The greatest need of innovation and relationships between industry and universities, particularly in the case of SMEs, is in Italy perceived essentially as the need for more research funding as a response to these needs. Evidently without denying the need for aid for research, the proposed solution, which considers only the financial aspect of the problem, does not take into account the reality of the process science to business in Italy and runs the risk of giving results much lower than expected. Should be considered first of all some differences between Italy and many other countries and concerning the university and the industrial structure. In Italy, unlike many industrialized countries, has no separate university education in science and technology from university general, hindering an entrepreneurial approach to scientific results exploitable for new technologies. On the other hand, the industrial structure of the country consists mainly of SMEs, which, while being innovative and leading in many markets, they do little R & D and their innovations lack the degree of radicalism that would be necessary in the medium or long term to compete with the advancement of emerging countries that instead invest more in R & D. Greater collaboration with the university could solve these problems by increasing the radicalism of research and thus the competitiveness of their innovations. The process of science to business in Italy faces a number of difficulties in making and developing enterprise but there is a little known initial difficulties concerning the technological exploitation of the results of scientific research.
This activity, known in the European university as a third mission, but built for a long time in American universities. The difference with Europe regards the entrepreneurial attitude towards research that need not consist in transforming a researcher in an entrepreneur but have an entrepreneurial vision of the results. Studies show the limits of this vision in the European researchers and even more in those Italians who mostly consider their work a cultural thing, and not that scientific research can also be a service to humanity. It therefore has a large research activity against a very limited number of patents and start-up. Now studies and experience show that we need a large number of innovative ideas that statistically you generate a new technology with good investment returns and a valid socio-economic impact. We are therefore faced with a problem of mentality that can be solved only on the generation from which the attention that should be given to young researchers in the thesis, or research contracts with a fixed term, with limited opportunities in academia, but that could be formed also for industrial research and start-ups. In fact, the widespread idea that competence in scientific research corresponds automatically to an expertise in R & D is illusory, in R & D come into play complex socio-economic factors that are not present in the scientific research and that we must manage to bring it to success. Without an education for researchers in this direction a simple increase in aid for innovation is likely to be the classic elephant gives birth to a mouse where a low generation of innovative ideas, to the very high natural selection of projects, will lead to a socio-economic impact negligible for the country.
