Automatic English translation of the article published in L'Espresso, 14 August 2026, pp. 74-77.
Top Patents, but What We Need Here Is Industry
Gianaurelio CunibertiIn December 1962, one hundred dollars was enough to buy thirteen shares in Berkshire Hathaway, the textile company that Warren Buffett would later transform into one of the world's largest investment holdings. They cost seven dollars and fifty cents each. With one hundred dollars, enough to buy around thirteen shares, you were investing a little more than an industrial worker's entire monthly wage. Today, those shares would be worth around 9.6 million dollars.
Time does not merely preserve the value of good choices: it often multiplies it. And it also multiplies the cost of the choices we failed to make. This is what economists call opportunity cost: the value of the best alternative we give up.
For a country, however, the consequences are much deeper. A missed industrial opportunity does not cost only the revenue that is never generated. It costs the factories that are not built, the engineers who are not trained, the suppliers that do not grow, the patents that do not generate further patents, and the companies that never become large enough to finance the next generation.
Missed opportunities also generate compound interest. The difference is that they generate it somewhere else.
Modern Italian history can be read through this lens. Possessing the resources of the previous technological paradigm does not guarantee leadership in the next one.
The Republic of Genoa, for example, understood credit, sovereign risk and the need to protect financiers long before many modern states did. The Genoese genovino, the Republic's gold coin, stood at the summit of the monetary and commercial world of its time. But today's debates about de-dollarisation remind us of an old truth: monetary power cannot indefinitely be separated from productive capacity.
What distinguished the countries that led the next cycle was precisely their ability to transform capital, knowledge and energy into a new productive system. Britain's Industrial Revolution combined abundant, low-cost coal with technical innovation, capital, infrastructure, markets, institutions, the organisation of labour and the ability to manufacture at scale.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Germany refined that model by linking banks, large companies, technical education and scientific research. The United States added an enormous continental market, standardisation, mass production and, later, access to oil, gas and electricity at competitive prices.
Italy entered that transformation burdened by late political unification, inadequate infrastructure, low literacy, limited access to coal and enormous territorial inequalities. That difficulty has never entirely disappeared.
Italy continues to produce inventions, expertise and prototypes of world-class quality. Far less often does it succeed in turning them into global industrial platforms.
In 1965, in New York, Olivetti unveiled the Programma 101, a revolutionary desktop electronic calculator. Yet even that success was already marked by a compromised future. Olivetti had just sold 75 per cent of its Electronics Division to General Electric, and that decision was already redefining its industrial trajectory.
It thereby weakened the possibility of building around those capabilities an industrial platform of sufficient size, capitalisation and durability.
Today we stand at the threshold of a new transition, perhaps the largest industrial transition we have ever seen. What is emerging is the convergence of artificial intelligence with the physical world.
Humanoid robots are its most spectacular manifestation. A robot is a complex physical machine, at the heart of which are actuators, the devices that transform energy and digital commands into movement, force and precision. They can account for more than 60 per cent of the cost of the machine.
In physical artificial intelligence, precision mechanics is not a relic of the past. It is a strategic technology.
In machinery and mechatronics, Italy is home to more than 18,000 companies, the highest number in Europe, and ranks second in Europe for the sector's value added, employment and exports.
But we must not confuse a good starting position with a victory already secured.
A constellation of excellent suppliers does not amount to an industrial platform. If the robot design, software, data, capital and access to the market belong to others, Italy risks selling components and then buying back complete systems.
The industrial margins remain here; the technological rents go elsewhere.
In 2024, 542,000 industrial robots were installed worldwide. Seventy-four per cent of new installations took place in Asia, compared with 16 per cent in Europe. China alone accounted for more than half of the global market. Europe retains a high density of robotics, but the centre of gravity of production, demand and experimentation is shifting.
The history of Boston Dynamics demonstrates that advanced robotics requires much more than a brilliant laboratory. Born in the MIT environment, the company passed through Google and SoftBank, but only under the ownership of a large automotive manufacturer such as Hyundai, with expertise in actuators, are we beginning to see the difference.
In 2026, Hyundai Mobis announced that it would supply the actuators for Atlas, Boston Dynamics' new industrial humanoid robot. Atlas is intended for its first applications in the automotive group's manufacturing systems.
This is no coincidence.
An automotive group possesses the entire ecosystem needed to transform a robotic prototype into an industrial machine. It is precisely this ability to integrate research, product development, manufacturing and markets that remains so often fragmented in Europe.
Italy can provide decisive manufacturing and mechatronics expertise, but this challenge cannot be addressed within the borders of a single country. The necessary scale must therefore be continental.
And Europe has already shown that it can build global industries even when it starts late.
Airbus emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s from cooperation between European governments and industries. In 2000, the establishment of EADS brought together French, German and Spanish activities. Europe was not first in commercial aviation, but it created the scale necessary to become one of the world's two dominant players.
Robotics is not aviation. The cycles are faster, the market is more fragmented, and startups and software play a greater role.
But we need to reproduce the ambition that made Airbus possible: pooling demand, capital, research, standards and manufacturing capacity.
The Draghi Report points in this direction.
Between 2008 and 2021, almost 30 per cent of unicorns founded in Europe moved their headquarters outside the European Union, overwhelmingly to the United States. Europe knows how to generate research, talent and companies. What it still cannot consistently provide is the capital, market and speed required to allow them to grow without losing their decision-making centres.
Italy can position itself as a European platform for actuators, mechatronics, manipulation, safety and the industrialisation of robotics.
It must finance pilot plants, establish testing and certification centres, create permanent links between universities and factories, support growth capital for hardware companies, and use public demand in areas such as healthcare, logistics, civil protection and maintenance.
Europe must provide the rest of the scale: common standards, computing power, access to data, semiconductors, robotic models, protection of industrial intellectual property and coordinated procurement.
The European Commission has already included a European Robotics Catalyst in its Apply AI strategy, intended to connect user industries, developers and research. What is now needed is to turn coordination into production and financing into a market.
But there is a deeper and more urgent need that can no longer be postponed: a radical cultural change.
We cannot continue to finance invention and then abandon industrialisation.
Only 12 per cent of European startups that raise more than EUR 100 million in investment retain their centre of control in Europe. We cannot ask universities to generate patents without building patient capital capable of supporting years of development, pilot plants and industrial growth before a return is realised.
Nor can industrial policy be entrusted to short-lived, fragmented incentives that lack a clearly identifiable technological demand.
The objective is not to manufacture every component in Italy or in Europe: technological autarky is an illusion.
The objective is to retain sufficient expertise, companies and productive capacity to be able to choose our own future, rather than depending entirely on the decisions of others.
The opportunities we fail to turn into factories return to us in the form of products we have to buy, technologies we have to license, and dependencies we have to manage.
The course can still be corrected, but doing so requires explicit choices and shared responsibility.
The future matters (
Il futuro importa!), a great deal, but it is not something that simply arrives by itself.
It is financed.
It is built.
It is produced.
And above all, the future is not something you import. (
Il futuro non si'importa!)
Gianaurelio Cuniberti is Professor of Materials Science and Nanotechnology at Dresden University of Technology, was awarded the "Stella d'Italia" in 2024, is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, an elected member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech), and president of SIGN, the Network of Italian Scientists in Germany.
