Southern Italy as a platform for sustainable development

"South Innovation", the event held on 20 and 21 June in Calabria, promoted and organized by Entopan Smart Networks & Strategies, in partnership with Harmonic Innovation Group, Plug and Play, Deloitte, EFM, and Rina Prime Value Services helped to promote a comparison on synergies and strategies useful to confirm the consolidation of the role of Southern Italy as a Mediterranean platform for sustainable development.

A development driven by an innovation conceived in the unprecedented "Harmonic" connotation that has taken shape in Calabria, in the last decade, thanks to the intense work of Entopan, anticipating in many ways the current Mediterranean issue that affects - with its impacts, responsibilities and opportunities - the whole of Europe. A vision which has found concrete application in the realization of the great and strategic project Harmonic Innovation Hub – which will inaugurate next year – but which needs to be continuously nourished and expanded thanks to the collaboration with the widest possible number of subjects.

The two days of "South Innovation" has seen institutions and companies speaking about the Mediterranean option to innovation that finds meaning in the Magna Graecia experience with its vocations, traditions and cultural roots. At the center of the dialogue that animated the various panels, the comparison on how to use these resources to trigger innovative processes that generate change and well-being and create the conditions for a harmonious and sustainable society, which respects Man and the specificities of the territories and the community and that, in a long-term planning perspective, enhances the available natural resources, avoiding exhausting or destroying them.

The event, which began in the afternoon of 20 June, was opened by a message from the European Commissioner for the Economy Paolo Gentiloni, to continue with the presentation of the Southern 2025 Report: a Mediterranean perspective by Deloitte partner Francesco Iannamorelli. A snapshot that is the starting point for subsequent panels on the role of finance, industry and strategic infrastructures in supporting the growth of Southern Italy as challenges and opportunities in a Mediterranean key, on the ability to generate innovation and attract investments and on how a new humanistic vision can emerge from the Mediterranean to orient global innovative ecosystems by promoting long-term enterprise.

The event wes closed by the work will be the interventions of Francesco Cicione, President of Entopan and Roberto Occhiuto, President of the Calabria Region.

The message of Antonio Tajani, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Vice-President of the Council, opened the day on 21 June, followed by a vertical focus on innovation. First the in-depth analysis of the long-awaited Harmonic Innovation Hub, designed in Calabria on the model of the most advanced innovation spaces in the world to be at the service of the transition and sustainable growth needs of Italy and the Mediterranean and Middle East macro-area, and then with the precious contribution of one of its strategic partners: Plug and Play, the largest Open Innovation platform in the world and which since May 2022 has found in Calabria an opportunity to further growth in the Mediterranean area with its fourth Italian office after Milan, Modena and Turin.

Plug and Play was in "South Innovation" bringing not only the value of its global experience with Plug and Play Egypt, the third African office opened in 2022 – which also supports Morocco's North Africa office and neighboring offices in the Middle East and Northern Mediterranean – with the mission of driving international investments and catalyzing Open Innovation practices in the Egyptian technology ecosystem. Plug and Play will also enrich the event with 10 international startups belonging to its network active in Agritech, Industry 4.0 and Sustainability, from Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, Switzerland, Germany and Spain, testifying to the exceptional attractiveness of the ecosystem that is being built in the heart of the Mediterranean.

The event ended with an afternoon dedicated to vertical working tables, in which it will be possible to experience a direct dialogue between the approximately one hundred startups, SMEs, corporates, national and international institutional stakeholders and exponents of the world of culture and research, who started a choral reflection with a view to innovation also with reference to the opportunity represented by the tool of the Harmonic Innovation Labs which will be the backbone of the activities developed within the Harmonic Innovation platform.