Private
and
Public,
together.
Future Farming Initiative S.r.l. is an institutionalized public-private partnership formed by ZERO (51%) and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (49%), within Italy’s NRRP (Mission 4, Component 2, Investment 3.1). It is not an academic consortium. It is not an incubator.
It is an operating company that runs an infrastructure designed to make the passage from ideas to industrial applications efficient, and to make solutions accessible to those able to turn them into value.
51%
49%
A deep-tech company developing technologies for agriculture and Biomanufacturing. It brings what is often missing in technology-transfer systems: a feel for business and for market needs. Not just a partner: it is the infrastructure’s first user. Through FFI, ZERO taps the ecosystem of researchers, inventors and startups to accelerate the development of new products and solutions.
The university brings scientific depth and plays a key role in federating the research system. It connects universities, research centers and expertise spread across the territory, making accessible a body of knowledge that would otherwise remain fragmented. FFI thus becomes a structured point of access to the research system.
A federative and choral approach.
FFI operates as a node in a federation of affiliated research partners, universities and research centers that continuously widen the network. Not a closed structure: a system in expansion.
Every new partner activates skills, every collaboration widens the ecosystem. The result is a continuous flow of intellectual property, talent and scientific capacity.
- Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
- IUAV University of Venice
- University of Trento
- University of Trieste
- National Research Council (CNR)
- University of Udine
- University of Palermo
- Marche Polytechnic University
- University of Verona
- National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics (OGS), Trieste
- University of Padua
- University of Naples Federico II
- International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste
Our focus:
applications and technologies.
We work within the perimeter of Controlled Environment Agriculture and Biomanufacturing, along two complementary axes: vertical applications, production systems that combine technology and biological knowledge for a specific result, and transversal technologies, the enabling tools that make them possible, efficient and scalable.
Vertical applications.
Every application is a distinct production system, with its own biological logic, process parameters and market goals. We support the FFI ecosystem in turning these opportunities into replicable operating platforms, able to move quickly from experimentation to industrial scale.
Transversal technologies.
Enabling tools that make applications possible, optimizable and industrializable. Their value is in transferability: a technology developed for one application can generate efficiency in other application contexts too.
A stack of multidisciplinary,
integrated skills.
Every project requires the same mix: biology, agronomy, process engineering, software, data science, automation, materials science. Not a multidisciplinary approach in the academic sense, but an operational one: different skills on the same system, in the same place, with the same goal.
At the border between two worlds.
FFI works as a horizontal platform at the border between two worlds. On one side, the market and the industrial partners who choose, like ZERO, to leverage FFI for their research and development. On the other, the ecosystem of intellectual-property creators, which can answer industrial needs or open new opportunities to build innovative, IP-rich ventures.
The technical-scientific committee expressed by all federated research partners guarantees rigor. It validates technologies, processes and approaches proposed within the infrastructure.
Knowledge creates value only when it moves. We are building an open system where science and market meet and manage to speak to each other.
Biology defines what is possible; technology determines what becomes real.
Then you need the space to make it happen.
Discover our laboratories