Italian Lombardy is Leading in AI Development in the EU

European Union is the main source of funding for the Italian regions to promote the development of entrepreneurial activity on a territorial basis. To a large extent, this is a partial refund of Italy's contribution to the budget of the EU in the form of funding for research and development, innovation, thus increasing the competitiveness of Italian SMEs.

Between 2014 and 2020, the European Regional Development Fund transferred almost 1 bln euros to the Italian region of Lombardy. Lombardy has not been chosen by chance: the region was able to efficiently spend European financial resources on the promotion and implementation of projects agreed with the EU with maximum return. Region is currently negotiating with Brussels on the allocation of a new tranche for the 2021–2027 period. The amount of funding has not yet been determined, but the region has already adopted a “Document on strategic goals”, which establishes that 45% of all financial revenues will be spent on research, innovation and improving competitiveness.

In the process of determining strategic priorities, the state regional administration applied artificial intelligence with a qualitative and quantitative assessment of needs and subsequent actions — in order to provide decision-makers with the necessary levers to enforce decisions at the regional government level.

The methodology patented by the Lombardy region is based on an automatic comparison of target industries: the scope of participation and the performance indicator are identified starting with the analysis of information driven by big data. Then comes a comparison with a group of comparable regions.

In each field of application, levers are identified that the region can directly manage for improvement, which is based on the past experience of experimental regions that have already introduced AI. In this way, the impact of a positive experience is modelled to prevent negative trends in other European regions. A true innovation of the methodology is the technology of automatic analysis to identify the main problems and flaws in the Lombardy region and the levers of possible impact in order to overcome the flaws and strengthen positive trends for the further improvement. The big data analysis methodology allows to explore scenarios and study the impact of different choices as part of predictive analysis.

Such a methodology strengthens the position of the Lombardy region in negotiations with the EU on financing since it is based not only on the ability to efficiently spend allocated funds, but also on achieving strategic results by projecting and modelling the effects arising directly from the data of AI application.

Since data-based analysis is intended to help Lombardy become a leading region in the field of innovation in Europe, regional indicators were compared with the average for Italy, which resulted in a large gap between Lombardy and other Italian regions. In addition to comparisons at the national level, data were also compared with three leading innovation regions in Europe: Baden-Württemberg in Germany, Rhône-Alpes in France and Catalonia in Spain.

Comparisons were made both in terms of index and dynamics. Studies on patenting were carried out on specific indicators: the Lombardy region has sufficient scientific and technical potential, (including scientific publications and the number of employed high-tech workers) to increase the number of patents per million population by 13%.

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