Franco Stefani and Romano and Federica Minozzi win the EY "Entrepreneur of the Year 2017" award

The presentation ceremony for the EY "Entrepreneur of the Year 2017" Award, which this year featured winners from the Italian ceramic industry, was held on 9 November in Palazzo della Borsa in Milan.

Franco Stefani, Chairman of the System Group, was proclaimed winner in the Digital Transformation category, one of the 9 categories covered by the award. According to the jury statement, the award was assigned for "his role as a key player in the creation of Smart Manufacturing; for being recognised as a world leader in the field of industrial digital technology through a new factory concept, where cutting-edge solutions are implemented to create a flexible, connected and global industry, with the human-machine interaction at its centre; for having created an international group of companies and establishing important partnerships and synergies capable of tackling the constant challenges of the market".

"We are process innovators," said Stefani when commenting on the prestigious award. "Winning the Digital Transformation category means being the pioneers of a new industrial and cultural concept. For us, the process of digital transformation began back in the 1980s and involved both our own production sites, which are taken as a global benchmark for manufacturing excellence, and the innovative solutions that we offer to the world market. Our business is one of the most important international players in the field of industrial process automation thanks to our ability to find radical original solutions, our capacity to work as a team, our desire to succeed and our readiness to change."

The winner of the EY Innovation Category Award was Federica Minozzi, CEO of Iris Ceramica, together with her father Romano, Chairman of the Group, "for succeeding in establishing the company in Italy and worldwide by exploring new opportunities to expand the boundaries of ceramics, creating products where innovative materials and colours are combined with cutting-edge technologies, research into new combinations of materials with the capacity to rethink styles and functionality, and making sustainability a cornerstone of the company’s competitiveness".