Joule, Eni's business school, is ready to open, to support the recovery and the entrepreneurs of the future

Rome, 4 May 2020 – Eni's business school opens. The call for applications to Joule is up on the website eni.com/joule. The project's aim is to train the entrepreneurs of tomorrow, promoting a culture founded on the values of integration, sustainable growth and development of informed leadership.

This project aims to be a trigger for relaunching businesses in Italy and for developing innovative, sustainable start-up companies, at a historic moment that presents huge challenges and profound transformations, in a testimony of the importance that Eni places on people’s training, in line with its values.

Joule will see Eni share the goals the company has made its own over the last years with the business players of the future, including: a commitment to researching solutions for the transition to an energy model with a low carbon impact; the ever more important role of renewable energy and the circular economy; providing access to energy and contributing to use of sustainable energy resources for local development in countries through investment, skills and technology.

Much like the unit of measure for energy from which it takes its name, Joule will centre its activity on the unit of measure of business: people. It is a school based on the integration between academic skills, business skills and students' experience.

Eni's school will follow two lines of action, which aim to foster the growth of new businesses and entrepreneurs, not necessarily in the energy sector, interested in developing a path that will help Italy accelerate, all based on the company's values.

Eni will provide 25 scholarships to aspiring entrepreneurs under the age of 40, who want to grow and contribute to Italy's sustainable growth, giving them tools, knowledge, skills and keys to understand business.

The training experience will hone in them the most important skills for entrepreneurs (critical thinking, decision making, risk management) and work on macro-themes based on knowledge of the context and the challenges of a sustainable business, like the energy transition, decarbonization and the circular economy. Themes linked to economic, financial and legal aspects of business will also be addressed, including how to create value, finance your own ideas, position yourself in the international context, manage workers and use technology to speed up your business.

The training program will begin in autumn and last six months, taking the form of both classroom training (two weekends a month at Eni's training offices at Villa Montecucco in Castel Gandolfo, near Rome) and distance learning. The training course will rely on workshop-based teaching approaches that get students involved. It will be taught alternately by entrepreneurs, Eni trainers and experts from business schools centres of academic excellence. Every student will have a tutor and coach to help them down their path of growth and individual change.

From today to 31 May, anyone interested can apply on www.eni.com/joule, where all the information on selection is available.

The mixed course (known as “Blended”) will be joined in autumn by a course done entirely through distance learning (the “Open” program).

Energizer is Joule's business accelerator and an observatory providing concrete support for developing business with a low carbon impact, promoting incubation programmes, accelerating start-ups and small and medium enterprises, and providing methodological, logistical and financial support.

One of the project's goals is to allow monitoring of accelerated initiatives, using specific performance indicators for environmental sustainability and making models, alongside the start-ups, to measure the impact of business in the medium-to-long term.

The first acceleration initiatives involve two strategic partnerships. One is with the co-innovation programme Open Italy, promoted by the Elis consortium (a not for profit entity focused on youth, professionals and enterprises, which contributes to the sustainable development of startups) and joined by 50 corporates, 80 acceleration providers and more than 300 start-ups. The second agreement is with PoliHub, the incubator of the Politecnico di Milano, run by the University’s Foundation, recently placed in the world’s top five of university incubators (UBI Index 2019-2020) and able to accelerate many innovative technologies, also thanks to its important alliances with some of the best European universities.

The cooperation with Polihub, in particular, will allow the launch of an incubator program for early-stage businesses with high potential, with a focus on Deep Tech, through the scaling up of the Polytechnic initiatives of Technology Transfer. Dedicated to the topics of decarbonization and circular economy, the first call, named “Switch2Product,” is launched today by PoliHub and is focused on students, researchers and academics of the Milan Polytechnic and of its partner universities and research centres.

Joule refreshes the idea of ethic capitalism that is in Eni’s DNA, turning it into an engine to strengthen business initiatives with a high impact on the energy transition and in the shift from a linear model for economic development to a circular one.