The Fedrigoni Group, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of special papers for luxury packaging and other creative solutions, as well as of premium labels and self-adhesive materials, has chosen to push the research and development accelerator, with the opening, next September, of an "innovation house" for sustainable, recycled and recyclable premium papers and self-adhesive materials.
Located in Verona, Italy, the large 3,000 square metre area, will also host the FedLab incubator for innovative ideas, the Customer Experience Centre and the Customer Academy.
Fedrigoni’s new Research Development & Innovation will be fully operational in the first quarter of 2024. The investment, which will include a share of public funding through NRRP funds, will make it possible to centralise, coordinate and optimise functions that until now have been fragmented across Italy and Europe.
Four complementary areas
The Innovation Centre will consist of four closely complementary areas.
The first will house the group’s Research, Development & Innovation team, with laboratories for the analysis of new raw materials, starting with recycled fibres and alternatives to cellulose; state-of-the-art machines for testing and prototyping innovative treatments while minimising environmental impact; printers for digital printing tests, including the HP Indigo 7K Digital Press printer for which Fedrigoni will be the competence centre for Italy in partnership with HP Indigo; and a fully automated sample warehouse, unique in the world, which will collect over 8,000 samples of special papers.
The second area will be dedicated to FedLab, the incubator- accelerator of new ideas to be transformed into highly sustainable products, services or processes, also through an ecosystem of best-in-class actors, partnerships and collaborations already in place with Italian and foreign universities and research centres such as the Universities of Milan, Naples and Pisa, the International Paper Engineering School of Grenoble Inp-Pagora and the Pulp and Paper Research & Technical Centre (CTP), companies and start-ups that will be able to work together in co-working spaces.
The third area will host the Customer Experience Centre, where Fedrigoni will offer different interactive and immersive experiential paths. The aim is to meet the needs of all visitors - from brands to investors, from graphic designers to printers and converters, from institutions to graphics and communication students, to school groups on educational trips - who will be able to design and configure a customised product in real time. Through a crowdsourcing system, those who wish to can also contribute their own ideas and insights to the development of new solutions.
Lastly, the fourth area will host the Customer Academy, a learning and training centre for the entire Fedrigoni community - colleagues, customers, partners and university students.
