A close relationship between historical awareness and innovation

Our innovative tradition, is the title that sums up the identity and projects defined by the annual assembly of Museimpresa, which met last Tuesday in Milan to renew the executive bodies and the programme for the three-year period '25-'27. This might sound like an oxymoron. In reality, it confirms the orientations developed in recent years by the Association (founded in 2001 on the initiative of Assolombarda and Confindustria), insisting on the close relationship between historical awareness and innovation, between memory and the future, as original characteristics of Italian business culture and as a real "competitive asset" of our companies on international markets. A 'polytechnic culture', capable of original syntheses between humanistic knowledge and scientific knowledge and therefore stimulating to give a new direction to tradition and the revival of 'beautiful and well-made'.

In today's competitive environment, which has become much more uncertain and selective (geopolitical tensions and trade wars are disrupting traditional value chains), the values of identity, quality of products and production processes, and the strong signs of environmental and social sustainability inherent to the Made in Italy label emerge to the fore. And Museimpresa's 160 members and institutional supporters, in their historical archives and company museums, offer exemplary evidence of these values. Essential components of a positive 'social capital' to relaunch the productivity and competitiveness of Sistema Italia and to contribute to the definition and construction of a better industrial policy with a European outlook.

Museimpresa will therefore focus its efforts on a series of essential actions to promote business culture as a transversal resource for the economic, educational and social development of the country. The goal: the expansion of the national network of business museums and archives, seen as a cultural and productive infrastructure to be made available to the economy and the markets in order to reinforce, in public opinion and among political decision-makers, the positive perception of business as a place for building positive processes of work, change, innovation and widespread wellbeing. An enterprise to be valorised as an open space for new generations to cultivate and realise their projects of achievement and growth.

Another priority axis will be the expansion of collaboration with cultural, educational and university institutions, to generate synergies, design common research and training paths, and disseminate the values of enterprise and responsibility.

Museimpresa is thus, ever more clearly, a space for connecting identity, memory and innovation. Precisely in the season of the primacy of the 'knowledge economy', in the face of the controversial challenges of the 'environmental and digital transition', we strongly feel the responsibility of preserving and relaunching the founding values of Italian enterprise: creativity, know-how, the culture of work, and beauty understood as a form of knowledge. And so we intend to confirm and expand our commitment to building a living network of museums and business archives, places that not only tell the story, but speak to the present and inspire the future of a new and more robust 'industrial pride'.