The Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) (in English: Italian Institute of Technology) is a scientific research centre based in Genoa (Italy, EU).

[4] In November 2016, the Nature Index database named IIT among the list of the top 100 scientific centres running successful international collaborations, on world basis.

These scientific areas include: IIT mainly collaborates to the local University of Genoa, and also has other affiliated research centres (twelve in Italy and two in Boston, USA).

[11] The new research facilities will be dedicated to robotics, motion perception, neuroscience, human-robot interaction, computational statistics, neurogenomics, neurodiagnostics, and other scientific areas.

[19] The Scientific Plan 2009–2011 aims at developing the results of the start-up and sets a general framework which combines the integration and the reinforcement of the departments, the national network and the research platforms.

The new strategic plan 2009–2011 aims at consolidating the capabilities accomplished by IIT in the start-up phase, by developing a few new platforms instrumental to the evolution of the Humanoid Robotic program, meanwhile providing new opportunities to foster technological solutions useful in many fields of everyday life.

The new platforms represent the natural evolution of the existing ones, and they originate from the idea of making iCub closer and closer to a human, namely: to power the robot with portable, high efficiency energy sources, to develop smart materials with biomimetic characteristics, to investigate the interaction between artificial nanosystems and biological entities (such as cells) in view of future interconnections but also to assess safety issues.