ARCA is a consortium for the application of research and the creation of innovative enterprises, established in 2003, which has exploited a partnership between the University of Palermo and a private entrepreneurial group committed to industrial research and technological transfer.

In 2005 the Consortium started up the ARCA Incubator to promote and assist the generation of innovative business initiatives. The incubator is located within the University of Palermo campus, covering a total area of about 1,500 square meters and is built around a system of common spaces (co-working areas, lounge area, printing facilities), units for businesses, offices, staff & meeting rooms, training classrooms and technological labs.

ARCA promotes, too, industrial research and technological transfer programs customized to the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises, networks and industrial districts.

Données de contact des acteurs impliqués

• Nom et Prénom : LA COMMARE UMBERTO
• Qualité : Deputy Rector for Business Incubation activities & President of ARCA Consortium
• Organisation : UNIVERSITY OF PALERMO
• Adresse : VIALE DELLE SCIENZE, EDIF.8
• Téléphone : +39 091 6615611
• Email : umberto.lacommare@unipa.it
• Site web : www.consorzioarca.it

Ancrage dans son contexte 

ARCA experience is the result of the joint efforts of public and private actors who in 2003 decided to devise and test a turnaround in the way of doing business in Sicily, in Southern Italy where the unemployment rate of young people under 24 in 2014 reached 56% and only 20.8% women work. It is a region affected from a demographic tsunami, destined to lose 4.2 million inhabitants in the next 50 years, reducing dramatically the number of resident youngest people. The low birth rate, the absence of work resulting into low attraction of foreign people and investments and massive emigration to the Centre-North of Italy and abroad (which affected more than 1.6 million people from 2001 to 2014), are likely to transform the region gradually into a depopulated area, more and more elderly and dependent on the rest of the country. The context is characterized from an average yearly reduction of gross domestic product, as compared to the Italian average, thus confirming an ongoing development gap between the North and South regions in the country, from a loss of jobs due to the economic recession and to the collapse of industrial employment and a low employment rate of qualified young people. As a matter of fact, graduates are at the centre of this unstoppable brain drain process, as a proof of the incapacity of the region to absorb qualified personnel.

To help Sicily grow up, it was, and still is, necessary to reinforce and support the initiatives of industrial development and exploit the endogenous potential of this region at the centre of Mediterranean basin. Sicily, for a number of historical reasons, is chronically suffering of a lack of entrepreneurial culture, which has had serious effects on the capability of the society to counter fight the consequences of global competition; furthermore, those who embarked on a business venture did it so far in a traditional manner. Even the investments in social and economic innovation seem to be thwarted by such a mindset that moves people towards the search of unsustainable public employment rather than to exploit their creative potential.

In this scenario, ARCA business ecosystem succeeded to nucleate and diffuse a new approach to local development, based upon creativity and self-employment, through the emulation of the positive example represented by new young entrepreneurs coming up from university labs and courses.

The joint commitment of the University and of the private partner in ARCA acted as a catalyst towards other local companies linked with the incubator in a cooperation network, because, as a matter of fact, they have experienced, and are still experiencing, a very early contact with new business opportunities and talents growing up from academic R&D, working as an accelerator of the value generation for the local community. The creation and further consolidation of innovative supply chains and ventures, even attracting external investors, like venture capital funds and large enterprises, around the incubator experience proved that the brain drain of qualified young people and creative intelligence can, and must, be stopped.

Visibilité de l’action

ARCA has achieved a high visibility at several levels :

• at local level (gathering different stakeholders around the promotion of entrepreneurial culture and establishing an agreement with the Municipality of Palermo to replicate the university incubator experience in the urban environment through the regeneration of spaces to host cultural and creative new companies)
• at regional level (ARCA is one of the main actors of the process leading to build up the new Regional Innovation Strategy –RIS3 for the period 2014-2020 and to pilot the National Strategy for Inner Areas in rural municipalities)
• at international level (due to its transnational project networks supported by European funds and to its membership of global networks such as Enterprise Europe Network, European Networks of Living Labs and Sustainable Development Solutions Network).

The communication objectives, achieved through the web site and blog, the newsletter, the social media accounts, the organization of events and exhibitions, the entrepreneurship education courses and training workshops, convey from one side the story-telling of ARCA experience, identity and approach to entrepreneurship and innovation, from another side information about the activities, initiatives and projects it is committed to, about the events and, in particular, about the services delivered to the SMEs assisted and incubated. Finally, the communication team gets information from outside about relevant activities to be spread out and promotes their dissemination within the incubator network of contacts.

Transférabilité

The business support and incubation model experienced by ARCA, oriented to the open innovation paradigm and inspired by the Living Lab concept, has been already replicated in other urban premises and in other sites in the region. Moreover, through the NETKITE project, funded under the ENPI CBC MED programme, which was coordinated by ARCA, the model has been successfully shared with other Mediterranean partner countries, such as Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan and Palestine Territories.

Durabilité

The Consortium has afforded a self-sustainability model, based on private investments, incubation fees, technology transfer services, training activities, on-demand services and European funds granted. It is not linked to a short or medium-term project, but it has built up a durable partnership around entrepreneurship, business development, innovation and technology transfer.

Caractère Innovant 

ARCA contributed to start up not just companies, but an innovative educational process consisting of four steps:

1. Advice about change: get young people, leaving the University, achieve a full awareness of what is next, including great uncertainty with respect to their expectations, and then react with their capacity of personal initiative and adaptation to change
2. Entrepreneurship education: a toolkit, a change of mindset to cope with the future, although it does not always result into the set-up of a new company
3. Business support and mentoring: informing, training and coaching young people who want to develop their business idea, reinforce and give substance to it; this is the role of the university incubator as the best place for maturation and validation of business ideas
4. Added value of an entrepreneurial community, as well as a learning and knowledge community: through the incubator and its network of relationships, every start-up does not go it alone, but interacts with others and with experts and senior entrepreneurs to be stronger when entering the market.

The academia got benefits in terms of quality of higher education and review of training curricula following the example of the start-ups. The competitive advantage from a successful incubator is to connect more effectively the knowledge developed and distributed within the academia with the market, consisting of companies, products and consumers. In addition to this, cross-cutting skills have been developed especially in young people as it concerns their capacity to transform their knowledge into innovative products and services, satisfying real market needs. ARCA has encouraged new research demands to solve specific, real-life problems and fostered collaborative and interdisciplinary research, together with the generation of hundreds of qualified jobs.

Impact

ARCA provides start-ups with a set of complementary services within a structured methodology of incubation. The approach adopted is a multi-level network which offers mentoring and access to financial and industrial relations as well as premises and logistics. Advanced laboratories enable companies to carry out pre-industrial development and prototyping activities at competitive costs, in collaboration with our qualified experts and researchers, mainly within joint R&D and technology transfer university-enterprise agreements.

Consultancy support to potential entrepreneurs showed until a few years ago a cultural and professional gap between start-uppers, dealing with the challenge of doing business, and the intermediate bodies called upon to provide them with clear and timely information or managerial training somewhat distant from their educational paths.

Within ARCA, senior entrepreneurs and experts through an innovative approach to mentoring and coaching management support young entrepreneurs for the organizational, legal and financial, contractual and commercial issues as well as for benchmarking with best practices at regional, national and international level, feasibility check and technological due diligence, market positioning and analysis of competitors. The traditional isolation of start-uppers is overcome through a collaborative approach that facilitates prompt access to relevant information, mutual growth and learning and sectoral clustering, which empower them to grow up.

Starting from the support to business creation, ARCA is performing the role of catalyst of a business ecosystem in Western Sicily, promoting the interaction between knowledge-intensive start-ups and research organizations, manufacturing companies and service agencies in a district concept and according to an open innovation approach.