Why did I come up here? Who can guess? I came up to the chair to remind myself that we must always look at things from different angles. It is just when you think you know something that you have to look at it from another perspective.
[from "Dead Poet's Society" by Peter Weir].

WHAT IS INNOVATION TO MASSIMO SIDERI AND WHAT ROLE DOES IT PLAY IN THE LIVES OF BUSINESSES AND ALL OF US?
When I started working at Corriere in 2000, Italy was going through the season of big financial crashes, so I followed the events of Parmalat, Tango bonds and Cirio. Over the years, partly out of personal interest partly because the newspaper had a thematic gap to fill, I became passionate about technology and innovation and, together with my colleague Giancarlo Radice, now retired, I began to follow - in still unsuspected times - that revolutionary phenomenon that was and is the Internet. Economic preparation remained the key: I believe that not looking at the Internet and innovation in general simply as a circus phenomenon, but trying to understand how it is changing business models, relationships between entrepreneurs and employees, and professional jobs, is the best perspective to understand where the world is going. I have often wondered what the exact definition of innovation is. From the dictionary, we read that it is the act of innovating, but it is one of those tautological definitions that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth because it does not really explain what it is. In my opinion, the best definition was given by Nicholas Negroponte, father of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who once said:
"INNOVATION IS THAT THING THAT NO STATE WANTS FROM ITS CITIZENS, NO FAMILY WANTS FROM ITS CHILDREN AND NO COMPANY WANTS FROM ITS EMPLOYEES." thus defining it as a creative but almost unnatural process that forces us to change our point of view. Kind of like in the movie The Dead Poet's Society in which the main character makes the kids get on the desks to urge them to look at the world from new angles, to change their point of view. Innovation is often like that: constantly in flux, forcing us to put ourselves on the line, to keep learning and studying and that's the beauty of it.

WE ARE ACCUSTOMED TO SEEING THINGS IN A CERTAIN WAY, INNOVATION DEMANDS A CONSTANT CHANGE OF PERSPECTIVE, TO KEEP UP WITH THE TIMES.
In recent years, the approach to innovation has changed a lot, I notice this by talking with companies, with CEOs: there is finally a big curiosity, although not yet a real understanding of how the world is changing. The attitude of companies is similar to that of human beings: there is this overwhelming phenomenon called innovation, a revolution that changes everything, then I get scared and try to keep it away. Certainly, Italian companies in particular have behaved this way for many years, have tried to keep innovation out the door as if it were an enemy. That's kind of what happens in personal life, when you have certainties and someone tells you that we have to change them: over the years, it gets harder and harder. It is never late, however, because one of the unwritten laws of innovation is that if you don't do something, someone else will surely do it. In any case, the world we live in is in many ways destined to disappear, not necessarily for the better, but it is a process we must accept.
For many companies, innovation means cost cutting. I think that's a big limitation.

INNOVATION IS NOT COST CUTTING AND REQUIRES, ON THE CONTRARY, LARGE INVESTMENTS. Innovation is something across the board that changes the way we are. Take for example, Blade Runner: this was the last great film shot by the analog method, since then, all great films have achieved success through digitization. Or let's take the world of publishing: first the journalist worked with a typewriter, then he started to write on the PC, now he can directly enter the editorial system and update the Corriere.it website live from his cell phone. This kind of innovation, as well as the transition from analog to digital, are innovations in the working method. We generally accepted them because they did not challenge the role of traditional professions but only required an updating of processes. We are currently at a more complex stage where work can be disintermediated by machines: this may create the illusion that we can do without humans, but in reality there are things that machines will never understand, such as the concept of death, so much so that one of the most debated issues is that of digital inheritance/establishment. The powerful servers of Google as well as those of Facebook with all their intelligence fail to understand that they cannot continue to propose to us to follow missing people. Here, for example, because innovation can be a tool to improve people's lives, not to disintermediate them. To date, what is rather disintermediating is our leisure time: the ubiquity of technology means that there is less and less separation between family life and work life.

LISTENING, COMPARING, SHARING ARE THE WATCHWORDS FOR ENTREPRENEURS.
The thing that amazes me most about the startupper ecosystem is just that: the continuous sharing of ideas, so different from everything we have been taught so far (i.e. when you have an idea hold on to it, they might steal it from you). There's that very interesting passage in the movie about Zuckerberg, The Social Network, where the twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss accuse him of copying the idea and he, fed up, replies, "I didn't copy it because you would never be able to do it the way I did," which is kind of what everybody knows in the innovation world: Execution is the real weapon of a startupper. You have to put yourself out there intellectually and not be afraid to share. I think a chief executive officer has to do mostly this: Getting involved by listening, sharing ideas, because collective intelligence will always beat individual intelligence (unless you are Newton or Einstein), spend as much time as possible with these people, even if there is no connection to your business, because talking with them can open your mind to new horizons.

NEW ENTREPRENEURS ARE INDEED CHARACTERIZED BY GREAT VITALITY; WHAT THEY LACK INSTEAD IS SYSTEM-BUILDING.
In the rest of the world, however, the winning models are highly integrated systems with close dialogue between academia, business and startups. In fact, innovation, by definition, tends to run away from strings and ties, so it tends to be external to complex realities. Large companies should understand that start-ups are nothing more than outsourced research and development centers that could innovate the business that internally the company is failing to innovate. One example is pharmaceuticals: the antibiotics we use are reaching saturation level, and in twenty or thirty years they will no longer be as effective. And here a small start-up has managed to synthesize the super antibiotic and is now in negotiations to be acquired by a multinational company. What happens in the pharmaceutical sector should be replicated in other sectors as well.

AN IMPORTANT ELEMENT THAT IS MISSING IN OUR COMPANIES IS THE THOUGHT THAT THE LAST IN THE HIERARCHICAL LADDER MAY ACTUALLY HAVE A BRILLIANT IDEA.
One of the greatest lessons on innovation I received from Vito Lomele, the founder of Jobrapido, one of our champions who managed to sell for several tens of millions his creature born in a bedroom, with a computer and no investment except for four pennies given by friends. Lomele managed to create a kind of Google, a job search engine, and he managed to sell it to the British group Dmgt, which is headed by the British newspaper Daily Mail. I went to interview him that very day. He was at Jobrapido's headquarters near Castello Sforzesco with his 100 guys from all over the world. A picture needed to be taken and the photographer asked that all the boys gather around Vito, but no one listened to him. Desperate, he asked for help from Vito, the big boss, who tried to call them, but no one listened to him either, so he told me, "See Massimo, innovation is too fast to be hierarchical. I can't think I'm the boss in here, because maybe one of the guys is going to have an idea that will be much more important than mine."

FINALLY, THE BIG ABSENTEE IS THE STATE, NOT ONLY ON THE DIGITAL FRONT, BUT ON ALL INDUSTRIAL POLICY.
It is true that regulations have been enacted in recent years that have facilitated the emergence of new innovative companies, but as you travel and get to know the protagonists of California's Silicon Valley or Israel's, China's, Germany's, or London's Tech City, the element that emerges is that the state, the public entity, at some point believed in it. And to think that in the past we have invested in companies -- even private ones -- to support them in times of difficulty, see Alitalia in recent years. The problem is that we do not adopt the same sensitivity in the area of innovation. Where, on the other hand, in California or Israel, no one is surprised that the state pours half a billion dollars a year to support this sector. It is as if we persist in defending old jobs without having the foresight to create new ones. In fact, the social purposes are trivial to describe: we have a whole world of trades and traditional jobs that are deteriorating, this is a way to create new employment.