My experience: it took me six months to get the project - create a commercial open source product starting from a toolkit made by academic researchers - approved and funded.

I personally interviewed applicants along with FILAS and the professor involved with the project, and and I got three researchers paid for one year.
Besides that they sponsored a marketing research, and at the end of the day we did a very good deal spending some efforts to work on the business model in order to get it approved.

If you have a business idea, give it a try!

I have very little experience with public funding, but of course I know that in some cases they deliver high funds if we compare it to the economics of small companies and start-ups.

From your posts it seems like you have had a positive experience. I don’t have any, actually. What would you advise?

What did you get funding for?

What was the outcome?

How did you report on the results? Were the funds “a fondo perso” or was it a loan with a tiny rate?

Then you’re right, Italian companies do not participate to standardization bodies, and I believe there are a number of reasons, ranging from cultural aspects to linguistic ones.

About R&D expenditures I know that in other countries there are fiscal deductions for firms who invest in R$D.
This might help, I guess.

My personal experience in Italy says that if you have a good project you might help from public institutions, like the Financial Investment Agency of the Regione Lazio (FILAS), who helped me to create a network between a roman university and my company.

I’m looking forward to interview Fabrizio Capobianco,stay tuned!

What I think is crazy is that in Italy there is very little investment (if nothing) in the research and development. Companies always invest internally in projects they feel safe will bring some revenue in the very near future. There is very little pure research.
Investments in new technologies in Italy is very little. Rarely happens that a company spends money on the learning for its employees.
A demonstration of this is the number of Italian companies participating in research activities such as the W3C. The W3C counts 3-4 entities from Italy, one is the CNR and another is Telecom Italia Lab.
Where are all the other companies?

This is what makes me think that open-source can hardly find investments in Italy. Research and open-source today go side-by-side, in my opinion. A lot of research is done in open-source and a lot of innovation came from the open-source, look at PHP or JBoss.
Companies in countries like England, Ireland and France are spending much more money and time in research and development and this will bring them to even more advantage in the future.

I think that the post from Fabrizio Capobianco describes some of these ideas too, in the “The Funambol model: US capital and Italian heart ” paragraph from BAIA invited post on the Funambol model. He is Italian, all the development is done in Pavia, but they had to go to the Silicon Valley to find some money to start working.

I think WURFL has a bright future ahead. Luca and I are working daily to channel the energies of the community to give more fire-power to WURFL.

The idea of open-source in Italy is often to have something for free and not even say “Thank you” to the original developers. I have taken a lot from the open-source world and it feels good to give something back. It is hard to find sponsors in Italy. DADA was an exception and it was good. M:Metrics is a US company and things are different again.
We should try to import the best from the foreign countries and not just hamburgers.