Agency

In operation since 1997, the office in Terni is situated in the Sabbione industrial zone, a few kilometres from the town centre, with excellent links to the motorway slip road.

It is the first incubator of enterprises in Umbria and was funded by a contribution from the specific provisions of Law 181/89 to support the areas suffering from the crisis in the steel industry. It contributed to the reconversion of the area traditionally linked to the steel and chemical industries, with activities of research, craft and qualified services.

Mission

The incubator is a tool of territorial development: it encourages the foundation and development of new enterprises, creates new jobs, supports the local economy and promotes specific sectors of production. The objective of the incubator is to provide concrete support to innovative entrepreneurial ideas by offering integrated, logistic and consultancy services, which will help sustain the setup and start-up phases of newly-established businesses or programmes of diversification and expansion of existing companies. This office speeds up the systematic creation of new companies, by providing physical spaces, support services for business development and opportunities for integration, networking and subsidised funding.

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.

Topics

The Terni incubator has only recently abandoned more general hospitality to focus on a more targeted incubation inspired by a specific theme of energy efficiency.

Similarly the incubation structures have become more like a campus. A place for an aggregation of businesses, where it is possible to interpret their technological needs, stimulate the development of relationships, focus regional efforts to support research and innovation. The incubator tends to gather individuals together by placing itself at the centre of a series of relationships that see the technological enterprises, production centres of knowledge and investors as qualified players.

The theme of the Terni incubator is linked mainly to a partnership between Sviluppumbria, RSE and GSE. It aims to construct a hub of aggregation and research on the topic of energy efficiency, from which other projects will burgeon, which will find room in the business centre and lead to a highly technological start-up.

The structure and services

The Terni 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 various buildings, intended for four different types of use:

• The service centre covers a surface area of 800 m². It includes offices, a reception, a 60-seat conference hall and 2 meeting rooms  for conventions and training activities for the guest companies or other users;
• The high tech laboratories cover a surface area of 1,250 m², intended for the localisation of innovative enterprises using advanced technologies or service companies. They are divided into 14 units of various sizes (from 64 to 156 m²). However, they are constructed in modules to allow a wide variety of solutions;
• The industrial laboratories have a total surface area of 1,360 m² for the localisation of manufacturing, industrial or craft activities. They are divided into 10 136 m² modular units;
• The industrial laboratories have a total surface area of 1,080 m², divided into 4 270 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:

a) 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;

b) procedures for admission applications: completion of a question format with methodological support from Sviluppumbria personnel;

c) the assessment criteria for the applications:

• 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:

The draft of a standard contract of 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.