BUSINESS
DARIO AVALLONE, R&D DIRECTOR, ENGINEERING GROUP
ENGINEERING GROUP EXPAND R&D TEAM IN SERBIA Italian IT company Engineering Group, which operates on the Serbian market under the name Engineering Software Lab, has announced the further expansion of its team in Serbia, with one segment of the planned expansion covering the field of research and development. In order to learn more about this expansion, we spoke with Engineering Group’s R&D Department Director Dario Avallone.
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esearch is one of the fundamental pillars of Engineering Group. What is the key approach? Research represents the first and most fundamental phase of our innovation process. In this process, we can count on a team of 450 researchers, which ensures that we are a well-recognised player in the context of European Industrial Research. This has enabled us to set up a wide and enduring network of research collaborations, both in Europe and worldwide, including the most qualified universities and research institutes, as well as the most innovative representatives of the ICT industry and relevant “users” providing emerging needs for all market sectors. In addition, we have contributed actively to the gradual creation and development of the main European research initiatives on ICT, aiming to cluster the industrial and
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academic view on emerging research and innovation priorities and related implementation strategies. We pay particular attention to the “concreteness and robustness” of our industrial research, but also to the capacity to effectively implement the technological transfer of solutions and skills produced. In other words, experimentation, innovation management and the offer are the three main objectives that form the basis of our R&D activities. This allows us to define a virtuous cycle, able to pick up new methodologies and technologies well in advance, to relate them to our customers’ business processes and thereby add value by following them all the way through their modernisation and “digital transformation”. Which types of R&D projects is Engineering Group involved in? We have participated in more than 500 research projects and are cur-
rently involved in more than 100 projects, with annual investment in R&D exceeding 40 million euros. Our research projects largely pertain to innovation challenges relevant to primary markets, such as Digital Industry, E-Health, Augmented Cities, Smart Energy & Utilities, Smart Government, Societal Physical and Digital Security, Smart Tourism & Culture, Smart Agriculture, Smart Transportation, Digital Media & Communication, as well as research on enabling technologies and architectures that are core to all our markets today and tomorrow, like Cloud and Edge, Cyber Security, Artificial Intelligence, Data/BigData and Collaboration Platforms, Blockchain and Quantum Computing. Our participation in relevant European initiatives and Associations, like FIWARE (providing “vendor independent” standard building blocks to build smart applications), Gaia-X (enabling data and service interoperability that ensures independence from physical infrastructure and/or providers), DAIRO (centred on nextgeneration technologies to exploit the value of data trough novel AI approaches) or IDSA (focusing on providing standards, architecture and software components to implement trusted data sharing within business ecosystems), represent a founding element of our success in research programmes and an essential ingredient for aligning our investments in the proper direction, in terms of
