A tribute to Italian ingenuity, past, present and future. An exhibition of over 100 patents, including the SACMI Cool+® system that contributed significantly to innovation in the beverage packaging industry. Venue: Rome, Ministry of Business and Made in Italy, until 20 March 2025
The exhibition L’Italia dei Brevetti. Invenzioni e Innovazioni di Successo (Italy, land of Patents. Successful Inventions and Innovations), organized together with the Central State Archives, is set to open at MIMIT (Ministero delle Imprese e del Made in Italy) in Rome. Around one hundred ‘inventions’ will be exhibited by companies that have played a pivotal role in Italian innovation. These include SACMI, there to showcase the patented Cool+®, a ground-breaking mold cooling system used in the manufacture of beverage caps.
With over 60% of the global flat-top cap market and lines that can produce up to 2,800 caps per minute, SACMI brings the full value of Italian technology to the global packaging table. Hence, among the innovations on show at MIMIT, the presence of Cool+, a pioneering system based on an internal cooling circuit for extremely small molds that’s designed to reach the areas closest to the molten plastic. This solution maximizes thermal transmission, dissipating heat extremely evenly. The result: higher quality and higher output rates.
“Patenting is organizationally essential to innovation,” points out Paolo Mongardi, President of SACMI. “In 2023, we reached a milestone: a total of 6,000 patents filed during our 105-year history. That’s more than one patent per employee. SACMI thrives on innovation,” adds Paolo Mongardi, “and we aim to keep on investing in it, also through close collaboration with numerous Italian and international training and research bodies.”
The ‘Italy, land of patents. Successful inventions and innovations’ exhibition is a journey between past and present, illustrated via more than 100 patents that show how visionary ideas have had a lasting impact in Italy and worldwide. The initiative marks two key anniversaries: the 550th anniversary of the publication of the first Patent Statute, promulgated by the Republic of Venice in 1494, and the 140th anniversary of the founding of the Italian Patent and Trademark Office (UIBM), the records of which are kept in the Central State Archives.
The MIMIT event is part of a memorandum of understanding signed on 2nd November 2023; this aims to celebrate and diffuse Italian manufacturing excellence, the highest levels of which are achieved via the patenting process. The exhibition also aims to provide a platform for Italian companies whose years of innovation and ideas have produced projects and inventions capable of revolutionizing entire manufacturing sectors and areas of society.
Drawing on original materials from the patent archives, UIBM’s current patent management systems, photographic and multimedia documents, products and prototypes, the exhibition highlights the variety of Italian inventiveness and the complexity of technological modernization. The exhibition compares generations of inventors: from the pioneers who, at the dawn of intellectual property protection, individually filed their inventions to make them available to society, to contemporary innovators who patent works of genius within multidisciplinary corporate teams and/or with universities, research centers and start-ups.
The patent history at MIMIT is organized into seven subject-related areas, sub-divided by use and purpose. They tell the story of cutting-edge devices that harnessed new technologies to improve production processes on a daily basis in a variety of sectors: a celebration of the Italian ingenuity that blends tradition with innovation, and a tribute to those who converted bright ideas into practical solutions that advanced both society and the economy.
The exhibition will be open to the public from 23rd November 2024 to 2nd March 2025 at MIMIT – Ministero delle Imprese e del Made in Italy, Palazzo Piacentini, Via Veneto 33, Rome.
