Enrico Pisino discusses the role, figures, and strategy of the center, the state of additive manufacturing in Italy, and the new partnership with ICIM Group to integrate compliance and innovation.
CIM has become a benchmark for industrial innovation with recognized specialization in Additive Manufacturing and Digital Factory. We discuss the center’s role, the state of the art of additive manufacturing in Italy, and the recently signed partnership with ICIM Group regarding certification with Enrico Pisino.
Let’s start with the basics: what is CIM and what is the role of Competence Centers in the Italian innovation landscape?
CIM is one of the eight national Competence Centers established under the National Industry 4.0 Plan, promoted by the Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy. The task assigned to us is clear: to act as a bridge between the world of university research and businesses — particularly SMEs — to accelerate the adoption of enabling technologies through technological orientation, training, and experimentation before investment, what we call Test Before Invest.
We operate within a network of eight centers distributed across the national territory, each with its own vocation. CIM specializes in Aerospace, Automotive, Digital Factory, and Additive Manufacturing, with headquarters in Turin and a direct link to the Polytechnic and University of Turin, our founding members. Alongside us, to name a few: MADE in Milan on enabling technologies, BI-REX in Bologna on big data, ARTES4.0 in Pisa on advanced robotics, SMACT in Padua for Agritech, START4.0 in Genoa for the security of critical structures, CYBER4.0 in Rome on cybersecurity, and MEDITECH in Naples on the integration of 4.0 technologies.
We are a limited liability consortium company, functioning as a non-profit research organization with a public-private partnership structure: 26 founding members — three public administrations, two industrial associations, and 21 companies — and 14 activity partners added over the years, from Accenture to EY, from Amazon AWS to Google Cloud, from Fanuc to Aptiv. We started operations in September 2019 and closed 2025 with a production value of 12.3 million euros, growing steadily since 2019, with a revenue component from private companies that has progressively exceeded public contributions in recent years.
Behind these numbers are the people: more than 60 employees, plus 138 part-time staff provided by the consortium, including 82 senior specialists, 34 junior specialists, and 22 university professors. It is a young team — 60% are under thirty — and balanced, with 45% female representation. In 2025 alone, we met over 1,500 companies, provided more than 600 services to over 350 SMEs, and launched more than 50 innovation projects involving over 60 companies for a total value of approximately 40 million euros. On the training front, our Learning Hub conducted over 90 webinars, 50 workshops, and 80 courses, for a total of 3,500 hours delivered to more than 100 companies.
Let’s focus on Additive Manufacturing: what equipment and expertise have you built, and what is your positioning strategy in this area?
Additive Manufacturing is one of the four pillars upon which we built CIM from the beginning, along with Digital Factory, Innovation & Venture Lab, and Learning Hub. In Turin, we have two pilot lines unique in the Italian landscape, and the one dedicated to additive manufacturing is probably the most complete and well-structured currently available to companies at a national level.
We are talking about a pilot line covering four technology families — Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) and Directed Energy Deposition (DED) for metal, Stereolithography (SLA) and Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) for polymers — distributed across dedicated stations ranging from engineering to quality control, from post-processing to the powder warehouse. It is a facility designed to accompany a company from the definition of process parameters through to pre-series production, including certification phases and business case analysis.
This is complemented by the Joint Lab with Stellantis, hosted within the Mirafiori site, which represents one of the most significant experiences of integration between research and industrial production in this field in Italy today: 16 3D printing machines, five different technologies — two L-PBF for metals, eight FDM and two MJF for thermoplastics, three SLA and one PLJ for thermosets — over ten qualified polymer and metal materials, fifteen dedicated operators and specialists, for a production capacity exceeding 50,000 components per year. It is not a demonstration laboratory: it is a line that produces for real industry, with all the constraints of quality, traceability, and cost that this entails.
Our positioning strategy is clear: we do not want to be a 3D printing supplier; we want to be the partner that accompanies the company through the entire industrialization process of additive technology. This is the tech transfer roadmap model that we apply across CIM: opportunity analysis, proof of concept development, field trial execution, and long-term strategy definition. For additive, this means supporting companies — large and small — in defining process parameters, product certification, cost-benefit analysis, and operator training, so that the investment does not stop at the prototype stage but truly reaches production.
Looking at the national system: how do you judge the development of additive manufacturing in Italy compared to the expectations of the first Industry 4.0 Plan in 2016? What are the difficulties for companies and the most receptive sectors?
This is a topic we follow closely, also because it is at the heart of one of the position papers our study center has published in the last two years, specifically dedicated to additive manufacturing for industry. The situation must be viewed with balance. When the National Industry 4.0 Plan included additive manufacturing among the enabling technologies in 2016, expectations were typical of a technology heralded as revolutionary, promising a radical transformation in production methods. Nearly a decade later, the technology is much more widespread and known than it was then, but it has not yet established itself as the reference technique in all sectors where, on paper, it could generate concrete advantages. The global market for metal additive manufacturing alone exceeded 5 billion dollars in 2025, with double-digit growth but lower than the more optimistic forecasts made years ago.
The reasons for this gap between expectation and reality are, in my view, more structural than technological. The first factor, which we see confirmed every time we meet a company in the evaluation phase, is not the cost of investment — in our experience, budget is almost never the first declared obstacle — but the lack of skills: there is a shortage of professionals with specific training in additive technologies, materials, and processes, especially in SMEs, which constitute the vast majority of the Italian industrial fabric and often lack the internal resources to train or attract these profiles. This is a point I have raised several times when discussing manufacturing in general: it is not so much a matter of soft skills as it is of structured technical training, and here the public role in supporting smaller companies remains decisive.
The second factor is cultural and organizational: additive manufacturing often requires rethinking the product from scratch — so-called design for additive manufacturing — rather than simply replacing a subtractive process with an additive one. This conceptual leap requires time, experimentation, and a protected environment where it is possible to make mistakes without risking production: this is exactly the test before invest function that Competence Centers like ours are called to perform.
The third factor concerns certification: regulated sectors such as aerospace or biomedical require long and rigorous process and product qualification paths, and this has partly slowed down large-scale adoption. Paradoxically, these are precisely the most receptive sectors: aerospace and automotive remain, in our direct experience, those where we see the highest investment intensity and the greatest maturity in the use of additive, followed by growing interest in the biomedical field and in high-value niches such as motorsport, jewelry, and luxury.
The strategies to accelerate involve, I believe, three directions: investing in specialized technical training, involving leading companies as co-producers of knowledge and not just as recipients; offering SMEs access to shared pilot infrastructures, so they can experiment without bearing the initial investment cost alone; and integrating compliance and certification expertise from the early stages of the project, so that product qualification does not become a bottleneck downstream but an element of design from the beginning — it is exactly on this third point that our collaboration with ICIM Group fits in. The advantages of broader adoption are already measurable where the technology has been correctly industrialized: reduction in product development times, batch-of-one production without retooling costs, minimization of material waste, and, an aspect often underestimated in public debate, the possibility of reshoring low-volume, high-value-added production to Italy.
It is precisely with this logic that we built the Additive Manufacturing Academy with the contribution of the Polytechnic of Turin: a path designed to train cross-functional skills, experimenting within the pilot line and tackling real challenges. The Academy includes ICIM Group among its instructors to concretely address quality, standards, and certification issues.
Let’s come to the agreement with ICIM Group on the topic of compliance: what is the rationale behind this partnership and what prospects does it open up?
The agreement with ICIM Group stems from a very concrete need that we encounter daily working with companies investing in additive manufacturing: the ability to innovate and prototype rapidly is not enough if the product then fails to pass the qualification, validation, and certification path necessary to reach the market in a reasonable time. That is where the competitive advantage gained during the development phase is often lost.
With this framework agreement, we systematize two complementary specializations: on one hand, CIM’s expertise in industrial research, product development, and industrialization, with a specific focus on additive technologies; on the other, ICIM Group’s know-how in testing, validation, qualification, and certification processes for products, processes, and systems, as an Accredia-accredited body with consolidated experience also in Industry 4.0 requirements. The goal is to build an end-to-end offering that accompanies companies from production process optimization through to regulatory compliance, reducing development time, complexity, and costs — precisely the three elements that, as I mentioned, currently hinder adoption at scale.
Beyond individual projects supporting companies, the partnership includes joint activities in specialized training, technology transfer, and industrial research, with shared participation in R&D projects, technical committees, and events dedicated to emerging topics in additive manufacturing, non-destructive testing, and advanced certification.
The prospect, looking ahead, is that compliance will no longer be viewed by companies as a final fulfillment, a stamp to be obtained downstream, but as a project component to be integrated from the early stages of development — a principle of certification by design that, in the field of compliance, replicates the same approach we call design for manufacturing in additive manufacturing. If a company knows from the start which regulatory requirements it must meet, it can guide choices regarding materials, processes, and printing parameters consistently, avoiding the late discovery that the prototyped component is not certifiable. It is a paradigm shift that can contribute significantly to closing that gap between expectation and adoption we discussed earlier.
