ROME, April 12 (Xinhua) -- The Shanghai Expo is set to become a launch pad for a greater cooperation between Italian and Chinese firms in the field of innovation, Italian Public Administration and Innovation Minister Renato Brunetta told Xinhua on Monday.
"A future marriage between the Italian original style and the Chinese productivity genius could have an explosive effect on the global economy," said Brunetta, who is one of Italy's top economists.
The minister said he had great expectations and looked forward to the expo as a first step toward enhancing bilateral cooperation in several strategic innovation fields, including manufacture and public administration.
"We will be showcasing at the Italian pavilion over 250 high- tech projects that have passed a national competition. Italy is a country of innovators, where our small and medium-sized enterprises are the real protagonists," he said.
The winners of the competition are to take part in the expo. Among the projects are an ecological robot for differentiated waste disposable, a portable ecographer for emergency cases such as earthquakes, and an example of vertical grass walls aimed at improving cities' image.
The competition was launched in honor of the Shanghai Expo and will continue to take place each year as a way to celebrate such ground-breaking global events, the minister noted. Another 250 projects not showcased at the pavilion will be posted on an English-Chinese institutional website for a second "virtual Shanghai."
According to Brunetta, the Shanghai Expo represents a starting point for future bilateral collaborations. "It's an opportunity to outline pioneering projects for the first time ever to the Chinese public. Our goal is to create new partnerships and joint ventures between Italian and Chinese firms," he said.
The potentialities of such a "marriage" are enormous. "If we blend the Italian capacity to innovate with the Chinese production and market power, there will be a great outcome not only in terms of bilateral but also multilateral cooperation," he stressed.
The minister pointed out that the strategic application of the Italian way of life, style, culture and quality to China's powerful manufacturing industry was expected to create an added value to the global economy.
In this major operation, Brunetta said he looked forward to involving the Chinese small and medium-sized manufacture enterprises, which, like their Italian counterparts, represent a core sector of the country's economy.
At the end of July, the minister will be visiting Shanghai and Beijing with a delegation of functionaries for a series of bilateral government meetings.
"I'm very satisfied of going to China," he said. "It's a country with a great culture and elevated market potentialities."
Brunetta's scheduled bilateral meetings in Beijing will focus on the e-government revolution Italy is experiencing. "I will bring to China the Italian model I have lately implemented, focused on bureaucratic simplification and customer satisfaction," he said.
The minister has launched a radical reform in Italy, curbing public employees' inefficiency and using new technologies such as emails, the Internet and e-learning to facilitate the state's dialogue with citizens and firms.
"I think China has similar problems and it's good to discuss together such important issues. Modernizing the public administration is a must," he noted.
Brunetta explained that collaboration and exchange in original ideas and projects inevitably led to a sort of natural osmosis process. He also admitted that he had "borrowed" the idea of customer satisfaction from some Chinese experience.
"I have a little tale to share with you. One day a friend of mine, returning from the Beijing Olympics, told me he had been impressed by the Chinese system of tracking down customers' opinion on the service quality of public officials by pressing a green, red or yellow button. In that precise moment I had the idea of applying the same mechanism in Italy," he said.
"Therefore, I have already used China's innovation. I have copied their customer satisfaction system," he quipped.
Today in Italy more than 300 public offices have introduced touch-screens for customers' approval rates and over 2 million opinions have already been collected.
