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Our mission is to help you innovate
We guide you on developing new products and services by combining skills, methods and location.

We support companies and start-ups in brainstorming, product development and the innovation process in their day-to-day business. Choose from a wide range of service in innovation management, including support from experts, specific workshops, setting up opportunities for cooperation and matching with start-ups and researchers.

Where do ideas like these come from? The ones that are beyond our horizon. That unhinge business models and create markets. How do we get to radical innovation?

Find out here

Making ideas tangible. Improving products. That is innovation: product innovation, to be precise, also known as incremental innovation. Are you and your team grappling with an idea or a problem and searching for a solution? Pi Innovation services provide companies with support in the development and validation of product innovations. And to encapsulate our aims, we have borrowed a letter from the Greek alphabet – Pi, the number 3.14, and a mathematical certainty. From every radius, Pi calculates the circumference and area of a circle - and the result is always accurate. And this is also Pi Innovation’s claim: we optimise products and develop prototypes. And are certain of our results.
Pi Innovation structures product innovation in five steps:

  1. EXPLORE: firstly, understand the problems and needs of the customers and the market;
  2. CREATE: start the creative development of the product;
  3. PROTOTYPE: develop a testable prototype (minimum viable product);
  4. VALIDATE: validate and evaluate the result;
  5. BUSINESS MODELLING: and finally, create a business model and receive the first customer feedback.

Pi-Innovation builds. On ideas and products.

Not quite what you are looking for? Innovation should begin at a later stage, where the “new” is yet too foggy to discern? Or where the innovation is radical, and goes by the name of Alpha?

Then click here: Alpha Innovation at NOI begins where innovation has yet to take shape.

Companies propose a challenge, students respond!
This is Students Sprint, an immersive 5-day’s innovation sprint, hosted in February 2022 for the first time, here at NOI.
South Tyrolean companies were invited to present an innovation challenge they were each facing within the field of circular economy.
The Free University of Bolzano formed challenge-specific interdisciplinary teams of 3-5 students that co-created solutions under the mentorship of experts and researchers.

Read more about last year’s edition here

*We are preparing next year’s edition taking place in autumn 2023. We will keep you posted!

 

Matchmaking in the entrepreneurial sense ‑ we network established companies with innovative start-ups. Assistance in accessing suitable start-ups is undertaken in three steps that can be taken simultaneously or independently of one another:

Start-up Radar: creating an overview of the most important start-ups in a particular field of technology.

Innovation Challenge: workshop with employees of the company and 10 to 20 specially selected start-ups.

Acceleration: support and facilitation of a 4 to 6 month corporate Acceleration Programme with specially selected start-ups.

All three steps are usually handled by external partners who are selected by us based on the needs of the client.