The research

At the DG we encourage research on a wide range of topics that, in many instances, are strictly related to urgent social and economic issues.
This task can be accomplished because, in the last years, we fostered the merging of synergies at both the intra- and inter-departmental levels, namely by establishing research groups endowed with a “critical mass” and by promoting collaborations with other international and domestic research institutions.

This approach proved to be very rewarding in terms of scientific productivity, as also acknowledged by the independent DG Evaluation Panel in 2008: "the number and the quality of research outputs are impressive and unusually high for the Italian educational and research system" (more information  here).