Open Innovation: Techlab™ and Cineca at the Bi-Rex Competence Center

Innovation is the primary genome inherent in the Robopac Group’s DNA, which has always looked globally at the market to ensure the best technologies in the packaging industry and, at the same time, the highest performance in terms of efficiency and production optimization.

In this direction goes the close collaboration with Bi-Rex, one of the 8 national Competence Centres established by the Ministry of Economic Development, whose goal is to act as a strategic and operational support for companies oriented to the digitalization of industrial processes in a 4.0 perspective.

Founded in Bologna in 2018, Bi-Rex is a public-private consortium with 57 players among Universities, Research Centres and Excellence Companies, among which Aetna Group - Robopac appears as one the founding members.

This is an important partnership for Robopac in the business evolution and technological perspective, that allows to implement its know-how and make it available to companies and SMEs, which represent 95% of the industrial network, fully reflecting the standards of the open innovation approach.

"The Italian Competence Centres are able to bring together public and private, University and business research, to possess all the skills and networking resources capable of developing innovative processes” - said in an interview with La Repubblica Stefano Cattorini, BI-REX General Director– “Public-private collaboration is absolutely crucial to accelerate growth".

In this context, Robopac TechLab™ and Cineca are taken as examples of respectively private and public organizations of excellence, within the Bi-Rex Competence Center.

Cineca, Interuniversity Consortium for the Automatic Calculation of the North-eastern Italy, founded in 1969 as non-profit and formed by 93 public bodies, is today the largest computing centre in Italy and one of the most important worldwide, operating under the control of the Ministry of Education, University and Research, which offers its support through supercomputing and its applications.

In the private sector, a model of data usage aimed at the best control of machines and optimization of the productive effect in maximum safety and with the minimum use of packaging materials comes from TechLab™, the most advanced system of research laboratories in the packaging sector developed by the Robopac Group.

The aim of TechLab™ laboratories is to allow the testing of technological solutions through a scientific approach, obtained thanks to the necessary measurement and simulation equipment and through a testing method accredited by Accredia, which guarantees operability according to the highest worldwide standards of competence, independence, and impartiality.

Thanks to the synergy with the two research centres, Bi-Rex aims to provide all interested companies with new business models and enabling services in the field of Industry 4.0 and Enterprise 4.0, with enabling technologies related to the collection and efficient processing of big data, from industrial cloud/edge to artificial intelligence applied to predictive diagnostics and machine learning.

It is an Open Innovation approach, which aims at offering skills and resources to a wide industrial sector, adopting the concepts of IoT (Internet of Things) and Digital Twin as models that can be implemented in different fields, to achieve the best production performance, optimize resources and ensure environmental protection through energy and consumables savings.