The Florentine ecosystem of innovation has yet to grow in terms of network capacity, but the opportunities are enormous for the development of startups, and capable of opening new perspectives for the organization of work with a view to smart working, and for innovative models of corporate welfare exploiting the coworking model. These are the conclusions of the conference organized by the Municipality of Florence on 13th March, as part of the European project Speedup which aims to improve the Structural Funds' interventions for the support of entrepreneurship and business incubators.
At the conference the representatives of some city hubs (Spazio Co-Stanza, Impact Hub, Nana Bianca and Chamber of Commerce), as well as the regional president of Aidp (the association of HR managers) Emanuele Rossini, and i the University of Florence who presented the new results on the Florentine innovation ecosystem, which draws a new geography made by the reports of innovation actors on the regional territory, and highlights some limitations of the current structure. The University study has identified three main critical elements for innovative startups: the first is access to finance capital, with 90% of the companies surveyed whose private and often familiar capital is the only source of funding; the second point is the lack of qualified information on territorial references; finally, problems in their ability to create partnerships both at the time of the creation of the initial startup team, and in interaction with other companies and economic entities, once the work is started.
"The Municipality in this field has to coordinate and improve networking activities with the other local subjects public and private - noted the municipal councilor for economic development, Cecilia Del Re - just to create a chain of innovation, and be complementary to other active economic actors».
