From the laboratory to the company: Andrea Ceschini's experience between technology transfer and training
Let's get to know Andrea Ceschini, trainer at the Fondazione Mondo Digitale, co-founder in 2023 with six fellow researchers of Grid+, an innovative academic start-up that has set itself the ambitious goal of transferring scientific knowledge from the academic world to the business world. A sort of third mission that simultaneously trains workers on technologies and studies customised solutions.
Andrea told us, from his perspective as a researcher, about the difficult relationship between emerging technologies, such as those related to artificial intelligence, and organisations. The need to keep up to date and adopt the most innovative tools often conflicts with technological frontiers, which are not always adapted to truly operational solutions.
‘More and more companies are implementing AI in their processes. Yet a study by MIT reports that, despite the lack of investment, 95% of projects remain stuck in the experimental phase, without producing concrete competitive advantages,’ says Andrea. " On the one hand, university research is developing increasingly sophisticated but impractical knowledge, while on the other, companies need cutting-edge tools to remain competitive but struggle to identify and implement the most appropriate technologies for their processes."
Precisely to bridge the gap between research and business, Andrea would like to translate research and study into high-tech solutions that meet the digitalisation needs of companies through his daily work. ‘We are successfully activating technology transfer between academia and business, making the know-how gained in research laboratories available to companies. Our aim is to offer technical and scientific knowledge to companies that are undergoing technological transition,’ explains Andrea.
Another issue that is very important to complex organisations is customisation: the real challenge is finding experts capable of translating the complexity of AI into concrete applications tailored to each business process. The best solutions, in addition to an initial exploratory phase, require training people to promote digital culture and intelligent automation services, to identify and replace repetitive tasks with advanced and secure algorithms. This approach always starts with an in-depth analysis of existing processes to identify where artificial intelligence can generate the most value.
‘In our work, we always adopt the principle of privacy by design to keep data secure, with tailor-made implementations and local installations that do not require sensitive information to be sent to external cloud services.’ He has very clear ideas about future projects: "We will launch a subscription platform that will make the main algorithms developed by the team accessible with tools for data prediction, automatic image and document recognition, as well as virtual assistants for managing corporate knowledge. We will continue to work on vertical projects such as the chatbot for Roman tourism and the AI agent for automatic source code analysis to drastically reduce the time needed to draft technical documentation."
The story is by Onelia Onorati, press office of the Fondazione Mondo Digitale.
