Category: Events

Women and the balance between work and home care: what the pandemic can teach us

Posted on | by Beatrice Grillo | Leave a Comment on Women and the balance between work and home care: what the pandemic can teach us

A joint research project between Università Cattolica and the Politecnico di Milano School of Management to study the impact of Covid-19 on the life of working women

 

Since March 2020, the CAREER (CARE for womEn woRk) project, funded by Fondo Integrativo Speciale per la Ricerca and stemming from the collaboration between Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (“Carlo Dell’Aringa”-CRILDA University Research Centre for Family Studies and Labour) and Politecnico di Milano School of Management (Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering Department), has been investigating the experiences of working women during the pandemic to identify areas of intervention and solutions. The project involves 14 researchers from Milan’s two universities. On Wednesday 1 December, the first results were presented at the event “Women and the balance between work and home care. What the pandemic can teach us”.

As a result of the project, the managers in charge, Claudia Manzi, Professor of Social Psychology at Università Cattolica, and Cristina Rossi-Lamastra, Professor of Business and Industrial Economics at Politecnico di Milano, have drawn up an extremely complex picture of the working conditions faced by women in the last year and a half.

Working from home during the pandemic has had two-fold consequences and effects on working women. On the one hand, it has provided an opportunity to improve their work-life balance and their work performance. On the other, the gender bias sees women handling most domestic and family affairs (virtually single-handedly), thus restricting their work-family balance to a single sphere, the domestic one. This has had negative consequences not so much on the work performance of working women, but on their levels of stress and mental well-being.

As Professor Manzi of Università Cattolica states: “The underlying cause of this situation may be found in a combination of cultural, relational, logistical and organisational preconceptions. From a cultural point of view, the still largely unconscious adoption of stereotypical prejudices on the role of women in the work world and in the family sphere has undoubtedly been a major obstacle for women workers.”

“Such stereotypes,” says Professor Rossi-Lamastra, “result in an unequal allocation of resources. Through the CAREER project, we have seen that, when working from home, women are generally allocated a less adequate work space than men.”

Gender stereotypes have also been aggravated by a number of further situations: little and ill-formulated support from institutions and organisations, and in some cases, lack of support from partners, in addition to inadequate work spaces in the home.

The picture drawn by the research is certainly a complex one, but given how the world of work is evolving in Italy, if we are to promote and sustain female labour force participation then we need to take a less simplistic view of working from home. Above all, we need to develop a stronger sense of identity among working women in terms of their role within organisations and within society as a whole. Working from home should not become a way of preventing women from fulfilling their professional life and their identity as female workers.

The CAREER (CARE for womEn woRk) research project is still ongoing. For more information, please visit the official website at: https://projectcareer.it/

Also worthy reading are some more in-depth articles about the project recently published by Il Sole 24 Ore and IoDonna

 

Project HAwK wins 2021 Switch2Product | Innovation Challenge

Posted on | by Beatrice Grillo | Leave a Comment on Project HAwK wins 2021 Switch2Product | Innovation Challenge

Project HAwK proposed by Domenico Nucera (PhD Candidate, Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering), Luca Bertulessi (Researcher, Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering) and Tommaso Maioli (Alumnus of Politecnico di Milano) has won the Switch2Product Grant in the category “Industry Transformation”, ranking among the top 26 teams on a total of 250 projects presented at the S2P program, organized by PoliHub, the Technology Transfer Office of Politecnico di Milano and Deloitte’s Officine Innovazione.

HAwK is a hardware accelerator for the analysis of data coming from high data rate sensors, with the aim of reducing costs and energy consumption, enabling Artificial Intelligence on edge.

The 30.000 euros prize will serve the purpose of the technological development of the project, which is going to be realized with the scientific advisory of DIG’s Professors Marco Macchi and Luca Fumagalli and DEIB’s Professor Salvatore Levantino.

Domenico Nucera has enrolled in the 37° PhD cycle in Management Engineering and has been working for 2 years at the Industry 4.0 Lab at DIG. Luca Bertulessi is a researcher at ARPLab at DEIB.
HAwK will be able to promote potential cross-disciplinary activities between the above mentioned DIG and DEIB laboratories.

The awards ceremony was held at MADE Competence Center Industry 4.0, in the Bovisa campus of Politecnico di Milano.

 

For further information, please click here.

The manager of the future? They’re a designer

Posted on | by Angela Leone | Leave a Comment on The manager of the future? They’re a designer

Designers who become managers, managers who learn the tools of design. The “contamination” between these professionals is one of the answers to growing complexity. And it is at the centre of the Master in Strategic Design for Innovation and Transformation, as Claudio Dell’Era and Cabirio Cautela explain

Until a few years ago we were (or we thought we were) able to understand the world by relying on an analytical approach, that is based on well-defined methodologies, logic and categories. Today this is no longer the case. Growing complexity requires a change of pace, with the involvement of new abilities like intuitiveness and creativity. «It is the reason today’s managers can benefit from the adoption of skills offered by design», explains Professor Claudio Dell’Era, who together with Professor Cabirio Cautela is co-director of the Master in Strategic design for Innovation and Transformation at MIP Politecnico di Milano. «Indeed, the challenges of the world of work require a strengthened managerial figure, more contemporary and increasingly in demand».

The evolution of designers

At the same time, during the last twenty years designers themselves have seen their role gradually evolve. «On one hand they have gone from being technical figures to increasingly become managers. Just think of automotive, for example, with Chris Bangle in BMW and Walter De Silva in Audi, and then in all those sectors in which the language of the product, its structure, its meaning have an important impact on positioning» explains Cautela. «On the other hand, designers have started to become increasingly present in the marketing departments of companies, becoming fundamental not so much in product design, as in new offer solutions, that is the integrated process between product, service, communication and distribution».

Humans at the centre

The reason a company regulated on the principles of design ends up having a competitive advantage is the centrality of the human element. «Design presupposes a bottom-up involvement of employees. Only in this way is it possible to give meaning to one’s work, putting human values  before more functional and technical ones», explains Dell’Era. «This is an increasingly indispensable dynamic, a necessity more than a choice». The repercussions are also positive for users: «The new recipe for innovation must push us to create products, services and solutions that make peoples’ life experiences more pleasing. They are the people that we must put at the centre of our reflections».

Good design sells better

A point of view that is also echoed in the considerations of Cautela: «Good design makes you sell more, but above all it makes you sell better.   Because it starts from a vision of people, and not a corporate one, because it puts at the centre change, emerging cultural models, relations. Business is a consequence, not the end». And the workers involved also benefit from this: «Employee engagement is greater if it is tied to a deep motivation, to a purpose. That is not the profit, or a higher salary. The design leader must convey precisely this concept: the aim is to change peoples’ lives in a certain way. An approach that allows to retain human resources who truly believe in the corporate purpose, giving them an opportunity to enhance their creativity». 

The master’s degree  

These are the issues and the challenges which the Master in Strategic Design for Innovation and Transformation tries to address, offering training to managers who want to acquire design tools and to designers that instead feel a need for stronger managerial training. «The question we started from is:  who is the design leader?», explains Cautela. «The answer is that it is not someone who only has an ability to proactively offer solutions, but who also instils new values in the organization. To define this role, we used four thematic blocks: the first involves design as a lens with which to approach innovation, to give value to the products also for the meaning they embody. The second theme is that of leadership and engagement, as we have said. The third is that of data supporting creativity: not big data, but “thick” data, qualitative (feelings, reactions) data that provides information on individuals dealings with objects. Lastly, the fourth block involves the issue of the integration of creativity in organizations. How can it be done? It is a question that is often faced in big corporations, because the integration of new creative processes is always complex. But, if done well, it can lead to big benefits».

 

Financial Times: il MIP Politecnico di Milano is placed second in Europe among business schools belonging to technical univerisities

Posted on | by Angela Leone | Leave a Comment on Financial Times: il MIP Politecnico di Milano is placed second in Europe among business schools belonging to technical univerisities

MIP Politecnico di Milano, part of the university’s School of Management, has bettered its position in the FT European Business School Rankings 2021

MIP Politecnico di Milano, the Graduate School of Business at Politecnico di Milano’s School of Management, has again this year improved its position at the upper echelons of business schools in Europe.

According to the Financial Times European Business Schools Ranking 2021, published today, MIP has climbed to second place in Europe among the best business schools belonging to a technical university (Politecnico di Milano) bettered only by Imperial College Business School (UK). Last year, it was in third place. The confirmation of MIP’s excellent educational offer is highlighted in its improved position in the general ranking, where the Milan-based business school is 37th out of the 95 classified.

In the words of Vittorio Chiesa and Federico Frattini, President and Dean of MIP Politecnico di Milano, respectively: “Being in the apex zone of this classification of business schools that are part of a European technical university is a recognition of the effectiveness of our work and investment over this complex period to ensure the continuity of our offer. Rankings are certainly a key element that managers turn to when seeking to upskill themselves, and we can only be highly satisfied with this endorsement. We also know that, beyond rankings, we have a reputational value that strengthens our place as a reference point in education and training. The certification that we have received over the years and our ever increasing network of companies with whom we work, set MIP apart for its excellence in the field of lifelong learning, and a safe haven for those who, with reason, believe it to be a cornerstone for competing in a challenging market.”

The Financial Times also acknowledges the quality of the individual programmes taught at MIP, with two Masters advancing in its 2021 rankings. MIP’s MBA (Master in Business Administration) now in 34th place and EMBA (Executive Master in Business Administration) in 54th place, have climbed up by four and two places respectively, compared to 2020. In the Executive MBA, there is an improvement in the FT’s evaluation of the parameter Salary Today / Salary Increase, which compares the amount paid to managers three years after taking MIP’s EMBA against their pre-Master salary. On average, the salary of an MIP EMBA alumnus/a rises by 53%.

In the Financial Times top 10 ranking for business schools in the MIP “model” alone, meaning those that are part of a technical university, Politecnico di Milano’s business school is placed immediately behind Aalto University (Finland), TUM School of Management (Germany) and Institut Mines – Telecom Business School (France).

MIP’s educational portfolio of excellence covers about 40 Masters, including 7 MBAs and Executive MBAs, 200 open executive programmes and a series of training programmes customised for companies.

“From data science to data culture: the emergence of analytics-powered managers”: now online the new issue of SOMeMagazine

Posted on | by Beatrice Grillo | Leave a Comment on “From data science to data culture: the emergence of analytics-powered managers”: now online the new issue of SOMeMagazine

SOMe, our eMagazine which shares stories, points of view and projects around key themes of our mission, has just released its Issue #7.

“From data science to data culture: the emergence of analytics-powered managers” is the topic we discussed with our Faculty.

Carlo Vercellis tells how digital technologies and algorithms analysing data play a crucial role in human evolution and in the transformation of our ways of thinking and living.

Behind the strengthening of data culture in companies lies the need to confront with challenges of the competitive scenario, explains Giuliano Noci. While according to Filomena Canterino, this new approach implies also the revision of organizational and leadership models.

Our “Stories” report the excellent achievement of the Milan’s neighbourhood Hubs against food waste: the project, which the School of Management is partner of since 2017, won the first edition of the prestigious international Earthshot Prize for the best solutions to protect the environment, in the section “a world without waste”.
We share also recent update on the impact of our research with some data from the Research Impact Assessment, a tool recently implemented by our School to assess the impact of our projects on society as a whole. And finally the Erasmus+ project WiTECH (Entrepreneurship for Women in Tech) which promotes the presence of women in the ICT sector.

 

To read SOMe’s #7 click here.

To receive it directly in your inbox, please sign up here.

Previous issues of SOMe:

  • # 1 “Sustainability – Beyond good deeds, a good deal?”
  • Special Issue Covid-19 – “Global transformation, ubiquitous responses”
  • #2 “Being entrepreneurial in a high-tech world”
  • #3 “New connections in the post-covid era”
  • #4 “Multidisciplinarity: a new discipline”
  • #5 “Inclusion: shaping a better society for all”
  • #6 “Innovation with a human touch”

Data-powered management: a multifaceted challenge

Posted on | by Mirja Calgaro | Leave a Comment on Data-powered management: a multifaceted challenge

Behind a company’s declared need to strengthen its data culture lies a profound need to consolidate, enhance, develop or modify their business model, or the way they manage their business, in an informed manner. This is a compelling and pervasive need, linked to the observation of certain trends that are changing the competitive scenario.

 

Giuliano Noci, Professor of Strategy and Marketing and Vice Rector of the Chinese Campus of Politecnico di Milano

 

People who interact with companies are commonly told, “we need to strengthen our data culture”.

The concept of “data culture” has various undertones: the presence of data analysis skills, the ability to read and interpret analyses, the tendency of individuals and work teams to base their decisions on findings and data rather than on feelings and instinct, and efforts to collect and share the right data to support our own decisions and those of others.

Evidently, “data culture” is a combination of all these dimensions. Behind a company’s declared need to strengthen its data culture lies a profound need to consolidate, enhance, develop or modify their business model, or the way they manage their business, in an informed manner. This is a compelling and pervasive need, linked to the observation of certain trends that are changing the competitive scenario.

First of all, competition pressures, on markets that are increasingly saturated and also more and more interconnected, force us to seek out business models and innovations that enable functionality that is as useful as it is sophisticated. This leads to a quest for enhancement of the range of products and services offered, through data work, but not only. For example, if I want to make an electrical appliance stand out radically on the Western market, I will, within reason, have to connect it to the Internet and use the data it collects to offer value-added services to the customer (for example, in a refrigerator, not only report anomalies to enable technical maintenance in real time, but be able to notice when a milk carton is almost empty, and perhaps, based on the rate at which it is used, estimate when the milk will run out or with what frequency to suggest repurchasing it). What is more, it is clear that this type of innovation may bring about developments in the business model. For example, in the above case, integration with eCommerce systems can offer timely subscription-based refills.

Secondly, diversity in the target markets is calling for increasingly differentiated solutions from market segments that are highly heterogenous in terms of taste, preferences, product/service usage habits, and physical and digital channel usage behaviours in interacting with the company. These aspects require a practically one-to-one response from the company. From marketing automation to service automation, companies are increasingly seeking out models and algorithms that can gauge the health of their relationship with a customer, and how inclined they are to accept a new offer or abandon the company.

Thirdly and in fact as a result of the previous two cases, the focus of managerial activity is more and more characterised by the quest for accuracy, precision and waste reduction – in production, just as it is in marketing, sales, customer service, etc. Also in this case, data and the ability to read it are key levers.

Therefore, apart from the communicative effectiveness of the phrase “data culture”, the issue that arises is the development of an ability to combine advanced analytical skills with business acumen. This is a new skill in companies, and often one that is difficult to attribute to a single professional profile. Instead, it is attributed to a team. In fact, companies often hire data scientists with great analytical and technical expertise, but they do not always have managers able to bridge the gap between business needs and technical and modelling applications. Conversely, their personnel are not always able to translate analytical outputs into action plans that can drive the business.

Our school recognised this need when interacting with companies. As a result of this we have profoundly enhanced our range of machine learning and applied statistics courses and analytics courses applied to management disciplines (e.g. performance measurement, marketing, and even the public sector), with a Major, or specialisation, of the Master of Science with a strong analytical focus.  A large number of students have decided to enrol in these courses, and this outstanding success demonstrates that our young people know how important it is to acquire the professional expertise to build a strong “data-powered” career.

The pedagogical challenge, in this context, consists in condensing strong analytical training and an equally solid knowledge of the business impacts of the decision-making systems subject to modelling analysis, with an approach focused on studying these models in the context of the areas where their use is beneficial and promoting rich and extensive discussion on the further implications for the operating models of organisations.

 

 

 

Machine Learning & Big Data Analytics

Posted on | by Beatrice Grillo | Leave a Comment on Machine Learning & Big Data Analytics
Digital technologies and algorithms to analyse data represent the most recent evolution of intellectual technologies. They have transformed us into what we are today, into what we know, and into our ways of thinking. We live in close symbiosis with intellectual technologies and this will be increasingly the case with artificial intelligence algorithms

 

Carlo Vercellis, Full Professor of Machine Learning at School of Management, Politecnico di Milano

Most of our daily actions, purchases, movements, and personal or professional decisions are guided by a Machine Learning algorithm: it is convenient to receive suggestions about products to buy, hotels and means of transport for travel, and films or music we might like.

Many companies have been collecting large amounts of data in their information systems for decades. Credit card operators, who record almost two billion transactions over the course of a weekend, large retailers, Telco and utility providers.

However, the real revolution that has led to Big Data coincides with the advent of social networks, a phenomenon called the Internet of People. Each of us has gone from being a reader of information into an author of content. The need to store this immense and rapidly growing amount of data has led the large web companies to create a new type of database based on distributed network architectures and, in practice, to bring about the birth of the cloud.

In addition to people, there are now also ‘things’ on the Internet and this Internet of Things consists of countless objects equipped with sensors and often capable of intelligent and autonomous behaviour. We can turn on the lights in our homes from miles away, adjust our thermostats and watch through our video surveillance systems. Cars can drive autonomously without our intervention. This is a universe made up of almost 30 trillion sensors that record numerical values with a very high temporal frequency (one trillion is equal to ‘one’ followed by 18 ‘zeros’!). We also have digital meters for gas and power, capable of accurately recording how much we consume and suggesting behaviours to for more efficient sustainable use of energy. We wear fitness devices and smartwatches on our wrists, which record our physical activity, main vital parameters, eating habits, and the quality of our sleep, and provide us with useful suggestions to improve our physical condition. Smart objects that will help make our lives more and more comfortable.

From what we have said so far, it is clear that predictive value and applicative value help to generate great economic value, for businesses, for public administration, for citizens in general.

However, data in themselves are of no use if they are not automatically analysed by intelligent algorithms. In particular, machine learning algorithms in the field of artificial intelligence are applied to large volumes of data to recognise recurring regularities and to extract useful knowledge that makes it possible to predict future events with considerable accuracy. This is inductive logic, a bit like the learning mechanism of a child, to whom the mother points out a few examples of letters of the alphabet, enabling him in a short time to identify them independently and thus learn to read.

For example, algorithms are able to interpret the mood, the so-called ‘sentiment’, of text posts on social networks with 95-98% accuracy, which is higher than what a human reader could achieve. Similarly, algorithms are now able to perform automatic content and context recognition of analysed images with great precision.

Digital technologies and algorithms for analysing data represent the latest evolution of intellectual technologies and will help us live better. Suffice to think that throughout history, from the first prehistoric tools to the invention of writing, from the invention of printing to the conception of computers, intellectual technologies have been the driver behind human evolution. They have transformed us into what we are today, into what we know, and into our ways of thinking. We live in close symbiosis with intellectual technologies and this will be increasingly the case with artificial intelligence algorithms.

On the economic side, we observe that companies that are more mature in data analysis have a greater ability to compete and continue to strengthen compared companies that are less evolved and not as prompt in their adoption of digital innovation strategies. For years we have been used the term digital divide to refer to the gap between citizens with access to digital resources and those without. As part of the Big Data Analytics Observatory that we started up at Politecnico di Milano in 2008, last year we introduced the term Analytics Divide to indicate the gap that has been created and is unfortunately widening between companies that are virtuous in their use of big data and artificial intelligence and those that are less innovative, which will find it harder to get out of the swamp into which the virus has pushed us.

In order to progress as a data-driven company, it is however necessary to have adequate talent and skills, which can be obtained through the acquisition of new resources or the reskilling of resources already available in the company. With this in mind, at MIP-Politecnico di Milano we have launched several courses on Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, and Data Science, such as the international Master in Business Analytics & Big Data and the executive course in Data Science & Business Analytics.

WiTECH – Entrepreneurship for Women in Technology

Posted on | by Beatrice Grillo | Leave a Comment on WiTECH – Entrepreneurship for Women in Technology

WiTECH (Entrepreneurship for Women in Tech), a European education project fully funded by the Erasmus+ Programme, is designed to encourage women to stay in the ICT sector and to empower them to reach their full potential through the creation of businesses in this sector

Not only is there a growing gap across Europe between the demand and supply for ICT specialists, but women are overwhelmingly under-represented in this sector. Furthermore, women who do choose ICT face a higher risk of dropping out because of unfavourable working conditions and lack of career progress.

Funded by the EU’s Erasmus+ initiative, the WiTECH project is led by Politecnico di Milano (specifically, by the School of Management and by the Department of Electronic, Informatics, and Bioengineering, DEIB).
Besides Politecnico di Milano (POLIMI), the WiTECH consortium includes two other technological universities (Lappeenrannan–Lahden teknillinen yliopisto, LUT, and Technological University Dublin, TUM), three tech start-up hubs (PoliHub, The Startup Shortcut, and Digital Hub Development Agency), as well as a business school (L’Institut de préparation à l’administration générale IPAG) from four European countries.

The team consists of professors and experts in highly relevant technical, educational, economic, and managerial fields from POLIMI. These include Massimo G. Colombo (Full Professor in Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurial Finance at SoM), Cristina Rossi-Lamastra (Full Professor of Business and Industrial Economics at SoM, with additional expertise in gender issues in business contexts), Mara Tanelli (Full Professor of Automatic Controls at DEIB), Nicoletta Trentinaglia (Senior Project Manager of e-learning, e-collaboration and learning innovation projects).
The project leaders from other partners are: Adnane Maalaoui (Director of Entrepreneurship Programmes – IPAG), Jussi Kasurinen  (Associate Professor and Head of Software Engineering Programmes – LUT), Barry Feeney  (Head of Department of Computing – TUD), Julia Witting-Mäklin (Director of Operations – The Shortcut).
The project also involves young scholars such as Silvia Stroe (Junior Researcher in Entrepreneurship at SoM) and Jie Li (PhD Student in Entrepreneurship at SoM).

Currently, the WiTECH project is putting together a blended learning course, which builds the skills and confidence that women with STEM qualifications need to create their own innovative businesses in ICT fields.
The heart of WITECH is a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), which is conceived as a self-sustaining tool to encourage professors to innovate their teaching practices. It targets Master’s students in STEM subjects, by being freely available online, it is also intended to spark interest in ICT among high school girls to encourage them to choose this field of studies.
The course will be promoted widely across Europe, after the development and testing of its contents during 2022.

This blended learning course consists of three modules:

Module 1:  Entrepreneurship and management.
Notions of entrepreneurship (including social entrepreneurship), how to become an executive of the 21st century (new working culture, corporate-social responsibility, diversity in the workplace, etc.)

Module 2: Technology entrepreneurship.
The notions of entrepreneurship applied to the specific challenges of starting a business in technology sectors.

Module 3: Training at a tech startup or a tech hub.
Understanding the context of tech startups or tech hubs in the framework of technology entrepreneurial ecosystems.

WiTECH started in Oct 2019, and it is expected to be completed by the end of 2022.  All the course content is now ready and the MOOC format is being produced. The website has just been launched: https://witech.training/.
The Linkedin page of the project is: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/wi-tech/.

We welcome you to join us!

Neighbourhood Hubs against food waste win the Earthshot Prize

Posted on | by Marta Re Ferrè | Leave a Comment on Neighbourhood Hubs against food waste win the Earthshot Prize
Dedicated to environmental protection actions, Milan’s anti-food waste project won £1 million and support from the Royal Foundation for the next few years.

 

Milan, 18 October 2021 – On the night of Sunday, 17 October 2021, Prince William announced that the City of Milan, with its Neighbourhood Hubs Food Policy project against food waste, is the winner of the first prestigious international Earthshot Prize for the best solutions to protect the environment.

A month ago it was announced that Milan was one of the 15 finalists in the “a world without waste” section, and yesterday, live on the BBC and Discovery Channel, Prince William unveiled the winners after an international panel of experts selected Milan from 750 candidate initiatives from around the world.

Along with Milan in the other four categories of the award were winners from the Republic of Costa Rica for the protection of forests, India for the reduction of smoke emissions into the air, Berlin for the development of hydrogen technologies for energy production, and the Bahamas for the protection of coral reefs.

In Milan, the BBC arranged a link to London from a terrace overlooking the Duomo, which was attended by Deputy Mayor Anna Scavuzzo, with representatives of all the partners who bring this project to life.

The £1 million prize will be used to further develop these hubs and open new ones, ensuring their long-term sustainability and replicating this excellent practice in the network of cities working with Milan on food policy, starting with the network of C40 cities and the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact.

Winning the Earthshot prize is the recognition of a great team effort that has involved the entire city: thanks to the City Council and many organisations from the third sector, universities, large-scale retail trade and philanthropy operating in the area, Milan now has 3 neighbourhood hubs at Isola (2019), Lambrate (2020) and Gallaratese (2021).

The project was born in 2017 as a result of an alliance between the City of Milan, Politecnico di Milano (with the research group of the Food Sustainability Lab, Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering) Assolombarda, Fondazione Cariplo and the QuBì Programme.
The creation of the first Hub then brought in Banco Alimentare della Lombardia and saved over 10 tonnes of food per month, ensuring a stream of 260,000 equivalent meals in one year, reaching 3,800 people, thanks to the contribution of 20 supermarkets, 4 business canteens and 24 Third Sector organisations.

In particular, the Food Sustainability Observatory conducted a network feasibility study and monitored the hubs’ operation and the impact generated by the project, thus making it possible to build an extensible logistic model replicable in other areas of the city.

Indeed, this was followed by the launch of the Hub in Lambrate, immediately after the first lockdown in spring 2020, also managed by Banco Alimentare della Lombardia in a space made available by AVIS Milano and with the support of BCC Milano. The third Hub, at Gallaratese, is managed by Terre des Hommes with the support of the Fondazione Milan.

Another one, currently in the planning stage, will be the neighbourhood Hub in Corvetto, managed by the Banco Alimentare della Lombardia and with the support of the Fondazione SNAM; while the City of Milan has recently started the co-design process for the Hub in the city centre with Associazione IBVA and the support of BCC Milano.

 

The team of the Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering:
Alessandro Perego, Marco Melacini, Giulia Bartezzaghi, Annalaura Silvestro and Andrea Rizzuni from the Food Sustainability research group.

Partners involved:
The project involves major retailers including Lidl Italia, Esselunga, Carrefour, NaturaSi, Erbert, Coop Lombardia, Il Gigante, Bennet, Penny Market with the support of Number1 Logistics Group who provided the vans for the Isola and Lambrate hubs. Also involved were the canteens of Pirelli, Siemens, Deutsche Bank and Maire Tecnimont, coordinated by Gruppo Pellegrini for the Isola Hub.
With Fondazione Cariplo and SogeMi, the City of Milan has also launched the Foody zero waste initiative to replicate the hub model at Ortomercato and recover fresh food together with Banco Alimentare della Lombardia, Recup, Croce rossa sud milanese, Università degli studi di Milano and many other supporting partners.

Data culture and leadership culture: two sides of the same coin

Posted on | by Beatrice Grillo | Leave a Comment on Data culture and leadership culture: two sides of the same coin

Data experts are becoming key connectors in relationships within organisations. Data culture therefore brings with it the need to rethink organisational and leadership models

 

Filomena Canterino, Assistant Professor of People Management and Organization at School of Management, Politecnico di Milano 

For several years now, data analytics experts, the so-called data scientists and data analysts, have been among the most sought-after figures by companies across all sectors, from manufacturing and education to publishing. Their job is to gather, structure, analyse, interpret and summarise data, transforming it into information that is useful for the other players and decision-makers in an organisation.

Very often, the people in these roles are key connectors within the organisation, because they interact with individuals at various positions and levels, thus becoming reference points that transcend and, in some cases, even overturn traditional hierarchies. Data experts can in fact deliver great added value to almost all corporate areas, from maintenance and strategy to resources management and marketing. And in doing so, they interact with a host of different corporate players. Let us consider the typical example of the datafication of a production plant, in which a system of sensors is able to continuously gather real-time production performance data (for example, number of items manufactured, number of rejects, duration of downtime, number of breakdowns). By analysing and processing the data, and the information they manage to extrapolate from it, a data scientist or data expert can communicate effectively with operators, team leaders and top managers alike. They are able to give a voice to the machines, but also to the people who, armed with a more complete and detailed idea of the performance and potential areas for improvement, can put forward new solutions and ideas.

Just as often, unfortunately, people occupying these roles are superficially labelled as “nerds” and “geeks”, or other terms that allude to a certain familiarity with and interest in analytical and technical matters, and less interest or self-confidence in relationship, interpersonal and leadership aspects. Besides being narrow-minded – just think how many “nerds” are CEOs and leaders of big successful companies – this view is extremely limiting.

First of all, because it refers to an outdated view of the concept of leadership, i.e. innate, heroic leadership, based on “natural” charisma. Leadership experts and companies at the forefront with regard to these issues know all too well that people are not necessarily born leaders, but can become them – some with more effort than others, of course – simply because leadership is characterised by behaviours, or rather by actions that we can follow, practise and improve, and not by characteristics. So, surely also an individual with outstanding technical and analytical talent can identify and deploy the behaviours needed to interact with others and efficiently lead their team.
What is more, in the field of academic research, in which people have been aware for several decades of the fact that behaviour is more relevant than characteristics, the most recent studies have shown that leadership is actually a complex, dynamic and shared process in most cases, which stems from interaction between the various players of a system. If we look at it in this way, we could almost say that it could be more easily understood by individuals in charge of intercepting and interpreting data flows than by others.

Secondly, this type of view makes managing the development of these figures within organisations ineffective, precisely because it shines the spotlight on the wrong thing, i.e on the personal characteristics of those occupying a specific role, rather than on the organisation’s leadership model.

So what can be done to put these roles in a position to reach their full potential and develop their content- and process-based leadership qualities?

By all means, we can promote a cultural model that views leadership as something that is shared and widespread, based on actions and behaviour and on the concept of accountability – whereby each and every individual or small team is responsible for a small part of the result. All this can be achieved through coherent training and development plans across the entire organisation, as well as through digital technologies, which facilitate data acquisition and sharing to inform decisions and shorten hierarchical chains as a result. Data, accountability and shared leadership: a virtuous circle in which data experts can be true protagonists.