Challenging Science

Beside a vast majority of application-oriented projects, Pirelli Labs allocate limited but qualified resources to investigate long-term topics, sometimes controversial, which could give origin in the event of success to major technological breakthroughs.

These scouting projects, defined as "blue sky research", usually touch advanced areas of condensed matter and fundamental physics. In spite of their not immediate return of investment, the know-how accumulated in this kind of activity has often proved to have beneficial fallouts in other, more immediately useful R&D lines.