"On the year one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine, on the twenty-fifth day of June," the deed of incorporation of the "Società per la gestione dell'Incubatore d'impresa del Politecnico" was signed in a notary's office in Turin, in the presence of the then Rector of Politecnico di Torino, Rodolfo Zich, and representatives of the other partners. This was the birth of the I3P incubator, which is now preparing to celebrate 25 years of activity with a series of special initiatives over the course of 2024, starting with the presentation of a celebratory logo to mark the anniversary.
From 1999 to the present, 350 innovative start-ups have entered an incubation path in I3P, developing their business projects together with their tutors and mentors, but the incubator itself has also grown over the years, reaching many significant milestones. It was in May 2007, for example, that I3P's current headquarters were inaugurated, the result of a project to recover and restore part of the former OGR workshops: one of the symbols of 20th century industrial Turin that has become an emblem of the entrepreneurial spirit based on technology, research and innovation. "In our vision," explained Professor Vincenzo Pozzolo, then President of I3P, during the inauguration, "the incubator aims above all to be a strong stimulus for cultural change both in the academic world and in the socio-economic context: a laboratory where public research and entrepreneurship, innovative finance and technological development find a ground on which to measure themselves, confront each other and give rise to ever new initiatives". A vision shared over the years and still relevant today.
In 2014, I3P was ranked 5th in Europe and 15th in the world in the UBI Index ranking, which is considered a leader in analysing the performance of business incubators globally; just five years later, the "UBI Global World Rankings of Business Incubators and Accelerators 2019 - 2020" recognised I3P as the Best Public Incubator in the world. This recognition was also welcomed with a restyling of the incubator, which at the end of 2019 also celebrated its 20th anniversary with a complete renewal of its brand identity and the adoption of a new official motto: "We start-up the venture". In recent years, moreover, there has been no shortage of results to celebrate: in 2023 alone, a year in which there was a severe global decline in investments in start-ups, the network of companies that grew up in I3P surpassed the collective milestone of more than €52 million in investments raised, a record figure in the incubator's history that testifies to the value of the innovation produced by start-ups and the confidence of investors in their future development.
And it is precisely to the future that I3P continues to look, always with new projects, activities, and open events in which to involve the world of young innovative enterprises. "For 2024," recently stated Giuseppe Scellato, current President of I3P since 2018, "we foresee a further expansion of activities to support innovative entrepreneurship in the fields of aerospace, artificial intelligence applications in different industrial fields, cybersecurity, and technologies for environmental sustainability". Over the course of this year, the main initiatives launched by the incubator will be 'marked' by a special logo that recalls its 25 years, created both to commemorate the long path followed in this first quarter of a century and to highlight the variety of meeting opportunities for the I3P community that will punctuate the coming months until 2025.
