For Steve Blank, one of the great sages of Silicon Valley, innovation is born where there is a concentration of money and crazy people. In Italy, people are trying to create an ecosystem based on the same principles. It is MIND - Milano Innovation District, the innovation district that is being developed less than half an hour by subway from the city center.

It is a million-square-meter area that is taking shape to come full circle in a few years. The promoters are an urban development and regeneration company, Lendlease, an Australian multinational that has taken a 99-year lease on the area, and Arexpo, an investee of the Italian Ministry for Economy, the City of Milan and the Lombardy Region, which owns the land.

A true public-private partnership. The area will host companies, research centers, universities, and accelerators, some of which are already there. And also private citizens, because a residential neighborhood is planned within it. For a total, when fully operational, of 60,000 people.

In order to make big companies work together inside Mind, a formula has been "invented" that has no equal in the world. It is called Federated Innovation and its president is Tommaso Boralevi, an engineer with decades of experience in the United States, co-founder and adviser to several startups.

"We wanted to push companies to cooperate," Boralevi explains. "But how to make sure they were really committed to innovation? The solution was found in the creation of a new company, a new legal entity, which is precisely Federated Innovation. Each company pays an annual amount that guarantees the operation of the society. Right now the budget is € 3 million a year, with this amount they develop innovation projects together."

Today about 40 companies, both Italian and foreign, are members of Federated Innovation. Among them Bracco, Cisco, EnelX, ENI, Novartis, Mapei, Poste Italiane, Astrazeneca (which has its Italian headquarters right inside MIND), Synlab, E.ON. More than 100 projects have started in two years. "These are 'vertical' collaborations, that is, between companies in the same sector, or collaborations in fields other than their own, to create so-called 'lateral innovation.'"

An example? Lendlease and Elettronica, a company specializing in electronic countermeasures for military use (ELT Group), have together developed a revolutionary product that inactivates viruses in the air through the action of electromagnetic waves. Mind is also an international example of urban regeneration, selected by the European research project T-Factor, which studies the impact of temporary uses and involves, in addition to Milan, Łódź, Florence, Dortmund, Barcelona, Marseille, Shanghai, New York, Kaunas, Amsterdam, Bilbao and Lisbon.

Behind the creation of Mind Milano is a legendary figure on the global innovation scene: Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli. A professor of electrical and computer engineering in Berkeley, California, an entrepreneur and co-founder of more than 10 technology companies (two of them listed on Nasdaq with a capitalization of about $120 billion), Vincentelli moved to Berkeley back in 1975. Fifty years later, he was approached by Arexpo and Lendlease of all places to give his vision for building this huge project.

"For innovation to be born there are three indispensable elements: universities, large companies and startups. In Silicon Valley, Berkeley and Stanford played a key role, as well as in Boston Harvard and MIT," he told Millionaire. "That is why we have established here the Human Technopole, the largest Italian life sciences center, which has 380 researchers inside, and when fully operational will contain more than 1,000. We are moving the science faculties of the University of Milan to MIND (in 2025 about 18,000 students will gravitate here). We are also working to establish a presence of the Milan Polytechnic and Bocconi University."

The second key element in fostering an innovation ecosystem is large companies. "This is the hot button in Italy, where there are few large companies. We had to find a way to bring them together, to bring them together in a big project, and we succeeded." But a self-respecting ecosystem cannot do without another big element: startups. And Vincentelli's presence was instrumental in convincing SkyDeck, the UC Berkeley accelerator, to establish its office in Milan.

"This is the first case of a U.S. accelerator's presence in Europe," Vincentelli confirms. It is an exciting accelerator program that lasts six months: the first period in Berkeley, the second in Milan, with Cariplo Factory acting as a catalyst. Not only Italian startups, but also European ones can access it. The goal is to make MIND a major international center of innovation.