MILAN - Both Italy and China need innovation, though for different reasons, Giovanni Azzone, rector of the Milan Polytechnic, said in an interview with Xinhua on Thursday.

Speaking after the Italy China Innovation Forum, for which Azzone welcomed Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to his university, the rector said Italy had very high labor costs to cope with, while China was developing its innovation capacity at the international level."

"China has strong technological capacity, while Italy has a predisposition for creativity," he said, adding that these two modalities of innovation are "complementary" .

"We have flourishing exchanges with Chinese universities today.

But my dream is to create an integrated campus, or a joint educational system in which the Chinese and Italian methods can take advantage of diversity," he added.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, top officials and selected companies also participated in Thursday's event.

Milan Polytechnic, or Politecnico di Milano, has educated architects who were awarded the Pritzker Prize as well as Giulio Natta, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1963.

The 150-year-old university launched a joint program with Tongji University of Shanghai a few years ago, and was the first in Italy to establish a "vice rector for China" entirely dedicated to follow the growing number of projects with the Asian country.