Author: Marta Re Ferrè

Symplatform 2021: an international symposium on digital platforms

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Over the last years, the relevance of digital-based business model increased significantly. AirBnb, Uber or BlaBlaCar showed the great potentialities of companies that aim to get together different groups of customers – like travelers and hosts – through the opportunities provided by digital technologies.

We are pleased to launch the second edition of Symplatform, a symposium on digital platforms that aims to get together both scholars and practitioners.

Symplatform is a joint project developed by Trinity College Dublin, Politecnico di Milano School of Management and Audencia Business School. 

The second edition will take place digitally through 4 sessions between May 17th and May 20th from 2 pm. To 3.30 pm (CET).

The symposium is going to be based on various formats: parallel sessions with academic papers, “Pitch your challenge” sessions led by practitioners and collaborative workshops to help the platform field to move forward.

Further information can be found at Symplatform.com.

New perspectives between bioscience and management

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What the conscious mind expresses neither completely represents nor necessarily reflects the feelings and evaluations of consumers correctly. Biomarketing, a new discipline based on the application of neuro- and bioscience in a managerial context, helps us to identify the unconscious and emotional reactions of consumers evoked by a product or brand, and thus to predict their behavior.

 

Debora Bettiga, Assistant Professor of Marketing Strategy, Consumer Behavior and Marketing Research Methodologies, School of Management, Politecnico di Milano

 

Why biosciences and management?

The evolution of the market, increasingly dynamic and competitive, and of the consumer, more proactive, knowledgeable and demanding, generates a great challenge for companies. Interpreting the needs and expectations of consumers to develop an appealing offer is indeed increasingly difficult.

Research has shown that what the conscious mind expresses – through interviews, surveys, focus groups – neither completely represents nor necessarily reflects the future behavior of individuals correctly.

Neuromarketing, a discipline born as an application of neurosciences to the study of communication and persuasion, measures the cerebral response to stimuli to appraise how an individual reacts, evaluates and filters information.

As evolution of the discipline, biomarketing arises from the assumption that tracking cerebral activity is less accurate than tracking a full set of biological manifestations. Thus, biomarketing collects and integrates data about individual physiological responses such as skin conductance, breath and hearth rate or facial micro-expressions.

This new discipline, based on the application of neuro- and bioscience in a managerial context, seeks to identify, through quantitative methods, the cognitive and affective reactions of consumers evoked by a product, brand, advertising message or service encounter, and thus to predict their behavior. Biomarketing explores the unconscious and emotional sides of the purchasing process on which the individual decision-making process is grounded and enables a deep and unbiased understanding of human responses.

Thanks to their reliability, such methods have been applied in several fields and in different environments. Methodological rigor and depth of tracking allow drawing relevant implications even from small experimental samples, obtaining directions that, from a scientific and managerial point of view, are crucial for a full understanding of individual behavior. Hence, they represent valid instruments for companies in their marketing activities at the strategic and operational levels.

 

How do we measure consumer emotions?

Biometric tools enable the analysis of emotions and affective responses. For instance, with electroencephalography we can assess the attention, engagement and pleasantness generated from a stimulus. Wearable electrocardiogram and breathing pattern can detect relaxation, anxiety, stress or involvement. Tracking sensors for electrodermal activity may provide us indication of consumer arousal and engagement. Eye-tracking is a useful tool for assessing the visual paths and areas of focus while sensors for facial expressions can detect surprise, happiness, disgust, anger or sadness.

Analyzing consumer emotions is fundamental for understanding the customer experience and interaction with the brand. Individuals indeed react to marketing stimuli in a deeply emotional way, regardless of the product. Even for extremely functional products, emotions play a great role in driving purchasing behavior. All levers of the marketing mix can benefit from biometric inputs: reaction to product, brand, label, packaging, price, promotion, point of sale and merchandise management are for instance fields for which biometric tracking allows us to achieve a valuable and innovative evaluation of the impact on targets.

 

But which knowledge and competences should we put in place?

Well, a lot. The discipline born from the integration of marketing, bioscience, neuroscience and design, to name the key ones.
The presence of such competences inside the Politecnico di Milano has enabled the development and further growth of the discipline from a scientific and managerial point of view. PHEEL (Physiology, Emotion, Experience Lab) is the result of such integration, being an Interdepartmental Laboratory which sees the convergence of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, the Department of Design and the School of Management of the Politecnico di Milano.

The Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano is the national point of reference, as well as one of the world excellences in the field of biometrics applied to medicine. The research protocols allow precise and responsible tracking of every population segment, including people in conditions of weakness.

The Department of Design is one of the leading schools in the world in the study of user experience in interacting with product, interfaces and new technologies. The Department provides creative and rigorous keys of interpretation, which aim at translating results in tangible design inputs.

The expertise of the School of Management in the study of consumer evolution in response to the multichannel revolution in enterprise-market relationships allows us to convey tangible results that can be easily turned into managerial insights.

Enhancing cultural assets through digital innovation: the multidisciplinary approach as a development asset

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The multidisciplinary approach to enhancing cultural assets, combining knowledge of cultural and architectural assets with managerial skills applied to the specific context, may represent a strategic key to the country’s economic recovery.

 

Deborah Agostino, Associate Professor in Accounting Finance and Control and Director of the Digital Innovation in Heritage & Culture Observatory, School of Management, Politecnico di Milano.

Stefano della Torre, Full Professor of Restoration at the Politecnico di Milano and Head of the Master in Management of Cultural Heritage and Institutions – MIP Graduate School of Business, Politecnico di Milano

 

The current pandemic has brought to the fore the importance of adopting a multidisciplinary approach to enhancing cultural assets, based on a combination of humanistic, technical and scientific skills.
Cultural assets are in themselves multidisciplinary, in terms of the diverse ways in which they can produce benefits for local development and their resilience in the face of major crises. Over the last few years, the spotlight has often been placed on the importance of understanding the complexity of cultural assets with regard to their enhancement, involving areas as diverse as archaeology, architecture, chemistry, mathematics, materials science, design and management.

With the physical closure of Italian cultural sites, following the legislative decrees issued with a view to containing the Covid-19 pandemic, further attention has been drawn to the importance of creating synergy between different professional figures to enhance cultural assets, also – and, indeed, above all – in times of crisis. At this historical time, digital innovation, and the ability to exploit the digital channel, is the guiding thread connecting various disciplines. The cultural experience has temporarily shifted from the physical to the digital: on-site visits have turned into virtual tours, school visits into online activities, shows and events into live streams. In most cases, these services are not delivered in a structured manner by a team of professionals. On the contrary, a last-minute, emergency-driven approach has often been adopted, paid for with delays on several fronts. The School of Management has monitored the types of digital content proposed and the resources dedicated to it. While results, in terms of online participation in events, have on average been high (online participation doubled during lockdown, compared to the same period last year), the same cannot be said for the skills and resources involved. The findings of the School of Management’s Digital Innovation in Heritage & Culture Observatory show that, in Italy, one out of two museums employs professionals with specific digital skills. Of these, only 6% have a dedicated team comprising a digital manager and a set of specialised professionals.

While the approach used in the first lockdown involved producing digital cultural content using the resources available, it is now time to reflect in a more structured manner on the medium- to long-term sustainability of this business model, as further proven by closures and revenue loss. This means considering at least three aspects:

  • The type of digital cultural content, which cannot be a mere transformation into the digital realm of the activities designed for on-site use. Instead, we need to develop “native digital” offerings;
  • The revenue mechanisms associated with the new digital cultural offering. The digital content emerging from the first lockdown was free, but this does not contribute to the financial sustainability of museums;
  • The professional skills required to develop the project, which must inevitably combine cultural and heritage skills with managerial, technological and experience design competences.

In this regard, the School of Management takes an active role in boosting the digital innovation of cultural institutions through both research and training.
From a research perspective, its projects analyse new sustainable business models, the digital transformation approaches implemented, and the impact generated by innovation. For example, in terms of new business models, we are mapping fully digital offerings and their cost and revenue mechanisms. Early results show some difficulty in identifying a value proposition capable of highlighting the value of enjoying culture in digital form; in other words, while visitors may be willing to pay a ticket to visit a site, they are not prepared to do so for a digital activity. The research is in its early phase, but it will continue by mapping the models adopted nationally and internationally also in related sectors, in order to contribute to the definition of a possible “phygital approach” capable of combining the “physical” nature of cultural assets with the value added by a digital experience.

From a training perspective, it is now more necessary than ever before to train multidisciplinary professionals having two key cross-cutting competencies: soft skills, and the ability to understand different languages within the cultural heritage world; and digital innovation, in terms of designing experiences and of conservation techniques and new digital languages. In this context, with the Master in Management of Cultural Heritage and Institutions – unique in its kind, in Italy, for combining the technical skills of architecture, management and design in a single programme – the School of Management has set itself the ambitious goal of training executive figures capable of exploiting and steering the great changes underway in the cultural heritage world, combining an in-depth knowledge of cultural and architectural assets with managerial skills applied to the specific context.
This was done by means of an application approach that makes it possible to “experiment”, in the actual context, with the complexity of managing and enhancing an asset, favouring the dialogue between “theory” and “practice”, between universities and cultural institutions, and between different professionals.
This is an ambitious challenge we have set ourselves, but one that we believe, today more than ever, will represent an added value for the cultural heritage world and form part of our country’s economic recovery programme.

 

Multidisciplinarity: a new discipline

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Conversation with Vittorio Chiesa, President of MIP Graduate School of Business

 

We live in a world characterised by increasing interaction between disciplines, in which the professional profiles required by companies are changing. What role can a business school play in this framework?

The business school sector evolves with companies and the wider role they play in society. Companies have been required to operate with a “purpose”, i.e. to act not only for profit but for higher aims, so that they have a positive impact on the system in which they participate. Markets and consumers are showing a growing awareness of this issue and it has become essential for companies to have a relationship with their stakeholders.

Business schools must pay the same attention to students and companies. It is with this objective in mind that this year we obtained Bcorp (Benefit Corporation) certification by joining the international community of companies that stand out for their commitment to combine profit, the pursuit of well-being for society, inclusion, and attention to the environment.

The “purpose” must become a fundamental part in the development of people’s skills, so we can train managers capable of conceiving companies at the service of society.
Companies are asking us to make this cultural leap and we can help by teaching our students how a company can and should contribute positively to the system and country.
Our role is to prepare professionals to introduce strongly purpose oriented innovations that are financially and socially important.

Multidisciplinarity is functional to this objective as it imposes breadth of vision, flexibility, critical spirit, and intuition. Modern training does not only include restricted specialisation but interaction with other disciplines to create more complete professional profiles. Such people must be capable of systemic level analysis and guide companies by defining and drawing inspiration from a “purpose.”

Multidisciplinarity as a tool for breadth of vision and adaptability towards the world. How to integrate it into training?

Traditionally, the multidisciplinary approach was to provide different perspectives within a training programme, and offer different contributions within basic and specialist training. The synthesis between multidisciplinarity and specialist skills is left to the individual.

But it is possible to apply a radically different approach by integrating multidisciplinarity into a training programme, regardless of the subject. The modern challenge is to manage the complexity of this new approach. For example by using innovative teaching techniques which change the interaction between professor and student to make this type of training more effective.
At the moment it is not widely and easily disseminated, but several experiments are underway.

It requires training programme planning and preparation of professors, or rather groups of professors, working in teams. Multidisciplinary training needs more interaction, and to be delivered to small groups using teaching formats that actively involve students.

I believe that the future distinctive element between teaching programmes will be initiatives with specialist standardised content for large numbers, and more transversal content and innovative teaching methods, dedicated to more restricted groups.

Lately there is much talk of life-long education as a key to the continuous updating of skills. Is it a dynamic that intersects with multidisciplinarity?

Lifelong learning means remaining aligned with the environment development and this only rarely or partially happens through vertical insights. More often it means widening the professional profile.

What has been said before applies to lifelong learning too – it must be based on broader contents, and different from the past, using specific platforms capable of dealing with broad disciplinary ranges.

Purpose and multidisciplinarity. What are MIP’s plans for the future of these aspects?

All training programmes will include modules on “purpose,” the role of the company and managers as leaders and innovators.

Opening “Purpose Labs”, i.e. training initiatives dedicated to in-depth studying and analysing how a company can build its purpose, and support companies’ top management in this development.

Finally, innovating our service formats, so that the school is not just a place for training, but a place that encourages a person’s growth. This includes the assessment of skills, guidance, and professional development.

Inspiration from evolutionary approaches: algorithms and challenges in finance

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Advanced analytical techniques borrowed from a heterogeneous literature to extract valuable insights from data are gaining momentum within the finance community. This article briefly introduces how financial ecosystems are increasingly responsive to the application of biological and evolutionary algorithms aimed to analyze the behavior and dynamics of their participants.

Andrea Flori, Assistant Professor in Management and Finance at School of Management, Politecnico di Milano

 

In a popular 1973 work, Burton Malkiel showed how a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at the financial pages of a newspaper could select a portfolio which would perform just as well as one carefully constructed by experts (“A Random Walk Down Wall Street”, 1973), helping to fuel the debate on the possibility of extracting information from financial data and from the behaviour of market operators.

Financial markets are an arena where predictive techniques and algorithms attempt to challenge market efficiency using pattern identification.

Within this framework, numerous methodologies borrowed from various scientific fields have spread and combined to provide a new perspective for studying the dynamics of complex financial systems and the interdependencies that govern their participants’ relationships.

Market infrastructure, the role of information and the behaviour of the operators represent, therefore, some typical pillars employed to define such approaches of analysis within financial contexts.

In particular, approaches inspired by biological perspectives have captured the attention of many financial operators interested in a new generation of intelligent techniques of analysis and calculation that mimic human actions.

Hence, genetic algorithms and neural networks have pervaded financial literature and contributed to the dissemination of methodological innovations inspired by the biological evolution and human functioning. By relying on a multidisciplinary and computationally evolved perspective of analysis, these approaches have shown to obtain promising results compared to traditional methods of statistical analysis.

Specifically, genetic algorithms employ natural selection and genetics tools and perspectives to identify the best solution to problems. By mimicking biological evolution, an initial population is iteratively mutated and recombined to determine subsequent generations, so that changes with a desirable impact are retained in the gene pool of future generations in an attempt to converge towards optimal solutions. Each individual, i.e. candidate solution, is assigned a fitness value, and individuals with more promising characteristics are assigned a higher probability of mating to generate new individuals, i.e. potentially better performing solutions to problems, thus in line with the Darwinian theory of the “survival of the fittest”. Neural networks, instead, learn from data structure and process a signal through interconnected artificial neurons creating a configuration similar to the human nervous system. Each connection is associated with a weight that contains information about the input signal that inhibits or stimulates the signal that is communicated to the neurons to accomplish a specific task. External information is used as input and processed internally in one or more layers of analysis by activating specific neurons that transmit the signal to others before determining an output with a predictive accuracy that can be increased by a learning process of previous actions. Neural networks are a complex adaptive system which can change and adapt its internal structure based on the situation and information that crosses it.

These approaches are therefore flexible and able to adapt to new circumstances, possibly learning from past experience and reacting to stimuli coming from new signals in the system.

It is not surprising, therefore, that such techniques, either separately or combined with each other, are increasingly being applied in many financial areas, such as predictive market analysis and portfolio allocation rules, hedging of financial instruments, and robo-advisor applications.

With the recent increase in computational power and resources and their wide availability, advanced techniques for massive data analysis are, in fact, gaining momentum within the finance community, contributing to a rapidly growing body of literature that exploits, in addition to the techniques mentioned above, a large-scale use of statistical and deep learning concepts to identify patterns in financial markets, study the complex non-linear relationships between and within financial time series, and identify market anomalies.

In addition, repeated episodes of financial crisis with their far-reaching externalities and cascading effects on financial markets and the real economy have driven the study and provision of new tools to monitor and predict the spread of instability in financial systems and manage critical issues that may emerge.

However, adopting statistical learning approaches and deep learning techniques in the study of financial systems requires new paradigms, knowledge and practical skills necessary to develop a solid base of models and algorithms that are properly applied in the reference domains while exploiting the potential arising from a transdisciplinary approach to scientific investigation.

In the world of finance, such tools of analysis are of the utmost importance for future technological development and play a fundamental role in many financial ecosystems. Massive data analysis using advanced statistical and deep learning techniques is in great demand in many areas and in a wide range of applications, which include in addition to forecasting market trends, also for example the study of dependencies between financial systems, the approval of credit lines, the efficient management of financial resources, the detection of anomalies and frauds, and risk assessment.

These challenges seem to indicate therefore a new research perspective, at the crossroads between data mining, predictive analysis and causal modelling, which can allow us to exploit the strength of these algorithms of analysis and calculation to investigate economic and social problems of real and changing environments.

Involving family caregivers in designing assistance services

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The Place4Carers project was conceived to co-produce a new community social service, promoting the involvement of family caregivers of elderly people residing in remote, rural areas of the Camonica Valley (Lombardy Region).

 

Cristina Masella, Professor of Business Administration, School of Management, Politecnico di Milano

Eleonora Gheduzzi, PhD Candidate, School of Management, Politecnico di Milano

 

The current health emergency has provided the opportunity to reflect on the importance of community assistance and home care, especially in favour of fragile elderly people. In Italy, community assistance is entrusted primarily to 7 million family caregivers, a category that mostly goes unnoticed. Family caregivers are predominantly women aged 50 to 60. During the health emergency, more than 50% of these caregivers suspended or reduced their work activities because of the increased burden of caring for their loved ones.

 

“We have a thousand worries. Our life is very hard. We haven’t even the smallest moment to ourselves; a time in which to recharge our batteries. And community assistance is steadily decreasing,” Caregiver (55), Breno.

 

In addition to the psychological hardship of seeing a loved one suffer, family caregivers experience intense stress, a sense of impotence, and solitude due to their ‘burden of assistance’. To prevent the emergence of new vulnerabilities on the territory, a network of healthcare and social service providers must be created that can collaborate closely with family caregivers and provide them with the assistance they need in caring for the elderly. The goal of establishing such a network is twofold: to support caregivers, improving their psychological and social condition, and to strengthen the provision of community assistance to vulnerable elderly people.

 

“We have a greater awareness, both of ourselves and of the relationship we can establish with healthcare operators and professionals to assist our loved ones. I have matured a lot because I now realise what I can do,” Caregiver (77), Breno

 

The Place4Carers project has responded to these needs through participatory scientific research actions involving family caregivers who look after dependant elderly people living in the Camonica Valley. This mountainous, hard-to-reach area was chosen as the scope of the project because here, the caregivers’ assistance is truly crucial given their limited access to healthcare and social services.

The three-year project was funded by Fondazione Cariplo and coordinated by the EngageMinds HUB of the Università Cattolica, in collaboration with the School of Management (SOM) of the Politecnico di Milano, the Need Institute, and Azienda Territoriale per i Servizi alla Persona (ATSP), the local social welfare centre in Breno, Brescia.

In particular, the Politecnico di Milano’s SOM team was entrusted with mapping the needs and the psychological and social condition of family caregivers in the Camonica Valley. This study revealed that caregivers spend an average of 75 hours per week caring for their loved one, experiencing greater physical and psychological fatigue than those who benefit from greater healthcare and social services.

These and other results formed the basis for a new, co-designed service, “S.O.S CAREGIVERS: feeling well to help others feel well”, comprising four co-designed workshops involving 26 family caregivers, 6 researchers and 3 ATSP representatives.

The School of Management team supported ATSP in the implementation of the service, by evaluating its feasibility first and then its impact. The service comprises four macro-activities and has helped more than 150 caregivers:

  • Know more, know better: training courses aimed at providing family caregivers with know-how and practical skills for more effective management of their loved ones.
  • Tradition and memory: a sociable support group offering family caregivers the chance to exchange stories relating to life in the Camonica Valley, mediated by the support and supervision of a psychologist.
  • Information is good for the heart: the establishment of various local information channels, both online and offline, to inform caregivers about the community services available to fragile elderly people and to promote the new SOS Caregiver service.
  • Citizens’ Committee: a participatory organisational structure managing the service, supervising its performance and providing suggestions to improve its effectiveness. The Committee is made up of family caregivers, ATSP representatives, and researchers.

The results were more than satisfactory. For a more comprehensive, overall evaluation of the service, the School of Management team involved all the stakeholders who collaborated in implementing the service: family caregivers, ATSP representatives, researchers, trainers, professionals, and four local care homes. Overall, the service met with a very high level of satisfaction (around 90%), good understanding of course contents (around 88%), and a considerable participation rate, given the hard-to-reach context (around 20%). Moreover, the ATSP representatives, the professionals, and the managers of the four care homes involved were interested in continuing the service, highlighting the importance of supporting family caregivers in caring for the elderly at home.

 

“While we didn’t receive any physical help, the training and assistance we received has helped us manage better our day-to-day problems”, Caregiver (78), Breno.
“We were able to gain a better insight of the day-to-day difficulties experienced by family caregivers in caring for the elderly, and this helped us to review our services in order to address the needs not just of the elderly but of the family as a whole”, an ATSP member of staff, Breno.

 

This project has kicked off the establishment of a community network involving caregivers, researchers, ATSP, ATS Montagna (the mountain health protection agency), ASST Vallecamonica (the local community social healthcare company), Comunità Montana (the Italian mountain community), Assemblea dei Sindaci (the assembly of local mayors), four care homes in the Camonica Valley and a number of cooperatives.

The project may have come to an end, but Place4carers keeps on going!

For further information on the Place4Carers project, please click here to watch the project video and here to the final presentation.

Innovative design and technology for an inclusive society: new Joint Research Center

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Creating a more ‘smart’ and inclusive world: this is the scope of the new Joint Research Center ‘Innovative design and technology for an inclusive society’ created through a five-year agreement between the Politecnico di Milano, NTT DATA, and POLI.Design, with the participation of the Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering of the School of Management.

The new Research Center will see the work of NTT DATA — a leading Japanese multinational company in consultation and the IT sector — POLI.Design — a company of reference for post-graduate education that acts as a hinge between the university, institutions, companies and work — and, for the Politecnico, the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, the Department of Design, and the Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering.

The idea of working together grew out of not only a desire to make joint studies on innovative technological issues, but also sharing important values for promotion together, such as equality, diversity, and inclusion.

One of the collaboration’s primary goals is to use the most advanced technological and design tools synergistically to initiate a cultural transformation, to ‘focus on people’, supporting the inclusive development of society and placing technology at the service of individuals.

The collaboration establishes financing for activities and research projects related to different areas and topics of primary importance to create and realize ‘transparent’ technological solutions with impacts on our daily lives: Smart Mobility, Cybersecurity, Blockchain, Internet of Humans, Diversity Management, Universal Design, Design for Social Benefit, Product and Service Design

In particular, the contribution of the Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering will focus on the issues of Data Analytics and Technology Tools for Diversity and Inclusion in close collaboration with the Department of Electronics, Electronics, Information and Bioengineering at the Politecnico di Milano.

For more information, read the press release.

Call for Visiting Professors and Fellows at the School of Management

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The School of Management is committed to host visiting professors, guest professors and fellows from all over the world to promote and enhance the international exposure of research and teaching activities.
We are eager to host researchers in different fields of Management, Applied Economics and Industrial Engineering.
More information on the research lines and research groups are available here.

The call for the academic year 2020-2021 is now open. Applications must be sent before November 30th 2020.

For more details please visit:

https://www.som.polimi.it/en/join-us/

Expo Dubai 2020: re-establishing the connections

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Lucia Tajoli, Full professor of International Economics, School of Management, Politecnico di Milano

Lucio Lamberti, Full professor of Multichannel Customer Strategy, School of Management, Politecnico di Milano
Coordinator of the Physiology, Emotion and Experience Lab

 

Expo Dubai 2020, which will be held between October 2021 and March 2022 after a year’s postponement due to the pandemic, will—presumably and hopefully—be a key hub, post-Covid. World Expos are considered to be mega events, comparable in impact only to the World Football Championships and the Olympics in terms of media exposure, number of participants and effects on the host economy, but unlike mega sports events, they last longer (6 months) and potentially have a greater influence on the economy of the participating countries.

The last two editions of the World Expo have had special connotations. The 2010 Shanghai event was the largest in history in terms of participants, with around 84 million visitors. The theme was the quality of life in cities (“Better City, Better Life”), but, not by chance, together with the 2008 Beijing Olympics, it was also China’s way of demonstrating to the world the socio-economic prominence that the country had achieved. The 2015 Expo, held in Milan and focused on the theme of the ability to provide high-quality food to humanity (“Feeding the planet, Energy for life”), attracted around 20 million visitors, and represented, in a stagnant national economic context and despite considerable organisational complexity, a driving force for what many international analysts have considered the Milanese “Renaissance” of the last lustre.
The theme of Expo Dubai 2020 is “Connecting Minds, Creating the future“. The event focuses on the role of interconnection as a key to sustainable development.

192 countries have signed up, including Italy, which will participate with a pavilion with the theme “Beauty Unites People“.
The Politecnico di Milano and its School of Management are partners of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is organising Italy’s participation in Expo Dubai 2020, and, starting from 2018, has developed several studies aimed at quantifying the potential impacts of this involvement. Indeed, beyond the obvious need to justify the investment of public resources in the construction of the Pavilion, the measurement of returns (economic and non-economic) is made particularly relevant by the geopolitical specificities of this event: the geographical position of Dubai, the hub of the ME.Na.Sa. (Middle East, North Africa and South Asia) area, and logistics intersection, and the passageways of the New Silk Road makes this Expo a fundamental point of contact between Europe and the areas of the world with the highest rates of economic growth and growth of the middle classes.

It is no coincidence that the event, in the initial forecasts, has attracted a very large majority of non-local visitors, and foresees a committed and significant participation in terms of planning from both Middle Eastern countries and emerging economies such as those of India and Central-Southern Asia. This is a very important opportunity to address the issue of sustainable development in these areas of the world, for example with reference to Infrastructure and transport, the enhancement of cultural heritage, life sciences and aerospace.

Three main kinds of consideration justify the great attention that economic operators in the world are paying to the event.
Firstly, being the first World Expo held in the Middle East, Expo Dubai 2020 represents an opportunity to consolidate business and representation relations at various levels between this area of the world, the Arab world, North Africa and Europe.
Secondly, it is an Expo with a strong research connotation (even more so considering that the pandemic could reduce the number of “real” visitors and increase the virtual interconnection aspect): the Expo season has been archived for a couple of editions now, interpreted as a mere “showcase” of the participating countries, the logic of participation of many of the countries involved, including Italy, is to create within Expo 2020 a true hub of expertise to develop stable collaboration platforms, to be perpetuated even after the event.
Thirdly, this Expo represents one of the first mega events, together with the Tokyo Olympics, of the post-pandemic period, and will therefore have the dual role of showing the possible profile of the new normality in terms of events, flows of people and interconnections, and on the other hand of contributing to financial recovery following the interruptions linked to the pandemic.

The measurement of the impact of participation in a mega event with World Expo on the Organiser, and even more so on the countries that participate without hosting it, is a topic to which the scientific literature has not yet given definitive answers. With reference to the Olympic Games, while there are qualitative indications about the expansive result on the host country, there are also many critical voices that highlight how these initiatives tend, on a direct financial level (difference between investments and tickets, television rights, sponsors, etc.), not to pay off.
However, it is clear, on the one hand, that the direct financial effects are only one aspect of the induced fallout (there are impacts on tourism, equivalent advertising of the territory, etc.) and, on the other, that the World Expo has a different spin-off profile from the Olympic Games, due to the fact that it lasts 6 months and therefore produces a much higher flow of visitors, and because the participation of the host and organising countries is oriented towards primarily economic and diplomatic development objectives.

With reference to the participating countries, in particular, it is possible to attribute the areas of spillover to a potential impact on exports, as participation is an opportunity for promotion of one’s own excellence and of organisation of diplomatic and commercial missions. There is also, in the hub vision of Expo Dubai 2020, the possibility of promoting the meeting between supply and demand of capital, i.e. between innovative entrepreneurial initiatives and financiers, generating incoming and outgoing flows of foreign direct investment. Thirdly, participation with a pavilion at an Expo is also linked to the promotion of the cultural specificities of a territory (and the connotation focused on the beauty and technologies for cultural heritage of Italian participation makes this theme particularly central), and therefore tends to involve tourism promotion, with the potential expansive economic effects that this entails. Last but not least, diplomatic proximity and exposure to scientific collaboration platforms are increasingly a fundamental objective of participation in an Expo event. The analysis carried out in 2018 showed that a precautionary estimate of the expansionary effects of these phenomena for Italy could reach a value of 1.7 billion Euros per year for at least three to four years after the event.

It is clear that these estimates must be—if not revised, at least reconsidered—in the light of the pandemic. However, paradoxically, net of the possible further brakes to the event linked to phenomena at this unpredictable time of the continuation of the state of emergency, the need for the world economies to recover the positions lost in recent months, and the possibility of experimenting with new forms—more digital and less physical—of international promotion initiatives, could even have an even more expansive effect. What is certain is that Expo Dubai 2020 can have a symbolic value of a desire for redemption and, at the same time, a stage of further consolidation of the relationship between Europe and Asia. Analysing the effects in the short, medium and long term is a fascinating challenge that must be taken up in order to make these opportunities increasingly central in the process of developing international economic, and other, relations.

Building a Roadmap for the Future of Global Manufacturing

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Conversation with Marco Taisch
Professor of Advanced and Sustainable Manufacturing Systems, and Operations Management, School of Management, Politecnico di Milano
Scientific Chairman of the World Manufacturing Foundation
President at MADE, Competence Center on Industry 4.0

 

 

Tell us about the path that led to the World Manufacturing Forum: why was it launched, and what are its objectives?

Since first edition of the forum held in 2011, the World Manufacturing Forum is organised yearly by Politecnico di Milano with financial support from the European Commission. In 2018, thanks to Confindustria Lombardia and Regione Lombardia, in order to give stability and guarantee an expansion of activities, we created the World Manufacturing Foundation, which organises the annual event and deals with various initiatives.
The Foundation, created as an open international organization involving regional governments, companies, trade associations, industrial and non-industrial, therefore has the strategic objective of restoring the centrality of the manufacturing sector in the political agendas of various countries.

The main tools put in place are the World Manufacturing Forum, that last year attracted around 1500 people in three days, and the World Manufacturing Report, a yearly white paper that, through a process of consultation with experts from the world of business, academia and policy makers, collects opinions and offers visions for the future on a specific issue, which are relevant to manufacturing, suggesting key recommendations.

In the first edition, in 2018, we addressed the issue of the future of manufacturing as a lever for creating economic and social well-being; in the second, last year, we focused on the fundamental skills required by the sector. And this year, in the event that will take place on 11 and 12 November, we will talk about artificial intelligence.

 

The 2020 edition of the Forum has a unique flavour, a flavour relating to distance, but also to post-Covid recovery. What kind of edition will it be?

The format of the event will change due to the need for social distancing, but only in part: it will take place at the traditional venue in Villa Erba di Cernobbio with a maximum of 200 participants, with worldwide streaming.
We asked ourselves, like everyone else, what will be the impact of Covid on the manufacturing sector at regional and global level, and to give us an answer we created the “Back to the Future” project (the quote is intentional), new this year.
We “decomposed” the complexity of the problem into 14 sub-themes and created 14 working groups accordingly, each one coordinated by an expert (managers, representatives of the associative world, policy-makers, academics), who were asked to discuss and analyse the impact of Covid on their area of expertise, and to give recommendations.
We have already shared online, with the public, several drafts of documents and videos, produced by these workshops, whose results will be presented on the first day of the Forum, on November 11. On November 12 we will present the World Manufacturing Report.
If I can give a little preview, next year we will talk about digital transformation as an enabler of manufacturing sustainability, thus bringing together the two most important trends in the sector.

 

We come from the epic situation of Industry 4.0. How can digitisation in the factory world be a competitive advantage for boosting production and starting up again faster? 

Before the pandemic, it was “normal” to say that digitisation was the competitive advantage, and that’s the way we characterised the 4.0 industry. Now we have changed the statement: it is no longer an advantage, but a business prerequisite.
During the lockdown we saw how digitisation ensured business continuity for many companies that had already invested in this area. For others, unfortunately, there was nothing to be done.
It was a tragic way of realising, undoubtedly, that it affected those companies which, out of ignorance or inertia, had not paid attention to this technological trend.
In our country in particular, which was slower to adopt new technologies, the pandemic has accelerated the awareness of the importance of digitisation.

 

Large companies and small businesses: who has the advantage in this fourth industrial revolution?

Large companies have been digitising in our country for some time now, even before the “National Industry Plan 4.0” of 2017. Small and medium-sized enterprises, were, in fact, lagging behind. It was thanks to the plan, and the planned tax incentives, that they became aware of this opportunity for modernisation. Paradoxically, it was by talking about tax incentives that it was also possible to train in the field of technology, and this had a huge impact on the cultural growth of our country on these issues.
It is very important that the national plan has continuity over time, and that it is not a one-off incentive, to enable businesses—especially small ones—to plan and build a training and expertise programme. And today, to do so, they have several tools at their disposal, such as the Digital Innovation Hubs, and especially the Competence Centers. The Politecnico di Milano has put itself in the forefront of this last tool by creating MADE, a competence center that, gathering the skills of multiple departments, coordinates the work together with 44 other partners from the academic and industrial world.

 

What, in your opinion, are the 3 key words on the evolution of digital transformation in factories over the next 6 months?

First of all “servitisation”, i.e. the development of new business models that are being created thanks to new digital activities carried out in remote industries.
And then the second, “remote” or, if you like, “industrial smart working.”
Finally “resilience”, meaning adaptability, reconfigurability and flexibility of the factory and the supply chain.