2021 Sustainability Report
INNOVATION AND SUSTAINABLE FINANCE AS ACCELERATORS OF CHANGE INNOVATION Continuous, systemic innovation is a strategic driver for the Group’s strengthening of its leadership positions in the sectors in which it operates. Through innovation, the Group aims to offer increasingly higher quality services tailored to the specific needs of passengers, customers and other stakeholders. Innovation covers every link in the value chain, from design, to construction and maintenance and, finally, to the delivery of safe, integrated, made-to-measure transport services. Faced with a highly uncertain scenario dominated by the pandemic, the FS Italiane Group is even more compelled to rethink and reorganise its services and how it uses the infrastructure, making innovation an accelerator of change. The NRRP provided a huge stimulus by allocating considerable resources to the FS Italiane Group to build and design new railway infrastructure and upgrade existing infrastructure focused on sustainability, accessibility, digitalisation, resilience and interconnection.
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Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane will play a crucial role in Italy’s revival, not only in the amount of investments it will manage but also and above all in its ability to offer innovative solutions from a technical and sustainability point of view.
More specifically, the Group plays an active role in Horizon Europe, the EU’s key funding programme for research and innovation which helps to achieve the UN’s SDGs and boosts the EU’s competitiveness and growth.
At the end of 2021, the Group began work on drafting its new 20222031 business plan. In addition to putting the resources allocated by the NRRP to use, it will also give great impetus to making FS’ business more sustainable, digital and integrated.
In addition to activities performed with sector associations and European institutions, the Group was very active in interacting with innovative start-ups and SMEs: over 1,240 from 2018 to 2021. Specifically, while the 2018-2020 three-year period was dedicated to boosting the deal flow of innovative solutions from a quantitative viewpoint, in 2021 scouting was structured in a manner to improve the quality of potentially interesting innovative solutions, in order to increase the success rate of co-innovation projects rolled out as Proof of Concept (PoC).
The Group continues to be very active regarding research and innovation activities funded by the European Union through global consortia with over 100 partners including universities, research bodies, industry and sector operators. The portfolio of projects under way in 2021, chiefly focused on multimodal mobility, safety and aerospace technologies for monitoring infrastructure and signalling, received €72.8 million in EU funds over their lifespans, of which roughly €2.5 million allocated to the FS Italiane Group.
With regard to innovation and sustainability, the Group signed new partnerships with Snam, Eni, Enel and Sapio, focused on the transition to energy from alternative sources (hydrogen, biofuels, LNG, renewable sources), and with Acea
