Category: Events

JSCM’s Best Paper Award to Claudia Colicchia

Posted on | by Mirja Calgaro | Leave a Comment on JSCM’s Best Paper Award to Claudia Colicchia

Journal of Supply Chain Management awards our Professor’s study amongst all publications of 2019.

 

The paper “The Impact of Supplier Sustainability Risk on Shareholder Value“, authored by Claudia Colicchia, School of Management Politecnico di Milano, Seongtae Kim, Aalto University School of Business, Stephan M. Wagner ETH Zurich, received the Best Paper Award of the Journal of Supply Chain Management (JSCM) during the annual Conference of the Academy of Management. The paper was chosen by JSCM among all those published in the year 2019.

Claudia Colicchia is Associate Professor of Logistics and Supply Chain Management at Politecnico di Milano. Her research interests include Supply Chain Sustainability, Supply Chain Risk Management, Industry 4.0 and Logistics 4.0, and Citation Network Analysis.

The paper examines the magnitude of the consequences of what are termed as supplier sustainability risks (SSRs). Business scandals like sweatshop labour have received growing attention in the field of supply management. Yet little is known about how detrimental such scandals are to buying firms. To this end, an event study analysis was conducted, followed by regression modelling based on a sample of 196 U.S. publicly traded firms’ SSRs.

The results reveal that SSRs are associated with a 1.00 percent reduction in shareholder wealth. The market reacts negatively but not differently to the two types of SSR: process-related risks and product-related risks. Finally, a firm’s moral capital does play a mitigating role for SSRs and process-related risks; however, it does not provide insurance-like protection for product-related risks.

The Journal of Supply Chain Management is in its 55th year of publication. The Journal has made rapid advances in recent years, as evidenced by a quadrupling of submissions since 2007, and an ever-increasing number of high quality, unsolicited submissions. More tangibly, JSCM has been ranked either first or second for the past seven years among supply chain and operations management journals, based on its Thomson-Reuters ISI Impact Factor and received multiple Emerald Citations of Excellence Awards, which are given to the 50 most outstanding and highest impact articles out of the 15,000 articles published in the top 300 management journals.

For more information:
Kim, S., Wagner, S.M. and Colicchia, C.
The Impact of Supplier Sustainability Risk on Shareholder Value
J Supply Chain Manag, 55: 71-87 (2020)
The study online

International Workshop on Collaborative Practices and Technologies for Critical Infrastructure Resilience

Posted on | by Mirja Calgaro | Leave a Comment on International Workshop on Collaborative Practices and Technologies for Critical Infrastructure Resilience

The SICt project aims to strengthen the joint risk management capacities linked to events that may partially or totally disrupt the continuity of critical transport infrastructures service with cross-border relevance. It will be achieved by advancing the sharing of knowledge and information on cross-border Critical Infrastructures through the implementation of joint monitoring systems and communication procedures between Lombardy (Italy) and Ticino (Switzerland).

The Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering of the School of Management is scientific partner of the project.

The action strategy of the project is to improve the effectiveness of a shared prevention system built to reduce the impact of potential disruptive events.
On Friday, October 2, selected international projects will share their experiences on collaborative response planning and building Critical Infrastructure Resilience.
The Conference is funded by the Interreg V-A Italy-Switzerland 2014-2020 cooperation program, which aims to create significant economic and social improvements, by pooling the resources available in border areas.

The conference is organised and coordinated by the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Italian Switzerland (Scuola universitaria professionale della Svizzera italiana) – SUPSI, Istitute of Earth Sciences, in collaboration with the Critical Infrastructure Resilience International Network (CIRINT.NET).

Operation co-financed by the European Union, the European Regional Development Fund, the Italian State, the Swiss Confederation and the Cantons as part of the Interreg V-A Italy-Switzerland Cooperation Program.

 

Is Made in Italy forever?

Posted on | by Marta Re Ferrè | Leave a Comment on Is Made in Italy forever?

As more Countries promote the quality of their products and destinations, some essential sectors of the Italian industry are facing with a hard question: is the “Made in Italy” brand still competitive? And how can it guarantee a competitive advantage for our country in the long term?

 

Filippo Renga, Junior Assistant Professor of Production Plants and Business Organization
School of Management Politecnico di Milano

 

“Is Made in Italy forever?”: that’s the question that emerged during the 2018 Research of our Smart Agrifood and Digital Innovation in Tourism Observatories.

Beyond the slogan, an important doubt emerged about the competitiveness of some essential sectors of the country’s industry: can the “Paese Italia” brand – identified with the “Made in Italy” and frequently used in many sectors (food, tourism, clothing, music, design, art, etc.) to underline the Italian identity of a product or a service to increase its value on the market – survive intact in the long term and guarantee a competitive advantage for our country?
This is a question we will try to answer through the upcoming research, but which has already found confirmation in some phenomena we are recording.

 

Food quality is not only Made in Italy

Starting from food, we all know that any product with the “Made in Italy” mark receives special attention by a large part of the international consumers. This gives origin to frauds linked to the “Italian Sounding” (that is the use of images, brands and denominations recalling Italy to market products that are not related to our country in any way. Just think to the well-known “Parmesan”).

However, through our experience we realized that more and more countries promote the quality of their food products, thereby dispelling the myth of the “quality food” as a prerogative of Italy. For example, it is interesting to notice that in extremely attended international events dedicated to quality food – such as in London or Berlin – there isn’t a significant presence of Italian companies. Furthermore, food trends often originate outside our country (e.g. organic food). Even though a Google search it is possible to see that, if you insert the words “quality food” in the local language of many countries, no Italian product emerges. Finally, many TV formats about the restaurant industry were born abroad and are therefore imported by us.

This also happens because the concept of quality is anything but unequivocal, as shown by the model of the Food Quality Heptagon (see the Slide Booklet “Quality and sustainability with the digital traceability”) we developed. Many recent successful innovations in the food industry weren’t born in Italy, although they relate to products that have always been considered our “feuds”, as was the case of the coffee with Nespresso and Starbucks; or in the case of tomatoes, of which Holland is one of the first exporters in the world thanks to high-tech indoor farming systems, that made it possible not only to increase the production but also to improve the taste compared to the past.

 

What happens in tourism

On the other hand, in Tourism the weaknesses of the “Italia Brand” are clearly shown by an analysis of the international tourist flows coming to our country: if in 1970 Italy was in the first place in terms of attraction, in 2017 – according to the UNWTO data – Italy is fifth behind France, Spain, USA and China. You may think that the focus was more on the quality and less on the quantity (and therefore the expense) of the tourists, but numbers say that this did not happen in a significant way more than in other destinations.

The reasons are instead related to different fields, but fundamentally there is a strategic weakness about Tourism and the industries linked to it. If you take for example the Chinese market, among the most interesting both for the number and for the average receipt, Italy is behind the main European competitors for attractiveness. As underlined by Giuliano Noci (Vice Rector of the Chinese campus of the Politecnico di Milano) on the occasion of the Conference of the Digital Innovation in Tourism Observatory of 24 January (download the documents and videos of the Conference “The Italian Digital Way for the future of Tourism”), there was and there still is a lack of a medium/long-term strategy linked to different factors, among which:

  • the inability to give value to our brands (there is no evidence that one of our museums has been able to promote its brand like, for example, the Louvre in Paris did);
  • a structural deficit on connections (especially the aerial ones: Chinese people comes to Italy through other European cities)
  • the storytelling that promotes the territory through the audio-visual industry (mainly the cinema industry) primary vehicle of knowledge and learning for the Chinese (Swiss tourist resorts are the sets of some TV series distributed in China).

If there is a risk that Italy may lose its competitiveness, it could also happen that, due to the extraordinary assets available in our country, the Chinese will start to considerably invest to offer experiences and products to the millions of tourists and consumers looking for Italian contents. Nevertheless, this is already happening in other fields with the clothing or the sports industry.

And then we should add another question to the opening one (“Is Made in Italy forever?”), an equally concerning question: “Made in Italy… by whom?”

From technology to luxury, via MIP: the experience of Merry Le

Posted on | by Chiara Vasta | Leave a Comment on From technology to luxury, via MIP: the experience of Merry Le
MBA Alumna tells about the success achieved at the Mark Challenge, a competition for startups in the luxury & yachting field. A result also made possible by the ability to best exploit one’s skills

 

There’s a phrase, attributed to André Citroën, founder of the French auto manufacturer, that goes more or less like this: “Knowing how to do something is nothing without making it known.” Because sometimes the biggest challenge isn’t finding an excellent idea and developing it. It can be much more complex to effectively describe it, especially when faced with a varied audience, with different educational backgrounds. How do you convince everyone? It was the question asked by Merry Le, who after attending the Master in Business Administration programme at MIP Politecnico di Milano became the business strategy lead for Moi Composites. The company, a spinoff of Politecnico di Milano, is active in the 3D printing on demand market and received the Special Award in Yachting from the Mark Challenge, a competition for startups in the luxury sector. «Our patented technology, Continuous Fiber Manufacturing, allows production of unique products in a more efficient and economically accessible manner», explains Le. «Characteristics that go hand in hand with the production needs of a luxury sector like yachting, where customization is regularly desired.  The Mark Challenge seemed to us to be the right forum to promote the unique advantages of our startup. There was one main obstacle: since it is a technological process innovation, it was difficult to make the more technical aspects comprehensible».

 

The importance of a good pitch

Merry Le and her colleagues, all four hailing from MIP and the Politecnico, thus decided to take advantage of their knowledge network, including MIP professors: «We presented the project to several people to get feedback on its effectiveness. So we simplified the language and made some messaging more clear. The actual presentation, then, involved a further complication», says Le, «because it took place in the middle of the Covid-19 health emergency,  everything was done online». But the strategy of Moi Composites paid off, because Merry Le and her colleagues were awarded and won the possibility to present their pitch to the Monaco Yachting Clustercommission. Not only: the presentation itself was voted by the public as the best pitch. «A success that I and my colleagues achieved, thanks also to our different backgrounds, which allowed us both to develop a solid business plan, and to work with an innovative technology.»

 

The future of luxury between personalization and sustainability  

The characteristics of Moi Composites’ business are well suited to the latest developments in the luxury market in general, and not only of the nautical industry: «The current trend is that of personalization. Customers are increasingly looking for tailor-made products suited to their specific needs. It’s a trend accompanied by an increasing demand for environmental and social sustainability, as well as circularity», continues Le. «I am convinced that, despite Covid-19’s major impact on the economy, and thus also on luxury, we are more prepared to face the change.  The 2008 recession struck suddenly, taking everyone by surprise; but because of that crisis people now learned how to manage recovery and to become more creative and proactive.»

 

The wealth of the MBA  

Merry Le attended the Master in Business Administration at MIP because, after years of a career, she felt the need to broaden her expertise: «The world is changing rapidly, and it’s increasingly important to be able to count on skills that allow you to best understand and face changes underway». An American from the East Coast, after 14 years in the aerospace manufacturing industry, today Merry Le, in her new position as business strategy lead, can use the knowledge acquired during the master’s. Not only: the project work with which she participated in the Mark Challenge was proposed to her by MIP. And if you consider that Moi Composites, with headquarters in the nearby town of Pero, was created thanks to the support of Politecnico di Milano, it appears evident that MIP’s strenght isn’t limited to education, but can also provide a geographically near productive fabric, made up of high-level companies that are constantly seeking professional skills of the same calibre. «My experience was fantastic», concludes Le. «I would recommend the choice of an MBA to anyone. What attracted me most was the emphasis on tech and big data, but more generally I felt the need to learn something new in a new environment, not just to improve and fine-tune the skills I already had. Further value added is provided by the heterogeneity of the class: the students came from 20 different countries, and this allowed us to be exposed to new points of view. An invaluable wealth».

How will be the new #MIPexperience? Have a virtual tour in our school

Posted on | by Chiara Vasta | Leave a Comment on How will be the new #MIPexperience? Have a virtual tour in our school

To manage the tour, press the W, A, S, D keys to move forward, left, back and right respectively. Alternatively, you can also use the keyboard arrows to move in any desired direction.

Use the mouse to rotate the view, both when you are stationary and when you are moving.

Press the E key to exit the simulation and re-enable the mouse pointer.

 

Enjoy your visit!

 

#NiceToMIPyou

The Project Work experience, an opportunity to bring your ideas to life

Posted on | by Beatrice Grillo | Leave a Comment on The Project Work experience, an opportunity to bring your ideas to life

An International Part-time MBA at the MIP Politecnico di Milano School of Management always ends with the discussion of a group Project Work. During this final step, students have the possibility to put into practice what they have learnt during the two years in a consultancy project in their area of interest.

For this occasion, we had the possibility to join up with three colleagues and implement a project in our own company or develop a new business idea with the support of the MIP faculty.

I joined forces with Luca Randazzo, Alessandro Artuso and Alessandro Brunitti in a heterogeneous team in terms of knowledge and competences in the fields of law, engineering, marketing and information technology. We decided to develop our own business idea, willing to venture into a sector different from the one in which we work daily and, for the first time, to be responsible for an owned business, feeling like ambitious entrepreneurs and no longer just employees.

I met my Project Work colleagues for the first time during the MBA. We got to know each other during the courses and became good friends very soon. During the two full weeks abroad at leading European business schools offered by the Part-Time MBA program, we strengthened our friendship and we discovered that we had one common passion: traveling.

We first decided to extend the second of the two weeks abroad by taking the opportunity to explore the city of Munich and then we also organized another trip together to celebrate our graduation.

On these two occasions and in the context of the lockdown caused by the Covid-19 emergency, the idea for ​​our project was born: an app that simplifies travel planning and also brings tourists and tour guides closer thanks to remote tours, live or on demand. An app that allows guides to work remotely and that offers tourists multiple content solutions according to their individual needs. In defining this idea, talking about our past travel experiences and sharing personal stories, we also got closer to each other. Furthermore, we were able to put into practice all the main lessons of the course from Financial Accounting to Strategy and Marketing (to name a few) by applying them to the various project phases and defining an accurate business plan.

In addition to the opportunity to access the PoliHub – Politecnico di Milano’s in-house start-up incubator – MIP has assigned Filippo Renga to us as our tutor, expert in Management Economics, counting multiple personal experiences in different start-ups, also in the tourism sector. Filippo has been able to give us not only technical advice on how to set up a start-up but also food for thought. He often made our sense of security falter by testing our motivation to go beyond the idea of a project, with the simple goal of graduation, but rather, to take the path that would actually bring it into being. He also made us face up to the reality of the entrepreneur’s lifestyle, when you are often alone, fighting against numerous failures by pursuing your own ideas, very distant from that of an employee, both from a practical and an emotional point of view.

And now that we have just graduated, ambitious to carry on with our project, the real test and the most complex part will come: the implementation. But we are ready to get involved, to take our responsibilities and face the risks focused on the next goal, the first public release.

 

 

About the author
 Andrea De Donatis

I am Andrea De Donatis, a student of the international part-time MBA at MIP Politecnico di Milano. I Graduated in energy engineering and I am currently working in technical sales for a leading multinational electronics company based in Milan.
I am very passionate about technology, IT and digital marketing. I strongly believe that disruptive innovation is vital to create new value.

 

How to use a “digital mentor” to avoid the dunning-kruger effect

Posted on | by Beatrice Grillo | Leave a Comment on How to use a “digital mentor” to avoid the dunning-kruger effect

“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” (Albert Einstein)

Curiosity is one of the main leverages for continuous improvement. However, it is not enough if you don’t have someone to guide you along a growth path. With this goal in mind, MIP Politecnico di Milano developed FLEXA, the online platform created with Microsoft and aiming to be a digital mentor for current MIP students and alumni, in order to create a path of professional growth that is as flexible as possible.

Thanks to the work of Artificial Intelligence, FLEXA offers:

  • A hard skills self-evaluation
  • A soft skills assessment
  • A digital skills assessment
  • The possibility to insert your career goals
  • The chance to define the daily/weekly amount of time you want to dedicate to your improvement.

The user starts by defining the areas in which he/she wants to grow. After an evaluation, the platform allows the user to identify the gaps and the content necessary to be able to fill them.

Another important component is the time that the user has available for his/her training (“time is money”, they say). The content provided and the growth plan, in fact, consider the weekly hours that can be dedicated to studying and the period within which you want to obtain results.

With only these two pieces of information, FLEXA will provide you with plenty of materials, webinars, articles, events and videos from which you can choose to boost your knowledge.

Let’s talk about the self-evaluation. Is it truly easy to do? Apparently yes, but it’s not.

It takes time to properly evaluate your own level of knowledge. If you do it in a superficial way, you risk either overestimating or underestimating yourself, falling into the Dunning-Kruger effect.

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool”, wrote Shakespeare in As You Like It. And that’s the essence of the Dunning-Kruger effect, according to which those individuals who are least capable in a particular area of knowledge are most likely to overestimate their capability.

Only with experience can you properly get to understand which is your true level of competence.

The Dunning-Kruger effect makes you understand how important it is to fully comprehend your strengths and, above all, your weaknesses. Yes, because you must work hard on these weaknesses to improve yourself and to become an all-round professional.

Aristotle, one of the most famous philosophers in history, was convinced that “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom”. And the “beginning of all wisdom” can’t be that easy, can it?

Starting to do a good evaluation of yourself and your competences is the first step towards setting the best path for career growth. So, before beginning FLEXA’s skill assessment, try to focus on yourself. With a digital tutor it is even easier to be honest and admit your weaknesses.

This test will also be a good chance to focus on the main skills you’d like to improve and on the aspirations you have in the long term.

 In the Hard Skills section, you’re encouraged to reflect on yourself and the technical skills you have acquired to date. Through a self-assessment, you will be asked to define your level of knowledge of each of the complex skills that, based on the benchmarking, are generally required to operate within the functional area of ​​your choice.

The Soft and Digital skills sections are a little different and are evaluated through a bunch of multiple-choice questions.

At the end of the set of assessments you will be offered feedback, based on which you will be given a guide for the development of the level of your skills. The top critical skills to be developed for each set of skills (hard, soft and digital) will be highlighted as follows:

during the time, FLEXA will show your progress in each of the three fields of skills. From my point of view this is really helpful, and quite motivating. Having continuous feedback on how much you have improved and the great results you have achieved can be a huge incentive to keep on learning.

So, in order to stay curious, as Einstein said, why not give it a try and start your FLEXA Journey? Go to https://www.flexa.polimi.it/en/ and log in with your MIP email. For any questions or need of support, you can contact the FLEXA Support team by writing to flexasupport@mip.polimi.it.

 

About the author
 Marco Di Salvio

Student of the International Part Time MBA at MIP Politecnico di Milano.
Industrial Engineer currently working @ Gucci as WW Supply & Demand Planner, based in Florence.
Tech passionate, Cinema-lover, Sports addicted.
Solving the world’s problems one spreadsheet at a time.

 

A veterinarian in the MBA world: interview with MIP Alumnus Nicola Morandi

Posted on | by Beatrice Grillo | Leave a Comment on A veterinarian in the MBA world: interview with MIP Alumnus Nicola Morandi

The purple background of Teams pulses insistently, asking me to take the incoming call. It is a sunny, post-quarantine day, and I am getting along after home lockdown on my MBA journey. Classes are over and my days revolve around preparing for the project work I will be following in a couple of days down the line. The voice on the other side hails me on a cheerful yet unexpected note, “Hello, doctor!” Nicola Morandi is a former student from the Executive MBA of some years ago. He is the Technical Manager of the Animal Health division at Boehringer Ingelheim, the company where I will be doing the project work, and – the thing has made me most curious about his profile, amongst the network of MIP alumni – a PhD, like myself.

Hello Nicola, thank you for taking the time to talk with me today! I am happy to introduce your experience here: you are a doctor in veterinary sciences, as well as an MBA. Can you tell me about the industry you work in and what part the MBA played in your career development?

“I have been working at Boehringer Ingelheim Animal Health since 2015. It is a multinational pharmaceutical company, but still a family business. If you have a dog, we are the “Frontline” people, just to make it clear! Our core business is in the production of vaccines and antiparasitics for all kinds of animals. Until 2015, I was a veterinarian, in the most classical way: I was curing animals, and specifically my fields of specialization were internal medicine, bovine surgery and infective diseases. Once I arrived at Boehringer, I found out that despite the fact that my background and knowledge as a specialist veterinarian gave me the basis for a good performance, I was lacking of a set of hard skills that would have benefited my job as a whole. Strategy, economics and marketing are, after all, the pillars of every industry, and of our company as well. I could quite easily have gained these competences with some hands-on experience in the field, exposing myself to all the tasks required in the various roles in my division, but this would have required a lot of time. Indeed, an MBA program could accelerate this path, so I chose the latter option, with an Executive Part-Time program, to gain this acceleration. As of today, I must say I am able to have an impact in many processes of the company going above and beyond my specific job function. I can say that the EMBA really worked as an accelerator for my career path.” 

During the MBA at MIP, you were exposed to themes and tools such as innovation and design thinking. In which way have these been useful and practical in your job?

“One of the most positive aspects of doing an EMBA deals with the possibility of putting into practice tools, methods and models you see during seminars and classes quite straightforwardly. In my case, there were some of them, such as design thinking, innovation of meaning and creative problem solving, that proved truly helpful and fruitful in my job. For instance, they helped me accelerate the sales’ pipeline of one of our star products and this was quite impressive, given the fact that this product was already performing in a surprising way, with 50% of market share.” 

Would you like to share an anecdote about your MBA life?

“When I joined the program, I hadn’t considered two aspects that later on became key takeaways for me: teamwork and time management. The ability to put together effectively your everyday workload, private time with family and the commitment of doing a Master program is challenging at times. However, these are after all the things I remember the most: to perform well, you need to leverage on the strengths of every team member you find yourself working close to in every course of the program and to negotiate successfully the work-study-life balance. Oh yes, and parties too…”

On a serious note, Covid-19 is making organizations experience an unprecedented need for change. What are the implications you see in the upcoming months for your industry and what will be the drivers companies and employees should focus on adapting rapidly?

“As I see it, Covid-19 is a stress test: it made urgent and clear the need for changes that were in a way already programmed or in plan. I am specifically referring to people management and digital transformation. People are the key element of every organization, and this situation is specifically requiring effectiveness by making them feel an active part of the change, not a consequence of a necessary adaptation. Digital transformation is usually seen as a trend that will act as a substitute for people. On the contrary, the missing point in the common way to see it is that it is an enriching element contributing to performance. Of course, this is possible when the transformation is effectively communicated into a people strategy. Another driver that I find important and that we still need to work on a lot are soft skills: with particular reference to the present moment, communication, teamwork, proactiveness and the ability to stay up-to-date, focus on the objectives and resilience are the winning points of the future of work.” 

On this note, Prof Sdogati from our faculty at Politecnico has recently remembered something Gramsci said: “Study, because we will need all your intelligence”.

 

About the author
 Marianna Trimarchi
I am a candidate of the International Full Time MBA at MIP. I have a background in academia as a PhD in Communication and Strategic Analysis and a career as content producer in the Media Industry.I have worked for the Italian Television as author and assistant producer for cultural programs as well as for other media outlets as journalist. I am passionate about understanding complex phenomena particularly related to internationalization and global development from a multidisciplinary perspective.

 

Entrepreneurship in an interconnected world: now online the new issue of SOMeMagazine

Posted on | by Marta Re Ferrè | Leave a Comment on Entrepreneurship in an interconnected world: now online the new issue of SOMeMagazine

SOMe Issue #2 has been released.

SOMe is the eMagazine of our School born to share stories, points of view and projects around key themes of our mission.

The title of this issue is “Being entrepreneurial in a high tech world“, in which we discuss the change of approach to entrepreneurship in an increasingly interconnected world, but also dealing with the most serious health crisis of the last century.

First we present an interview with Andrea Sianesi, President PoliHub, Innovation District and Startup Accelerator of Politecnico di Milano, who tells us how entrepreneurship is evolving in this scenario and how the role of incubators is changing.

We then deal with some specific elements – such as strategy, leadership and business models – with editorials by Federico Frattini, Antonio Ghezzi, Roberto Verganti.

Finally, we tell stories of Alumni who turned their ideas in successful business initiatives.

To read SOMe’s #2 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”

Invest in yourself: develop your soft skills

Posted on | by Beatrice Grillo | Leave a Comment on Invest in yourself: develop your soft skills

The longer the time I spend with my Part-Time MBA fellows, the more surprised I am by the mutual enrichment we get from our different working backgrounds and personal lives: we get involved as a whole person, and this goes beyond our differences.

The benefits for students on an MBA program, along with the hard skills developed during the courses, include the opportunity to work in a team and cooperate proactively to achieve the common goal of finding an effective and original solution to challenging assignments. This is anything but easy: emphasising our creativity, we produce a bucketload of different ideas and everyone tries to persuade the others to follow his or her line. In the end, a fine emotional intelligence is key to understanding when it’s time to find a shared thought, agree upon an idea and lead the road towards the target.

In a few words, enrolling in an MBA program offers a great arena for training soft skills.

In general, soft skills indicate all the transversal competences that are not directly connected to a specific task; they mainly refer to the relationships with other people involved in the organization and the personal attitude to dealing with a task.
Hard skills, on the other hand, concern the ability to do a specific task, require specialized knowledge and technical abilities: they’re easily measurable and they are usually very specific to a role in an organization.

Time and effort dedicated to the development of soft skills is thus an investment for the future development of each person’s career; as the need for specific skills can pass by with the development of new technologies, the attitude to rapidly approaching new, upcoming technologies and coping with disrupting changes will remain.
And these two competencies, learning agility and adaptability, are indeed soft skills.

In the complex labour market in the era of disruptive change, while hard skills must be continuously improved as the necessary enablers to access the game and hold one’s position, soft skills give the opportunity to move wisely and nurture a positive environment that is the key to achieving both one’s personal goals and those of the team.

Moreover, in a time of fast transformations that lead to the development of cross-industry teams and abilities, soft skills represent a business card that is valuable in multiple different environments.
In a multi-disciplinary team the ability to communicate effectively, listen carefully and delegate are key elements for success. And guess what? These are soft skills.

In our path as MIP students, we are offered boot camps, seminars and courses to improve our soft skills: the leadership class at EADA was a great opportunity to reflect on personal attitudes and the different ways to be a leader, shaping our way with the four pillars of authentic leadership.
Seminars offer us the opportunity to dig into ourselves and develop self-awareness, maturing a consciousness of our strengths and dealing with our weaknesses: we don’t get to choose our warts, but we must be able to transform them into opportunities for growth.

As Part-Time students, moreover, we have the chance to put into place the soft skills training both at work and with our MBA colleagues, in very different contexts with bosses, subordinates and peers.

But the downside is that we have pressure coming from both sides and we have to struggle with tight time schedules to balance work and study. Guess what? Again, soft skills are required here.

About the author
 Fabrizio Liponi

My name is Fabrizio and I work as a tunnel engineer in the construction of Underground Line 4 of Milan. Born, raised, studied, living and working in Milan: I love my city and I’m proud to take part in building its future. Travel addicted, I love to meet people and different cultures.