Agency

The Foligno office has been in operation since 2001. It accelerates and systematically creates new companies by providing a wide range of integrated services. These include the physical incubation spaces, the support services for business development and the opportunities for integration and networking.

By providing these services and limiting the expense by cost sharing and economies of scale, business incubation significantly improves the survival and prospects of development for new start-ups.

The Foligno office essentially, but not exclusively, specialises in topics of innovation linked to the excellent businesses in the territory. It recognises a priority for the creation of initiatives with innovative characteristics, especially in health technologies.

The structure tends to attract individuals from its role centre stage in a series of relations, in which the technological companies are the qualified players, the production centres of knowledge and investors. In other words, our vision has widened to encompass the role of “campus”, focusing on technological innovation.

Topics

The Health Technology Campus, planned as part of the regional campuses, is part of a wider plan of specialisations in the Sviluppumbria system.

The Foligno incubator has been identified as the place to create the Health Technology Campus. The sector encompasses health in the broadest sense and includes pharmacology. It also extends to the agro-food and veterinary sectors and to industrial biotechnologies.

The Campus was located in the Foligno incubator essentially due to the presence within the incubator itself of the different businesses operating in the biomedical sector. Some of these already belong to institutional groups, such as the Biomedical Cluster of Umbria. Furthermore, some of the major companies in terms of numbers of employees and turnover in the regional biomedical panorama are located here.

The activity aims to create a centre, the Health Technology Campus, where new projects can be designed, where innovative start-ups and spin offs will find a niche to develop their potential, where it will be possible, in particular, to interpret the technological requirements of the companies, focus regional actions to support research and innovation and allow the development of intercompany relationships and research centres.

All this to encourage the transfer of competencies, information and skills of the leading enterprises to the small enterprises, to strengthen the image of each individual company and increase productive specialisation.

Structure and services

The Foligno incubator provides newly created companies with a localisation package at a competitive cost to strategically support the enterprise. This consists of:

• a turnkey, operational head office, already perfectly adequate for business activities and complete with a series of facilities (post distribution; porter’s lodge and visitor reception; night surveillance; car park; maintenance and cleaning of common areas);
• a complex of services, which can be varied and personalised according to the needs, conceived to work side by side with the entrepreneur from the processing phase of the project idea to its implementation and throughout the start-up, with the supply of a package of integrated services of consultancy, training and dedicated finance.

From the structural viewpoint, the incubator is divided into 5 buildings intended for three different types of use:

The service centre covers a surface area of 837 m². It includes offices, a 98-seat conference hall and a training classroom with approximately 20 seats for conventions and training activities for the guest companies or other users.

The high tech laboratories cover a surface area of 1,750 m² intended for innovative enterprises using advanced technologies or service companies. They are divided into 20 units of various sizes (from 55 to 135 m²). However, they are constructed in modules to allow a wide variety of solutions.

The industrial laboratories have a total surface area of 2,250 m² for new manufacturing, industrial or craft activities. They are divided into 11 200 m² modular units, each with independent services.

Service access procedures

The procedures to access the incubation services are set out transparently by the regulations that envisage:

• admission requisites: micro-enterprises, manufacturing and service provider SMEs (excluding commercial activities) in the start-up or pre-start-up phase or that wish to diversify/widen their activity;
• procedure for admission applications: completion of a question format with methodological support from Sviluppumbria personnel;
• criteria of application assessment: assessment of the consistency of the applicant’s profile with the idea, the feasibility of the project, the technical, economic and financial viability of the initiative;

• operational procedures of the relationship of incubation: draft of a standard contract with an integrated offer of services, which unequivocally sanctions, amongst other things, the duration of the relationship (three years, which can be extended to five) and the contents of the services offered.