size, sometimes happen to just ignore each other's existence in the same territory. That's why it is so important to promote match-making events in order to promote the startup of new, concrete initiatives as much as possible.

In 2007, the Province of Benevento held "Futurity": a unique event, strongly encouraged by president Carmine Nardone, that, for a few days, transformed the city center in an showcase of territory-bound innovation. That was the chance to inform the citizens of the local excellences, but also to get companies and research centers together to give them the chance of knowing each other and prepare for what have later become effective partnerships in the two years that followed.

This year Futuridea, in partnership with the ASI consortium, is promoting a new event (in Piazza Risorgimento, Benevento, from April 29 to May 3): the best aspects of Futurity will be enriched with new and more relevant dynamics, through meetings and round tables that will take place on the show floor for a double purpose: to testify how small innovative network effectively worked in the past and to show how much, and how better, we can do in the near future.

Giovanni Caturano