The beginning of the entrepreneurial journey
The two, after graduating from Sapienza University in Rome, had moved to Milan in the late 1960s. There they found employment in technical assistance for multinational automotive companies. However, the desire to do business and confidence in their own means convinced them after only two years to return to the capital and start Assing. The company's name was born from the inversion of the "Ingegneri Associati" that Renato and Luigi, then 27, had chosen for themselves.
The partnership between research and industry
Assing began by selling "equipment and instruments for industry and research," read one of the company's early advertising catalogs: mass spectrometers, scanning electron microscopes, such as Cambridge Instruments' SEM. The industry-research pair, and thus the link that doubly unites private and public, De Silva and Cremona understood precisely in Cambridge, England, where in the first half of the 1970s they went a couple of times a month precisely because of that business agreement.
Stereoscan, scanning electron microscope from Cambridge Instruments
"What we discovered there," De Silva explains today, "was a totally different world than in Italy, where academia and the productive world were totally disconnected. Not so in Cambridge. There, next to the university was the factory. The professor would finish his lecture in the university and then go through the manufacturing plant to give the guidelines. We understood how much academia and manufacturing traveled together to really do research and development." It was precisely this public-private partnership that became Assing's existential horizon.
"At Cambridge we understood how much academia and manufacturing traveled together to really do research and development."
- Renato De Silva
Assistance and advice: the strengths of Assing
Interviewed by the business magazine Espansione in April 1985, when the company had entered its 14th year, De Silva said, "The insights that have enabled us to achieve a satisfactory and lasting result are essentially two. the first point is to have continually succeeded in addressing and solving with the foreign house represented the specific problems of the Italian market. The second point was not to consider the relationship with the customer-user as concluded at the time of the sale, but to guarantee continuous service and advice even afterwards."
Ongoing support and consulting are still, 40 years after that interview, the beating heart of the company's services.
Expansion, April 1985
The future in the groove of an idea
Assing now has 120 employees, divided among its 3 offices in Monterotondo, Milan and Avellino: engineers, specialized technicians and administrative staff who work every day with the company's mission in mind: to be truly a Partner in Research, in the wake of an idea, the one shaped by Renato De Silva, that rejuvenates with the passage of time, thanks in part to the current Board made up of engineers Fazio Bianco and Sebastiano Caravaggi and doctors Giselda De Silva and Maria Bianco.
