MATCHIN: high-level research and development in SMEs, the WaterView story

Bringing a high-level researcher into your team to give the business a boost, improve products, develop new ones and consolidate your market position. Companies, including SMEs, can do this by tapping into the talent at Politecnico di Torino and beyond, thanks to the MATCHIN call from the Piedmont Region, which is designed to facilitate exactly this kind of operation. An opportunity that WaterView, an innovative SME that has pushed the boundaries of computer vision and AI, has made the most of.

Founded in 2015, WaterView focuses on using new technologies to monitor the environment, its key components and the activities taking place within it. The company initially concentrated on monitoring weather events before expanding into transport, road safety and workplace safety. Fields where innovative, simple and fast technological tools are essential, and where research is a major competitive advantage. "There is no doubt that our company has always had a certain openness to the world of research. In fact, we grew out of research. But over the years, you evolve. We stopped being 'pure' researchers and started turning research results into prototypes and then into marketable products," explains Paola Allamano, CEO of WaterView, who continues: "At a certain point, we realized we needed to go back to the original spirit of doing research: to dare something a bit more ambitious than usual. A bit like cyclists: there comes a moment in a race when, to win, you have to attack, because just going fast is no longer enough – you rise out of the saddle and break away from the pack. We wanted to give our company that kind of push. And that's when we discovered the MATCHIN call."

MATCHIN (Mobilizing Advanced Talents for Competence and High Innovation) aims to support the placement of highly qualified professionals within companies to carry out projects that strengthen SMEs' innovation capacity.

A bold move, then, that for a company like WaterView was only possible by bringing on board a researcher with an exceptional scientific profile. A delicate step from an organizational standpoint, and a demanding one financially: a challenge both for the company and for Farbod Khosro Anjom, a researcher with extensive experience built up at the Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering-DIATI, who rose to the challenge and now reflects: "The business world is completely different from the research world. Here, you approach problems with a different mindset. I am going through a very intense transition, but it is giving me a great deal, and I am glad I decided to take it on." Anjom adds: "I have nine years of experience from my PhD and subsequent research work, but I knew that in a company I would have to start from the bottom, in a sense, though I have the skills to grow quickly. It would have been very naive to think I could walk straight in at the top when moving from research to production. The pace, the people and the dynamics here are very different from what I had known until a few months ago, but I now have the opportunity to do applied research far more effectively than before."

The meeting between WaterView and Farbod Anjom was made possible by MATCHIN, which created the most favorable conditions. "MATCHIN acts as a bridge between companies and universities, two worlds that do not always manage to communicate. The strength of the call is that it is concrete, it’s easy to apply, and responses are quick. Farbod was hired on the first of February. We applied as soon as MATCHIN opened in early March, and we received a positive response in May, with retroactive effect," concludes Paola Allamano.