The Innovation Centre will be focused on the development of sustainable, recycled, and recyclable premium papers and self-adhesives.

Located next to Fedrigoni’s Verona office, the centre will bring Fedrigoni’s research teams with academics, start-ups and customers in a space designed explicitly for collaboration.

Marco Nespolo, Fedrigoni Group CEO, said: "This ambitious project facilitates a multi-faceted collaboration between our suppliers and strategic partners to create a significant impact on the entire ecosystem in which we operate.

"Without continuous innovation, there is no future. Improvement not only comes through R&D but also through the exchange of experiences and insights between different parties with complementary skillsets.

"This helps broaden our perspectives to think of bigger and better solutions for our industry and the sectors we serve.”

The Innovation Centre, opening in Q1 2024, will be divided in four parts.

The first, Fedrigoni’s research labs, will be fitted with laboratories for analysing new and recycled materials, testing, prototyping and printing machines, including an HP Indigo 7K digital press, and a “first-of-its-kind” fully automated sample warehouse, with over 8,000 samples.

The second, called FedLab, will focus on transforming new ideas into practical products, providing a space for the company’s existing relations with research centres and universities.

The centre will likewise have a customer experience centre and customer academy.

The experience centre will, Fedrigoni said, be “an interactive and immersive space” with touch-screen tables to help stakeholders, brands, designers and printers design and configure the products they need. 

A crowd-sourcing system will likewise gather their insights for researchers to use when developing new papers.

The customer academy, finally, will be a learning, training and events space for Fedrigoni, its customers, and research partners.

The manufacturer said it hoped the academy would become a “point of reference” for the global specialty paper and self-adhesive market to collaborate within.