Research

This Observatory explores the strategies and organizational choices that foster innovation within companies, highlighting the crucial role of Open Innovation in stimulating growth and strategic development through collaborations with external partners.

The Observatory is promoted by the POLIMI School of Management of Politecnico di Milano in collaboration with InnovUp, the association representing the Italian innovation ecosystem. This Observatory analyzes entrepreneurial dynamics and the landscape of high-tech startups and scaleups financed in Italy. Its goal is to raise awareness and foster culture regarding the impacts and opportunities brought by new businesses at all levels (economists, policymakers, managers, students) and for all actors in the Italian startup ecosystem, ultimately accelerating these positive dynamics by establishing a permanent reference point in this multidimensional process.

This Observatory is aimed at innovation managers and those involved in digital innovation within companies. It seeks to guide enterprises in building their own innovation models, spreading a culture of Open Innovation, developing Corporate Entrepreneurship, and gaining clearer insights into new digital technologies and emerging innovation ecosystems, including the startup ecosystem.

This Observatory is the reference community for innovation leaders imagining revolutionary digital business transformations built on platform-based mechanisms. Nearly ten years of research have shown us that there are many types of platforms, with startups successfully leveraging platform models to great effect. Nevertheless, platforms are not necessarily digital, do not always originate from Silicon Valley, and are not exclusively startups. Our goal is to discover how to make them an innovation tool for existing large enterprises.

The Observatory is the go-to reference point for the community of innovators using pioneering approaches such as Design Thinking to create value within their organizations. This edition aims to explore the role of Design in driving organizational and social transformations, analyzing how these transformations can be supported by digital technologies like GenAI, Big Data, and Extended Reality.

The Center for Digital Envisioning (C4DE) is a competence center within the Digital Innovation Observatories that develops and promotes the ability to identify future scenarios enabled cross-functionally by digital technologies, anticipating related opportunities and risks in the medium, long, and very long term. The Centre works to foster innovation in digital technology research, support the strategic visioning of institutions and companies, and inspire sector stakeholders.

The Observatory was created to experiment with and promote innovative approaches to designing “Futures.” In highly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous contexts such as those of modern society, leaders, innovators, and organizations are called to proactively and responsibly design desirable futures rather than merely adapt to emerging futures, reacting only after they unfold.