Silverzone is a network of experiences and knowledge, of “beautiful minded” over-65 retired people that have met Loccioni Group along their way.
Silverzone is a virtual space that gathers people with huge luggage of different knowledge, competences and experience. With their precious contribution and contagious enthusiasm, they keep sustaining Loccioni Group success.
In this space knowledge that has been gained through years and episodes, are collected to be available in the future. There are researchers, consultants, professors, managers of important industrial company that have reached ambitious achievements in their professional lives. Collaborators, clients, suppliers, partners who now feel like transferring their experience to young people, with a renovated enthusiasm and passion.
It’s all about building trustful and respectful relationships. Silverzone is basically based on a menthorship program, through which a new employee is joined by a retired person and together they work on a highly innovative project.
Loccioni Group gave birth to this program to preserve the richness that these persons own, not just looking at the past, but looking into the future in creative and innovative perspectives.
Indeed the company aims at hiring young students, that have just finished up professional and technical high schools or have just graduated at university. That means that Loccioni Group focuses its attention on enthusiasm and proactivity, rather than long experience when hiring. Consequently mentoring programs are crucial to support learning and decision making, enabling competences and knowledge to be quickly gained.
Silverzone sprang from one of this project, that eventually was called “28-82” because of the ages of the first mentor and the mentoree involved.
It was 2005 when Carmine arrived at Loccioni Group, after graduating in mechanical engineering. It arrived from Ischia, in the middle of the winter, while it was snowing in an unusual and extraordinary way for Angeli di Rosora.
The valley was covered by a thick layer of white and freezing snow and was completely desert: Carmine was all alone, even in the apartment that the company provide to non-resident collaborators and that is usually very crowded, there was nobody.
Carmine found on the door of his new room a post-it written by Enrico Loccioni himself telling that the following day he would pick up Carmine to go to CFR (Fiat Research Center) and meet Mario Ricco, “Common Rail technology mother”.
Carmine always uses this expression to define Mr. Ricco because of the latin proverb: mater simper certam est pater numquam.
They went together with Filippo Surace, ex Technical Director at Alfa Romeo, sharing a strong passion for car and automotive sector in general. The challenge they prompted for their-owns was inventing a tool to measure spray injector from mass distribution, internally developing the needed technology rather than buying it, cutting off costs.
After that meeting, Carmine spent month working on this projects closed in his office. Every now and then he met Filippo and discussed steps and advancements. Two years later, in 2007, they successfully developed and prototyped a tool called Mexus. The patent was filed using both their names, instead of one of Loccioni Group brand. Mexus has won lots of awards ( for example, NI Green Technology Awards) and allowed Loccioni to defeat direct competitors in the field.
Starting from this solution, a whole Research for Development laboratory has been developed in mobility business unit. Nowadays Carmine is the responsible of the whole team, composed by young researchers and engineers, and a dedicated new building is about to be constructed .
Merging the different characteristics and positive aspects of these two professional profiles and generations, lead not only to knowledge transfer, but also to new knowledge creation, triggering creativity and concretize avant-garde innovative projects and solutions.
