\ Creazione d'Impresa \ Fifty innovative startups at the CES in Las Vegas: Area Science Park with ITA leads Italy at the most important tech fair in the world

A prestigious stage for conquering international markets, but also an opportunity to test yourself and validate your business idea. The national research body Area Science Park returns in 2024 to the CES in Las Vegas – the largest and most important technology industry trade fair in the world, scheduled from January 9^th to 12^th, 2024 – and it will be accompanying the 50 Italian startups set up in the pavilion organized by ITA Agency inside Eureka Park, the CES exhibition area dedicated to “bottom-up” innovation.

«The Area Science Park has been active for years in supporting the internationalization of innovative Italian companies, but the recent evolution is important», explains Fabrizio Rovatti, technologist manager of Area Science Park. «Our institution is by definition a reality that creates synergies between technological research and the markets, meaning, especially with regards to deep tech, also setting its sights abroad. Bringing technology-based startups to contexts like the CES means making it possible for them not only to come into contact with potential industrial partners and research centers among the most important on the world scene, but also to have concrete and direct feedback from the market, as they have the opportunity to discuss their ideas with other companies and startups active in the same sectors. In these contexts, today we no longer go just to look for investments, but we go with the hope of building partnerships as well as creating research and co-innovation projects”.

This year too, as in its previous participations, Area Science Park organized an academy devoted to the startups of the pavilion which, through a series of training meetings with experts in the sector, have been able to best prepare themselves for the experience in Las Vegas: from indications on how to create the perfect pitch, to training on how to approach technological and industrial partners and the media present at the fair, for the purpose of maximizing business opportunities and visibility.

The institution will also be a key member of one of the thematic panels – on deep tech innovation – which will be held in the arena set up inside the pavilion, where meetings of in-depth analysis will alternate with national and international stakeholders from the world of innovation, pitches by the Italian startups and presentations of some of the most interesting innovative companies present in the pavilions of the other participating countries at Eureka Park.

Programs for innovative companies

The mission of Area Science Park at the CES in Las Vegas is part of a strategy in support of innovative high-tech companies, which holds together the consolidation of a national open innovation ecosystem and the activity of generating research and business opportunities at the international level, especially the American one.

In 2023, the Startup Marathon reached its fourth edition; this is an initiative of Area Science Park, UniCredit and Fondazione Comunica which, through competition among young innovative companies, stimulates the creation of synergies among the organizations that support them, the world of research, industry and venture capital. A constantly growing initiative which, in its latest edition received more than 30 participants among which incubators, accelerators, universities and other research institutions that help startups come about and grow. Agencies that in turn nominated 61 of their most interesting institutions for the contest, institutions which thus had the opportunity, in the various phases of the event, to come into contact with large companies and investors.

Among the initiatives to promote the internationalization of innovative Italian companies, Area Science Park created, along with the American non-profit organization Serena Foundation, the “Primo Innovare” format. In the two summits held in Seattle at the end of 2022 and the end of 2023, and in the events in Boston and New York during the year, dozens of Italian companies operating in deep technologies had the opportunity to come into contact with some of the largest players in the American tech industry, such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others.

Area Science Park has also entered into a partnership with Prospera Women, a Silicon Valley reality that brings together programs to support female-led startups around the world. Two startups that stood out in the past editions of Startup Marathon will participate in a program in the United States in 2024.