IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - March 2018 - 9

to help steer the future strategic plan of the cluster toward
sensible goals. This review is still being carried out, mostly
through volunteer contributions from both industry and
academia, and it includes education-related aspects of the
aerospace system in addition to production, research, and
other issues. The investigation was conducted at four different geographical levels, i.e., at the regional [2], national [3],
European [4], and global levels. This article completes the
series and reports the most significant outcomes of the
global-level survey.
Context
The Lombardy aerospace IndusTry cLusTer
Distretto Aerospaziale Lombardo (in English, Lombardy Aerospace Industry Cluster) [1] was founded in February 2010 as
an initiative involving some of the largest aerospace industries in Lombardy. It is an integrated system of enterprises,
universities, and research centers representing significant
advanced technological know-how and scientific knowledge in the aerospace sector. The initiative turned out to
be timely, as aerospace was declared to be a strategic sector
by the regional council (Regional Decree 1134) later in the
same year (23 December 2010). Subsequently, the cluster
was officially recognized as the contact point between the
region and the regional productive system (Regional Decree IX/1817; 8 June 2011).
ITaLIan cLusTer for aerospace TechnoLogy
Several other regional aerospace clusters characterized the
Italian scenario, which were encouraged by the Italian Ministry of Education and Research to organize and link at the national level when it issued an ad hoc call for national clusters
in 2012. An additional call in 2013 supported the establishment of suitable legal persons from the organized clusters.
The Italian Cluster for Aerospace Technology [5] (Cluster Tecnologico Nazionale Aerospazio, in Italian) was then activated in
2012 as a result of a joint proposal by several regional clusters,
including the Lombardy cluster.
TechnIcaL educaTIon and cLusTers
In 2011, before the foundation of the cluster, the provisional
Distretto Aerospaziale Lombardo activated ten working groups
(WGs), whose first assigned task was to review the current
situation in the region and beyond as a basis for a technological and strategic plan to be written at a subsequent stage.
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A specific education WG was defined among the ten WGs,
chaired by the first author of this article. Its work, lasting
several months, led to a fairly complete picture of all of the
educational activities relevant to aerospace in Lombardy.
The output was integrated into the cluster strategic plan
as the state of art from which to start determining the cluster actions, with the goal of creating an effective link between the education and the production systems. Later, the
confluence of the regional cluster into the national cluster
prompted the education WG to expand the review to a national level [3]. The WG then continued to geographically
extend the investigation to a European [4] and, finally, a
global level (hence, the present article). In addition to the
global geographic scope, this article also adds a temporal
perspective by reviewing the situation in 2013 and then
noting the observed changes in 2016.
the AnAlysis
When extended to the global level, a partial and relatively
modest review of educational activities quickly becomes a
considerable challenge. We had to set up a sensible strategy
to reduce the workload while retaining the statistical significance of the analyzed data. The following section explains
how the sample was defined.
defInIng The sTaTIsTIcaL sampLe
Similarly to what was done in the previous analysis at the
European level [4], we used the definition of higher education as it is identified in the Bologna process [6], including
the related and shared definition of educational levels.
In terms of spatial coverage, it is beyond our capacity
to cope with the huge amount of work required to collect
complete relevant data for all the educational institutions
across the globe (and also not worth the effort), as the impact on the final results decreases for an increasing number of additional institutions considered. For this reason,
we narrowed down the population of our statistical sample to tens of universities. This equals, on average, fewer
than one institution per country; yet it was considered a
reasonable compromise between significance and timely
delivery of results. Several countries are practically absent from the aerospace landscape, and it would not make
sense to force the inclusion of institutions of little or no
relevance to our investigation.
We use the scientific production of academic institutions as a proxy for an institution's present educational
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - March 2018