Mario Bernardi, 2nd year PhD student in Nanoscience, is the main representative of Farmelody, a business concept developed during the MBA carried out in collaboration with Scuola Normale and Collège des Ingénieurs Italia. The project will be presented in September to the entrepreneur and innovation guru Elon Musk.

Pisa, 14 July 2021.

A team of young talents whose main referent is a PhD student in Nanoscience, Mario Bernardi from Scuola Normale, won the Innovation 4 Change programme 2021. The event was sponsored by CERN, Collège des Ingénieurs Italia, Politecnico di Torino and Scuola Holden. The competition involved approximately 60 young graduates who competed to come up with original business ideas to address the problems of contemporary society through innovative solutions.

Mr. Bernardi could attend the programme as he is the first student at Scuola Normale to have joined the Science & Management MBA (Master in Business Administration), stemming from the agreement with Collège des Ingénieurs Italia. The Innovation 4 change programme represents the main activity of the first year, during which the sMBA fellows are expected to lay the foundation of a start-up. Thus Mr. Bernardi’s team presented their work on July the 2nd 2021 to a jury composed of John Elkann (Fondazione Agnelli/Stellantis), Oscar Farinetti  (Eataly), Fabiola Gianotti (Cern) e Roberto Cingolani (Ministro della Transizione Ecologica). The Farmelody project aims at improving the life of livestock animals by making farms more sustainable.

Farmelody is a digital platform designed to aggregate data coming from farms, vets and research hubs to monitor the gut microbiome: the community of microorganisms that live within the intestine of animals and humans, closely related to the metabolism, the immune system and the nervous system. Keeping a healthy gut microbiome would enable the farmers to severely cut the use of antibiotics, optimize the feed-to-conversion ratio and decrease the impact of livestock farming on the environment. In fact, farm animals produce more greenhouse gasses emission than cars and the transportation sector, almost half of todays’ greenhouse gasses emission produced by humanity. In addition to this, new upcoming EU regulations are enforcing strict emission parameters that the farms will have to be compliant with, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals declaration of the United Nations.

The Farmelody team members, other than Mr. Bernardi from Scuola Normale, are PhD students and graduate talents coming from Oxford University, Université du Luxembourg, Politecnico di Milano, Politecnico di Torino and University of Padova. They are all MBA fellows at the Collège des Ingénieurs Italia, and as a price for winning the I4C Programme they won a range of services to launch their startup Farmelody and the possibility to present their project to the entrepreneur and innovation guru Elon Musk, as he will represent the main guest of the Italian Tech Week, that will take place in Turin on the 23rd and 24th of September.

Scuola Normale is looking forward to improve the managerial skills of its students, enriching their potential to enter the world of work. After signing the agreement with the Collège des Ingénieurs Italia, Scuola Normale has increased its commitment to the cause launching the EELISA Unfolds project, selected and funded by European Institute of Technology since July.