ABOUT

Gently resting on the hillside, embraced by the course of the river Po and its tributaries, Torino owes much of its charm to its enchanting location at the foot of the western Alps, its vast artistic and cultural heritage, legacy of the Kingdom of Savoy inserted in the UNESCO World Heritage List and afterward as theatre and engine of the Italian unification and of the Italian industrial revolution. 

Today Torino is an important centre of research and high education with its excellent Polytechnic and University to drive the city towards new technological and relational skills, confirming Torino as the Italian capital of "Open Innovation", enabling it to become the second most innovative city in Europe under the prestigious “iCapital” award in 2016.

After a century as an automotive capital, Torino has diversified its ambitions and focused on industries with high-knowledge content, giving great importance to research and innovation, in particular in the strategic areas promoted also at regional level such as automotive, ICT, aerospace, biomedical and high quality food.  

The City of Torino, with its initiative Torino City Lab (TCL), offers the entire city for testing innovative solutions submitted by private operators, operating in any sector related to urban innovation, providing a system of physical, technological infrastructures, relations and know-how to experiment and scale up the proposed innovations.Building on its territorial know-how and industrial past, Torino has become an open laboratory for innovation, able to attract companies and skills. 

Autonomously driven and connected vehicles, drones, Internet of Things (IOT) and 5G, Artificial Intelligence and robotics: frontier technologies at the service of quality of life, environmental and social sustainability. 

The initiative was launched in 2018 by the City of Torino and supported since the beginning by different categories of partners: Public Utilities, Corporate, Research & Innovation and International Scaling Partners such as EnoLL, Venture Capitalists  and Media Partners.

In order to optimize TCL services, the team worked on the attraction of funding for larger PPP trials: about 2.5 million euros of European funding were invested in Torino in the period 2018-2020 within different European projects. The most important initiative to be mentioned is “Turin House of Emerging Technology”(CTE NEXT), a new project by the Ministry of Economic Development which builds upon Torino City Lab, enlarging its scopes, assets and services for the next 4 years. 

CTE NEXT will be a centre of technology transfer in sectors identified as strategic for the territory: smart mobility, industry 4.0 and innovative urban services.