About Us

About Us

ICO Academy is born

According to Adriano Olivetti, «culture is what gives human their true power».

ICO Academy is born in the same spirit: a hotbed of civil experimentation to respond to the challenges of today and to grow a well-founded, shared, better future. A laboratory of innovation and economic, social and cultural growth.

The Academy was created with the aim of addressing a national audience, promoting themes that intercept the great new trends in the fields of innovation, technology, design and social issues. In this way we try to bring the Factories back to the role that not only belongs to them but that they have held for many decades.

Andrea Ardissone, President of ICONA Srl

The return of the factories

If the future attends Ivrea, then the ex Olivetti Factories are his home. For this reason, ICONA Srl has taken on the commitment of 18 entrepreneurs and, after having acquired 45,000 square meters of the ex Olivetti Factories, is now focused on the realization of its Regeneration Plan.

The person at the center

Placing the person at the center, we bring the future back home, Ivrea, the industrial city of the 20th century and fertile ground on which to reread, update and project the heritage of Adriano Olivetti and the productive and social ecosystem he created.

Heritage joins the future

Tradition of brilliance, industriousness and savoir-faire: values that are important to us, the key to understanding of ICO Academy in analyzing the themes of:

Technology
Innovation
Design
Culture
Welfare
Social Issues

A vision that we associate with the priceless heritage of the Community: community embodies human, environmental and architectural values in which the economic-productive and social spaces coexist harmoniously.

Our approach

Between technology and social issues

Our future is full of social, moral, and ethical challenges, and we thought that to tackle them it is better to experiment with innovative approaches to education and to be a melting point between technology and social issues.


To build new horizons, we have reworked our past and that much-desired "Athens of the Fifties" by Adriano Olivetti: the richness of the present is having a past that still writes the future of a territory that in its balanced anomaly it is an opportunity for the world.

Where it all begun

The Main Projects

The future is back in Ivrea, an open-air laboratory

ICONA was born on 16 March 2018 in Ivrea, Via Jervis 9-11

ICONA Srl

In 2017, Andrea Ardissone and Alberto Zambolin chose to explore the possibility of bringing Olivetti's industrial heritage back to the center of a new project. After having acquired the Red Bricks Factory of Camillo Olivetti, in via Jervis 9-11, Andrea and Alberto have started an intense activity of meetings and relationships managing to gather 18 different subjects that have shared the vision and the dream to bring the Olivetti places back to international reference in interpreting the economic and social changes and the near future that awaits us.

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Redeveloping the Red Bricks Factory in Ivrea

The Future Is Back Home

A coalition with the aim of redeveloping the Red Bricks Factory in Ivrea. A building with a strong iconic and historical value, in a city that bears witness to the unique experience of the Olivetti enterprise. A project that involves the Ivrea community, and that looks beyond territorial boundaries and towards the whole of Europe, for the creation of a network of companies and people with the same vision: a future that sees communities and companies as pieces for a new development and wellness.

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