EcosistER - Ecosistema Territoriale di Innovazione dell’Emilia-Romagna

At the end of 2021, the Ministry of Universities and Research (MUR) website published a call for ‘submitting proposals for action to create and strengthen territorial innovation ecosystems’ to finance the creation of 12 territorial, regional or supra-regional innovation ecosystems. The highest score was achieved by the Emilia-Romagna Region’s EcosistER project, which will bring over 100 million euro in resources to the region to support the green transition of the regional economic and social system. In particular, EcosistER will cover advanced and sustainable materials, green manufacturing, systems and components for the conversion and use of energy from renewable sources, intelligent mobility, housing and energy solutions for a carbon-free society, circular economy and blue economy, data analysis and supercomputing to foster the green transition.

The project is the result of great teamwork that has brought together the entire network of regional universities and is organised according to the Hub&Spoke model. The Hub is the ‘implementing party’ responsible for initiating, implementing and managing the Innovation Ecosystem. Spokes are the ‘implementing actors’ involved in the implementation of the Research and Innovation Programme.

There are six project spokes and they all see the active participation of Unimore, which is the leader of spoke 2 (Clean Energy Production, Storage and Savings) and co-leader of spoke 6 (HPC and data technology-based green transition). The project will bring Unimore more than 12 million euro in resources to be committed to research and innovation.