The new edition of the project “Innovation for change” took place at CERN of Geneva on February 1^st. It has been promoted by the Scuola di alta formazione e management of Turin (SAFM – School of high education and management), by Politecnico di Torino and by Ideasquare, a specialised centre that hosts innovation-related events at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire).

50 young students at MBA and SAFM and graduate students of Politecnico take part in this project, that is an education course in the scientific/engineering field. In the next months they’re going to work in Geneva and in Turin; they’re divided into different groups, but they’re brought together by the same objective: to use the most advanced technologies in order to help face societal challenges like the question about food and health.

Thanks to the work of the next months we will get 8 new ideas of business; each one of them will be competitive on the market, since they offer innovative products and services invented just to face the societal challenges in the context of the industrial and international needs. The students will be supported by those ones who studied at SAFM and who are entrepreneurs now, or work in big companies or as researchers at CERN or at Politecnico, looking for advanced tools and technological solutions which are ready to be used and creating prototypes ready to be developed on the market.

This project will be also supported by institutions and agencies that showed the students which are the challenges they have to focus on in order to find feasible solutions: the Italian Ministry of Economic Development, the UN development organization, the AIUC (Onlus organization), Casillo Group, ENEL, ENI and Humanitas.

At the end of this project (that will be in June) the students have the opportunity to show the results of their work to companies and investors during a public meeting in Turin, in which the heads of the supporting institutes will take part, too.