Insights · 12 November 2026
The talent workshop and the risk paradox: why ITS academies should learn from startups
ITS Academies work: 41,000 students and nearly 80% employed. But training talent able to master uncertainty takes schools that think like startups. Here are ten out-of-the-box ideas.
A paradox runs through Italy's industrial districts, from the Lombard mechatronics valleys to the new tech hubs of the South. On one side, a foretold emergency: by 2035 companies will need 143,000 new specialised technicians a year to keep up with the digital and green transition. On the other, employers' bitter observation: young people arrive knowing the theory, but freeze when faced with the unexpected. What is missing is that buccaneering spark we call a propensity for innovation.
The answer to this skills mismatch exists and works: the ITS Academy. A proudly Italian model now crossing borders: on 11 November an ITS delegation came to the European Parliament in Brussels to show Europe how to build the bridge between school and factory floor. The numbers back it: 41,000 students and employment rates close to 80% one year after graduation, almost always in roles matching their studies.
Yet there is a glass ceiling we are about to hit. This comes not from conferences but from a dual vantage point on the front line: inside ITS project and teaching dynamics, and inside the most innovative companies. Two worlds that touch, but move at incompatible speeds.
The problem: an ITS run like a company
Today an ITS is designed, governed and assessed with the mindset of an established company, whose golden rule is minimising risk. Every new idea must immediately prove feasibility, technical sustainability and a certain return.
It is a reassuring logic that protects budgets. Applied to education, though, it produces curricula built on technologies already digested and consolidated: safe programmes, but inevitably already old.
If we want talent able to master uncertainty, we must stop managing ITS academies like companies and start thinking of them as education startups.
The lesson of the garage
In the garages where real revolutions are born, a startup does not seek reassurance: it chases innovation without inhibitions, embracing odd ideas and untrodden paths. The pact is ruthless but vital: nine ideas out of ten will fail, and that is the only way for the tenth, the one that changes the rules, to flourish.
This lack of brakes is what our education system misses. Schools fear teaching something that "might not be useful", and so they teach students not to take risks.
The classroom as a test ecosystem
An ITS that thinks like a startup welcomes educational risk: it hands students immature technologies, AI algorithms not yet standardised, frontier challenges. Not to give them a static skill for the next day, but to get them used to moving through unexplored territory.
The classroom stops certifying what exists and becomes a fluid lab, where every failure is useful data.
Ten out-of-the-box ideas for a startup-minded ITS
1. The failure budget. A fixed share of hours and resources is reserved for projects that may fail. What is assessed is the quality of the experiment and what was learned, not the outcome.
2. Failure Day. Once a semester, students, teachers and companies publicly share their best mistake and what they took from it. Failure becomes culture, not shame.
3. Beta courses. Every year at least one module is built on a technology released in the last six months, co-designed with students and rewritten as it runs.
4. The lab that goes to the company. A mobile lab parks in a company's yard for two weeks: students work on a real problem next to the technicians, with frontier tools on board.
5. The pirate teacher. Every course hosts an "innovator in residence" from a startup or research centre who brings an unsolved problem, not a lecture.
6. Hackathons instead of exams. Part of the assessment happens in 48-hour challenges on real business cases, judged by a mixed school-industry panel.
7. The school's digital twin. Students build a digital twin of a local plant or process and test scenarios impossible to try in the real world.
8. Student micro-ventures. The most promising ideas get a small budget and a mentor to become spin-offs: the ITS as an incubator, not just a school.
9. The technical committee as a venture board. Companies stop asking for "ready-to-use" profiles and bet on risky projects, like an investor who knows only one in ten will win.
10. AI as a lab partner. Local AI assistants, installed securely, help design, simulate and document, while students learn to challenge their answers.
The cultural leap companies must make
Companies on ITS technical committees cannot ask schools for well-worn "spare parts". They need the courage to use these institutes as R&D sandboxes, investing in the hungry approach that, now structured and heavier, they can no longer afford internally.
Only by accepting the risk of educational failure on experimental technologies will we train a generation of professionals who do not wait for the instructions, but write them. It is the direction Annoluce works in every day, with mobile labs and innovation projects built together with ITS academies.
“An ITS that thinks like a startup does not train spare parts: it trains people who write the instructions.”