Aerospace Technology District
Distretto Tecnologico Aerospaziale

Overview

About us

The Distretto Tecnologico Aerospaziale (DTA) was created in 2009, today it count 18 members from both industry and academia. DTA is one of the most active Italian aerospace cluster organizations. Its office is settled in Brindisi (Apulia, Italy), while the cluster covers the Apulian region. With about 6000 employees (research and industrial), Apulia is the fourth region in the national ranking for the economic impact of the aerospace sector. Currently 8 projects nationally funded and 2 projects funded through FP7 and H2020 are on-going for a total value of about 50M€, they focus on research and development of innovative technologies in quite all fields covered by the regional system (innovative materials, production processes, propulsion, space technologies, digital innovation, ...).

As the regional aerospace system has weak ties with European and global partners, mainly flowing through the few largest enterprises, the DTA has the mission to enact the growth of the whole system, in particular in the technology and innovation competences and capabilities, so to reach the European and global level.

Five long-term objectives are pursued to realize this mission:

1) the development of local infrastructure nurturing European research and development initiatives (the Grottaglie Airport Test Bed, among others);

2) the diffusion of the innovation culture enabling continuous technology flow from universities to research organizations and to enterprises;

3) bridging the gap among education programs, research organizations, industrial players, governmental agencies and local and national governments;

4) the creation of high competent work force directly managing a number of initiatives and projects spanning from educational consultancy and internships to high education programs and long life programs;

5) the internationalization of local enterprises.