UC Berkeley, power company Enel launch innovation hub

UC Berkeley, power company Enel launch innovation hub
CITRIS director Costas Spanos speaks to a crowd gathered for the Enel Innovation Hub ribbon-cutting at Sutardja Dai Hall. (Photo by Adriel Olmos, CITRIS and the Banatao Institute)

A new CITRIS partnership with Enel is a promising step towards increasing innovation at the University of California.

Berkeley News, March 7, 2017 – The UC Berkeley campus has a new innovation hub that is the result of a partnership between Enel, a multinational power company, and the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the Banatao Institute.

The Enel Innovation Hub will join the CITRIS Foundry, an on-campus startup accelerator focused on deep technology companies from the University of California. The partnership will allow closer collaboration between Enel and promising Berkeley-affiliated startups. Enel is the first corporation to establish a unique partnership with CITRIS that leverages both startup innovation through the CITRIS Foundry Accelerator and world-class academic research at UC Berkeley.

“Together with these public and private partners, we are shaping the future of technology transfer in ways that cross traditional boundaries,” said Costas Spanos, the director of CITRIS and the Banatao Institute.

The innovation hub’s ribbon-cutting ceremony took place today at CITRIS’s Sutardja Dai Hall. In addition to Spanos, at the ceremony were Ernesto Ciorra, the Enel Group’s head of innovation and sustainability; Francesco Venturini, head of Enel’s global renewable energies division, Enel Green Power; and Henry Chesbrough, a professor at the Haas School of Business and executive director of the Center for Open Innovation.

Read the full story at Berkeley News

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The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the Banatao Institute drive interdisciplinary innovation for social good with faculty researchers and students from four University of California campuses – Berkeley, Davis, Merced, and Santa Cruz – along with public and private partners.

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