Leonardo focuses on research and development, increasing the number of young scientists to be included in its Labs and increasing investments in the sector. The Italian giant that operates in the aerospace, defense and security sectors, in 2021 committed 1.8 billion euros on R & d, compared to 1.6 billion the previous year; and in 2022 the commitment will be able to increase, positively affected by both the NRP programs and the major European defense projects. It is in line with this line that the company has just developed a call for proposals for 51 researchers, to expand the Leonardo Labs network of skills; which will lead to 128 young people placed with research contracts in the group. The goal is to reach 200 researchers by 2023. Meanwhile, a new Lab dedicated to logistics is added to the 10 existing laboratories.
Franco Ongaro (former head of ESA research), since February, explains the strategy in place chief technology and innovation officer by Leonardo. “We are setting the future of the company – he says – on an increasingly digital basis: from big data, to high-power computing, to artificial intelligence (Ai), to look forward to quantum computing e quantum communication (which refer to quantum models, ndr). We are trying to create a link between the business areas of the group and this technological push. And we must equip ourselves with a capacity that does not stop only with internal growth. You can’t be credible if your labs don’t produce new knowledge that can compare with the rest of the world. You must therefore publish and be able to prove that the resources you have are doing research. Therefore we have made this call for the new 51 researchers, who are the lifeblood for us. They add to the 77 we already have and we want to increase their number to 200 by the end of next year. We intend to achieve that critical mass of research capacity that allows us to become credible in areas where competition is not our usual one but that of much more famous research institutes. We already know that we will need to have artificial intelligence on all of our vehicles; and we must understand how to make it interpretable and, above all, certifiable ».
Leonardo, continues Ongaro, obviously will not do «full spectrum research, but aimed at identifying what the future is, with respect to the main lines of business of the company. But then there is always a collateral eye and, if we are looking for new researchers to grow our internal capacity, we do not neglect external ideas as well. We have collaborations with all universities and our scientists work with other researchers that we fund within the universities themselves. We also have mechanisms to identify and grow startups “. Leonardo has recently activated 32 scholarships with 13 universities in Italy and abroad. And obviously the group’s pluses contribute to the open innovation of the Labs, such as the calculation possibilities of the davinci-1 supercomputer, artificial intelligence applications and the just launched Cyber and security academy.
“I can say – underlines Ongaro – that I am extremely grateful to my predecessor (Roberto Cingolani, now Minister of Ecological Transition, ndr) because he managed to put in place an exceptional technological plan, infrastructure and philosophy for Leonardo. And the top management of the company had the courage to listen to him and provide him with the means ». On the subject of transition, however, Ongaro recalls the group’s commitment in the field of sustainability: “Today, 50% of the resources we receive from the financial world are linked to meeting the ESG criteria (Environmental, social, governance). We are truly setting up a job that involves the entire company and affects all our processes. The environment, then, is a research area on which we are innovating, both in materials, in the electrification of helicopters and airplanes, and in vehicles. unmanned, both in industrial development processes. We are working on this with our researchers, with the university and with other realities: we have three laboratories in cooperation with the ITT of Genoa and one for research on materials, in collaboration with Solvay ».
The group has just created a new Lab dedicated to logistics. «Leonardo – says Ongaro – has 106 industrial sites around the world and a series of different logistics systems, including IT systems, which are a legacy of the companies we had before. The logistics of the group must be reinvented. Also because, between pandemic and war, the fragility of one supply chain international has become evident to all and efficient logistics is a key to industrial advantage. This laboratory will look at all the big data applications, of Ai and robotics, in the context of the company’s logistics ».