Collaborazione industria – università

[Autom. eng. transl.] Thanks to the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), Universities (and research centres) and Industry are receiving precious funds to be used in the best possible way to contribute to the successful recovery. Recovery calls for innovation and innovation calls for University-industry collaboration. As an academic, I carried out specific research on the topic and I did not expect to find so much material, even very recent, on the study of the factors that can favor and impact university-industry collaboration. Searching for correlations with the areas best known to me, in 1990 the WHO coined the concept of shared responsibility for the management of food safety and hygiene, in which Government, Industry, Science & Research and Consumers have specific roles and responsibilities. In the University-Industry collaboration we talk about the Triple Helix innovation model to underline the importance of interactions between the University, private sector and public institutions to promote the transfer of knowledge and optimize the innovation process and its social impact. It is no longer a linear model of innovation (like the one adopted after the Second World War and which saw the results of research translated into innovations and then spread throughout society), but rather a non-linear model with continuous feedback mechanisms between the different components of the innovation process. Instead, universities and scientific results, and industry and technology often appear separate or more or less distant entities depending on the technological sector. This is despite the fact that in 2000 the European Union, with the Lisbon Agenda and the Europe Horizon 2020 strategy, made innovation a priority, with the aim of bridging the technological gap compared to the United States and becoming "the most competitive and dynamic in the world based on knowledge and capable of supporting economic growth in terms of number and quality of jobs and high social cohesion". We are still witnessing the "European Paradox" whereby Europe, although leading the United States in terms of scientific results, does not do the same in terms of the ability to convert these scientific results into successful technological innovations. In the European panorama, then, Italy does not appear among the countries that invest the most in the various factors that can favor a solid and fruitful University-Industry collaboration. Since the food sector shares this reality of University-Industry distance, I like to highlight some of the barriers (leaving aside the economic ones) that should be broken down to bridge this distance, so that readers, of one or the other faction, can make a a little soul-searching and think about some good resolutions for 2023, remembering that collaborations are, first and foremost, between people. Barriers include misalignment of objectives between academia and industry and differences in time scales for achieving them; conflicts in the management of intellectual property; fears in sharing one's knowledge; lack of direct contact and trust between the two worlds; lack of recognition (for university career purposes) of the time dedicated to collaborations with industry. I am struck by the lack of specific programs that favor the short-medium term mobility of researchers in industry and vice versa... I would be one of the first to want to experiment with it.