Deep Tech: a New Approach to Innovation. The Case of Future Farming Initiative S.r.l.

This thesis analyzes Deep Tech, identified as the fourth and most disruptive wave of innovation, as a fundamental operational paradigm for addressing the pressing systemic challenges of our time, such as the climate crisis and resource depletion. It argues that Deep Tech, applied through the prism of Future Farming, the strategic intersection of Nature Co-Design and Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA), represents a crucial opportunity to orchestrate a new industrial renaissance, intrinsically sustainable and generative. However, the thesis identifies the main obstacle to this transition not in the technology itself, but in the systemic friction between the speed of scientific discovery and the inertia of traditional business models, collaborative ecosystems, and, above all, venture capital financing models, which are structurally inadequate to support long, capital-intensive development cycles. To demonstrate how this friction can be overcome, an in-depth analysis of the pioneering case study of the Future Farming Initiative S.r.l. (FFI) is conducted. Analysis by FFI, a public-private partnership between Ca' Foscari University of Venice and the technology company ZERO, reveals it as a true "enabling ecosystem."