Standing in the sunshine by a towering 12th-century converted stone castle, Roberto Viola gestures to a valley of vineyards and the rounded, majestic mountains that spread out in the distance.
“This is our living lab, a work in progress,” says Mr. Viola, the energetic director of the Research and Innovation Center of the Edmund Mach Foundation, a public research institution that conducts cutting-edge agricultural, nutritional, and environmental studies. Its most recent accomplishments include the genome sequencing of the pinot-noir grape and the Golden Delicious apple.
While the scientists here are blazing new paths in agricultural research, the political vision of local leaders is helping transform not just FEM, as the institution is called, but also the nearby University of Trento and 20 or so local centers for information and communications technology, biotech, and brain study into an Italian hub of research and innovation.
The small northern province of Trentino is a bold exception in the Italian academic landscape. While Italy, with Europe’s fourth-biggest economy, ranks a lowly 17th in research investment among European Union countries, with investment at around 1 percent of its GDP, Trentino matches top European nations’ investment in research, allocating close to 3 percent of its provincial GDP.
The FEM campus, in the town of San Michele all’Adige comprises a cluster of modern buildings, some still under construction, nestled around the castle. In 1874, forward-thinking regional officials transformed the castle, by then a deconsecrated Augustinian monastery, into an agricultural school and research center. Today, spread out over the valley are 300 acres of fruit orchards and vineyards, whose grapes are used for biotech research as well as the yearly production of 250,000 bottles of some of the best wine in the region.
Several dozen ponds hold local fish species for researchers who investigate strategies to repopulate the area’s lakes and rivers and improve fish quality for industry. Inside new buildings are labs where researchers study emergent fields such as fruit genomics, developing customized varieties of apples and grapes, for instance, that are better able to resist parasites, grow in conditions affected by global warming, or offer taste and nutrients tailored for “tomorrow’s consumer.”
The genomics lab is known as “la stanza dei sogni,” says Mr. Viola, with a grin: “the dream room.”
Bringing in Money
As university labs throughout the rest of Italy struggle to keep projects alive with dwindling government funds, virtually no private investment, and a brain drain of bright, young scientists, Trentino is not only dedicating millions of euros of public money to local research centers and spinoff companies, but is also attracting private investors and partners such as IBM, Fiat, Telecom Italia, and Siemens. Top young scientists are setting up labs here. They include the American biologist Sheref S. Mansy, who used a $1-million Armenise-Harvard Foundation grant to establish the Center for Integrative Biology at the University of Trento, with the objective of creating synthetic cells with possible cancer-research applications.
The research centers here have also proven far more successful than most Italian universities in winning European Research Council awards. Even more unusual in the Italian context is the hefty endowment of 600,000 euros for 10 years scored by the university’s Center for Mind/Brain Sciences from the private Trento and Rovereto Savings Bank Foundation.
Key to the province’s ability to invest in research and attract respected scientists is its near-autonomous political status, which allows Trentino to keep about 90 percent of the taxes it collects and spend the money as it sees fit. Perched near the Austrian border, the province was part of the Tyrol region under Austrian control until the end of World War I, when it passed to Italy. In the aftermath of World War II, the province was granted autonomous status in recognition of its Germanic cultural and linguistic distinctiveness. For centuries, Trentino has been a conduit between southern and northern Europe, with as many economic and cultural ties to Austria and Germany as to Italy.
Long before “knowledge economy” became a catch phrase, the province set out clearly articulated goals, investing heavily in higher education and earmarking more and more of its research-and-development money for projects linked to improving the quality of life of its inhabitants, from social services to the environment. In the past several years, under the leadership of Gov. Lorenzo Dellai, a man with a hard-working, no-nonsense reputation, that commitment has only intensified.
“Without investment in research, our area of Italy would never be competitive,” says Mr. Dellai. “We’re small, mountainous region with half a million people, so we needed to turn to innovation.” It’s a decision that was first made 50 years ago, he says, when Trentino was as poor as the southern Italian region of Calabria. “And it’s paid off.”
International Allure
The process of establishing a knowledge economy in Trentino has not been without its detractors. Owners of small local businesses have long grumbled about the heavy investment in R&D rather than commerce. Political critics would like more coordination among the research centers to avoid overlap, as well as independent assessment of publicly supported projects to determine success rates.
Yet the success of the province’s strategy is hard to refute: Trentino now tops the average income ranking in Italy and has an AA- rating from Fitch. Longtime residents and newcomers alike laud the quality of life. Heidi Hauffe, a friendly, soft-spoken Canadian and mother of two teenage daughters who heads up the department of biodiversity and molecular ecology at FEM, says both the natural beauty and the local services in Trentino have gone a long way toward making her decision to move here a happy one.
“I’ve lived in other parts of Italy and Europe but have been really impressed by the excellent schools and health-care system here,” she says. “It’s turned out to be a wonderful, really easy place to raise a family.”
Ms. Hauffe is one of the dozens of foreign scientists and Ph.D. students who populate the labs and offices in and around the provincial capital of Trento, a clean, bustling Romanesque and Renaissance town. Thanks to intense recruitment of young scientific talent (and helped by the research centers’ topping up Italy’s paltry stipends for doctoral study and research), the number of foreign students and faculty is high above the Italian university average of 3.6 percent.
At FEM’s Center for Research and Innovation, for instance, foreigners make up 20 percent of the 300 technicians and researchers, 30 percent of the department heads, and over half of the 56 Ph.D. candidates. Two-thirds of the staff is under 40—the inverse of the age ratio at most higher-education institutes in Italy.
Davide Bassi, the University of Trento’s rector, has long years of experience abroad, as do many of the directors of the research centers. They are keen to safeguard Trentino’s institutions from what they see as Italian academe’s rampant cronyism, discrimination against youth, and deep suspicion of private-sector collaboration.
Mr. Bassi says he doesn’t have high hopes that other regions will model themselves on Trentino, at least not until higher-education institutions gain more autonomy from the central government. However, he says, he is motivated by the desire to show other regions just what is possible: “We’re less than 1 percent of the Italian university system, so if we fail, nobody will care. If we succeed, we’re too small to change the Italian average, but we can at least be an example of a good experience.”
Mr. Viola, of FEM, says he “brutally cloned” international standards from Britain, where he taught for two decades, and brought them here.
“When I came here, in 2005, there were no standards for research, so a culture had to be imported,” he says. “When we select scientists, for example, instead of doing the usual local call, we advertise in Nature and international journals.” He points to a wall lined with framed covers of scientific journals and magazines with articles on breakthrough research done at the institute.
‘Silicon Valley of the Alps’
A short, meandering drive from San Michele to the village of Povo, on the eastern outskirts of Trento, sits another thriving research-and-innovation hub, in low, rectangular, glass-and-steel buildings that glisten on the Dolomite foothills. Inside are the labs of Trento’s Faculty of Mathematical, Physics, and Natural Sciences, its Faculty of Engineering, and the Bruno Kessler Foundation, a center set up to pursue research in information and communications technology, with a focus on projects with some benefit to local quality of life.
In a small, light-filled office, Fausto Giunchiglia, a computer-science professor and former vice dean of the university, recalls that when he arrived here from Stanford University, in 1988, there was only one small building, with a handful of professors and a five-year commitment from the province to develop a center for information and communications technology.
“Building a successful research institute requires time, a lot of money, and success stories, and many thought ours would die. For a long time, I would say we were in the middle of nowhere,” he says with a laughs “Now we are arguably in the top six places in Europe for ICT research.”
While Trentino’s nickname, “Silicon Valley of the Alps,” is more aspiration than realization, the province has consciously followed the concept of “an ecosystem of innovation” that brings private and community stake holders into play with researchers. The Bruno Kessler Foundation’s 400 researchers work on projects as varied as human-language technology, energy-saving systems, and interfaces in museums aimed at promoting discussion among visitors.
A recently established enterprise is Trento Rise, a joint effort of the university and the foundation, which transfers ICT research to the market. Begun in 2010, Trento Rise helps create local companies by offering technical, strategic, and financial support.
Luca Cornali,28, and his partner, Michele Galli, 29, were among the first to receive grants from Trento Rise. In April they established their company, Reputeka, which helps Italian artisans sell their wares online.
“We started the project two years ago by studying the artisan market and discovered that Italian handmade products are a huge part of our economy, yet only 1.25 percent of Italian artisans are online with a Web site or e-commerce,” says Mr. Cornali, sipping wine in the open air in Trento’s main square one evening.
Another Trento Rise project is a wireless network of sensors designed to save energy on lighting and increase safety in tunnels—a technology with clear potential benefit to the region, with its 150 tunnels, as well as globally. It’s the kind of project that Trentino is building its future on—based on local data, with tangible benefit and international potential.
“We want to move the research labs outdoors, into the streets,” says Paolo Traverso, chief executive of Trento Rise. “We want a future where the local territory is our lab.”
