“How many times have you come into contact with cellulose today?”
This unlikely question was the opening of one of the presentations at the MIT DesignX Venice Final Pitch event at the H3 Factory on Giudecca, which took place on Monday, November 24, 2025. The event was the culmination of months of training and work with DesignX instructors and mentors in Venice. Now in its fourth year, the MIT DesignX Venice program is an advanced business training course aimed at promising startups whose companies are oriented towards generating social and environmental benefits.
Hence the question about cellulose. We learned that cellulose is indeed part of products and materials that we encounter daily. Moreover, its much smaller form, nanocellulose, is an increasingly important material with a wide variety of uses, from medicine to food to packaging and more. The problem is that methods for producing nanocellulose can be energy intensive or chemically hazardous, and they can generate considerable waste.
The presenting startup, Tunica, has discovered that small creatures called tunicates are in fact the only animals that actually produce nanocellulose in their outer envelope. Furthermore, it turns out that tunicates are disposed of as waste in vast quantities during the processing of shellfish like mussels. Of no value to the seafood processors, this waste stream actually represents a great opportunity in the nanocellulose market. Tunica has accordingly developed an eco-friendly method of extracting the nanocellulose from the animal’s outer envelope, and another method to then process the remainder of the animals into a versatile biofertilizer.
This idea of capturing waste streams – many of which the average person likely doesn’t even know exist – and turning them into clean, flexible, and valuable resources is a strongly recurring theme among the DesignX participants. For example, another company presenting at this year’s event, Bi-Harvest, has developed a system for converting vegetables that are currently being discarded during processing because of damage or defects – again in vast quantities – into edible powders that have a wide variety of uses for both human and animal consumption. Their slogan sums up this circular economy approach: “We turn waste into value”.
The MIT DesignX program was created at MIT in Boston. Held annually, the program has a rigorous set of requirements for admission. According to the program website, “applicants go through a rigorous selection process that reviews venture designs and ideas based on human and social impact, feasibility, uniqueness, and scalability as well as team composition, diversity and skillset”.
The program has expanded around the world: “Projects include our workshop with the MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node, social venture workshop with the University of Iceland, accelerators in Venice with SerenDPT, and in Dubai with DIEZ, Dtec and GGH, and a collaboration with OGS and MISTI working with Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurs.”
MIT Design X Venice is a collaboration between the main Boston-based program and SerenDPT, the startup incubator launched in Venice by Fabio Carrera, himself a graduate of MIT (Ph.D, Urban Information Systems and Planning), in the H3 Factory on Giudecca. The building, originally a 16th century church that was later deconsecrated, was also a garment factory for 100 years during Giudecca’s industrial phase. The building was later acquired by the Comune di Venezia, which removed the factory equipment and installed a three-story office space which was completed in 2008, with the intention of launching new businesses there. SerenDPT was granted a nine-year special lease for the site in 2018 to further this goal.
The idea of bringing DesignX to Venice was, as Carrera is fond of saying, “serendipity”. While visiting H3 several years ago, DesignX founder Dennis Frenchman was struck by the building and its potential, offhandedly suggesting that it would be a great place to hold a DesignX program.
The rest, as they say, is history: DesignX Venice is now in its fourth year.
The success of the program has a lot to say about Venice itself and its potential for economic growth and innovation. It is commonly said now that the only work available in Venice is in restaurants and hotels, or rather only in activities related to tourism. While this is undeniably true to an extent, the companies participating in DesignX point in a different direction.
A great example is a local business, Rehub. This company, a participant in the first DesignX Venice, embodies the “turning waste into opportunity” ethos of the program. Its primary activity is reprocessing, or rather “upcycling” glass waste produced by Murano factories. Once again, this is a reasonably unknown but considerable source of waste that now produces real value. The company is based in Venice and has grown to include several employees.
Furthermore, each year, some of the companies participating in MIT DesignX commit to basing their operations in Venice, and in return they receive a year of free office space and support from SerenDPT.
Thus, Venice is slowly but surely gaining new businesses, trained at the highest level and chosen for their sustainability, circular economic approach, and societal benefits.
At the same time, despite its slow transportation and location out in the lagoon, Venice itself has proven to be a great benefit to many of these businesses. Participants have said that they find Venice to be a very dynamic location for basing their operations, with its countless international connections, myriad opportunities for networking and contacts, and proximity to events and conferences across Europe.
The program’s success and impact calls into question the idea of the “Boston Model” touted by authorities over the past few years in Venice. This model has been presented as the basis for a “Campus city”, to bring in thousands of new students, teachers, and researchers, an initiative presented as a potential driver of new economic growth and opportunity in Venice.
However, the “Boston model” they are talking about does not actually exist. Boston is a huge city, and its economy is driven far more by its hospitals and medical complexes, technology, and finance than education and research. In fact, according to Boston Today, the top five industries in the Boston economy are, in order: Healthcare and Social Assistance; Professional, Scientific and Technical Services; Finance and Insurance; Government; and Educational Services. Thus, though it is certainly true that Boston and the Boston area boast a considerable number of top universities and schools, the actual number of jobs this sector creates in the city is well under half those created by Healthcare and Social Assistance.
It would be far more accurate to describe MIT DesignX, created in Boston itself, as the real “Boston model” – a highly professional and accredited program aimed not at university students but at entrepreneurs and innovators who are seeking to, in the words of Ben Franklin himself, “do well while doing good”. The participating companies themselves may be young, but their teams are composed of highly educated and experienced experts across a range of fields. What they require is advanced, targeted training to help them realize their specific business goals. Now, thanks to this program, 39 companies have received exactly this kind of training, right here in Venice, with more to come in 2026.
Many of these companies, even if not based in Venice, are nevertheless working in Venice, which brings us back to this year’s Final Pitch, where we met a Milan-based company with the unlikely name Lizard. Once again, this company has created a new kind of business by intercepting a little-considered waste stream, in this case that of corporate furniture. Rather than purchasing furniture for offices and hospitality sites and then disposing of it every three years (the average turnover in this industry, generating upwards of 11 million tons of waste annually in the EU), Lizard offers this sector the opportunity to rent and return their furniture. Working in partnership with furniture manufacturers, the rented furniture is returned for refurbishment and resale.
The impact of such a venture in Venice? Lizard’s first major (and very satisfied) corporate customer is Venice Marco Polo Airport. Thus the impact is local and direct, as is the case for many of the other participating startups that have passed through this unique program.
Much of the talk about economic development in Venice that goes beyond tourism and its related services and industries has thus far remained just that: talk and slogans. Meanwhile, on Giudecca, the real “Boston model”, in the form of MIT DesignX, is already active on the ground, helping to create new jobs, new industries, and innovative technologies that not only have potential benefits, but are already benefitting people, the environment, society, and the city of Venice itself.
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