Promoting Transition and Fostering Sustainable Innovation: The MUSA Spoke 5 Project

 

Milan is globally renowned for its luxury industry, encompassing fashion, design, and all related sectors such as beauty and jewelry. These industries are currently undergoing a profound transformation, merging their high standards and exceptional characteristics with the increasing global and consumer demand for sustainable products and practices.

To manage the complexity of this transition, MUSA Spoke 5, a project funded by PNRR aims to design and disseminate best practices providing support to foster sustainable innovation, starting from the municipality of Milan.

The event ‘Dove il lusso incontra la sostenibilità” held on 16 May 2024 at the Politecnico di Milano marked a significant step along this path, creating a community of companies interested in activating a collaborative process, sparkling meaningful dialogues towards new practices through speeches from renowned guests.

Guests facilitate the conversation by providing insights about leading innovations in related fields, starting from the role that digital technologies can provide.

Paolo Stella, influencer and creative director of the @suonarestella project shared the value of critically reflecting on the role that objects around us can play in nurturing innovation.
He presented the project as an opportunity to exploit social media to generate awareness about fields like design, traditionally distant from mainstream consciousness, introducing new concepts and trends to a broader audience.

To strengthen the role of digitalization, Valentina Pontiggia, Director of the eCommerce B2c and Retail Digital Innovation Observatory of the School of Management of the Politecnico di Milano, emphasised the importance of integrating digital technologies to support sustainable innovation. Through the research of observatories, she highlighted how data analytics and product traceability are becoming crucial for promoting fair and trustworthy innovation. This integration not only enhances environmental sustainability but also reinforces social responsibility.

Carlo Salvato, Professor of Business Strategy at Bocconi University in Milan, contributed to the dialogue by discussing how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can achieve sustainable innovation by harnessing their unique capabilities of flexibility and local connectivity.
Sharing data from research of Osservatorio AUB he underscored the significance of diversity in age and gender as catalysts for heightened innovation and superior performance, shedding light on the potential of diverse teams to drive progress in sustainability.

Echoing the core values of the MUSA community, Edoardo Iannuzzi, founder of the start-up ACBC stressed that sustainable transformation extends beyond material changes. It involves fundamentally reshaping collaborations among stakeholders and nurturing systemic innovation. With his company, Iannuzzi pointed out the necessity of creating a global, interconnected system where various actors cooperate to reduce material consumption and foster sustainable practices.

The essence of this event lied in the matchmaking session planting the initial seeds for building a community of firms in the fashion, design, beauty, and luxury sectors. This community aims to bring together firms already committed to sustainability with those aspiring to transition towards more sustainable practices, nurturing collaboration to support each other in shaping a sustainable future. The diversity of backgrounds in participants strengthens the innovation opportunities that these interactions enable, becoming a paramount opportunity to interact with firms that are typically difficult to reach.

The MUSA community’s ultimate goal is to become a central hub for fostering innovative practices and supporting both SMEs and established firms on their path towards sustainable innovation. To achieve this, MUSA Spoke 5 will activate in the coming perioda digital platform to nurture and sustain the connections formed within this community over time, paving the way for a more sustainable future in Milan’s luxury industry.

 

 

Got a Radical Idea at Work? Find a Partner

The story of Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, the winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries underpinning the mRNA vaccines against Covid-19, holds lessons for others pursuing radical ideas. In their article in Harvard Business Review, Paola Bellis, Assistant Professor in Organizational Behavior and Leadership and Innovation, and Roberto Verganti, Professor in Leadership and Innovation, draw on their interview with Karikó and those of others with Weissman and her, to extrapolate lessons on why pairs can be more effective in pursuing seemingly wild ideas and how to find someone to take the journey with you.

 

Imagine you have an unorthodox idea — one that challenges the dominant assumptions in your organization and industry. How do you develop it? Moving forward alone is hard. On the other hand, you are unlikely to attract or be provided with a large team to pursue an idea that most see as crazy.

The research by Paola Bellis and Roberto Verganti suggests that such radical thinkers thrive in a unique organizational setting by finding one other individual to work with — by operating in pairs.

The article “Got a Radical Idea at Work? Find a Partner.” recently published in Harvard Business Review, explores why and how a couple can help develop unorthodox ideas.

In addition to the interpretation of the story of Katalin Karikò and Drew Weissman’s – based on an interview and other sources – the study is based on more than 30 interviews with couples around the world and on the analysis of more than 60 famous cases, such as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak for the development of the personal computer, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, to name a few.

Among the success factors of innovative couples emerge relational and behavioral aspects, such as the fact that daring to share a crazy idea is easier in the intimate space of working as a couple. Couples are also more resistant than teams to the difficult moments typical of radical innovation.

To read the complete article:
Got a Radical Idea at Work? Find a Partner” – Harvard Business Review

 

 

NEXT GENERATION UPP: a project to improve the justice system in Northwest Italy

NEXT GENERATION UPP seeks to provide a more efficient method for managing judicial affairs and thus help reduce the backlog and the average length of judicial proceedings.

 

NEXT GENERATION UPP is coordinated by the University of Turin in partnership with eleven universities in Northwest Italy – including the Politecnico di Milano with the Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering, the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering and the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies. The project is promoted by the Ministry of Justice within the framework of the NOP on Governance and Institutional Capacity 2014-2020 and carried out in synergy with the interventions envisaged by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) in support of justice reform.

Next Generation UPP aims to improve the justice system in Northwest Italy through the strengthening of Trial Offices (UPP), technological innovation, and trialling new collaborative schemes between universities and judicial offices. It is aimed at courts in the Macro Area 01, which includes the Appeal Courts of Brescia, Genoa, Milan and Turin, the Courts and the Juvenile Courts of the corresponding districts.

In particular the working group from the Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering, led by Prof. Giancarlo Vecchi, is mapping the organisation of the Trial Office at the Appeal Court and the Court of Milan.
The analysis seeks to show in detail the organisational solutions put in place, the strengths and weaknesses and the impact in terms of reduction of backlog and disposition time, i.e., the time taken to reach final determination in judicial proceedings. In addition, it will design and trial innovative organisational solutions to consolidate, strengthen and transfer the obtained results.

The project, launched on 1 April 2022, will be concluded on 30 September 2023.


For more information:
Prof. Giancarlo Vecchi: giancarlo.vecchi@polimi.it

“Innovation with a human touch”: now online the new issue of SOMeMagazine

SOMe Issue #6 has been released, the eMagazine of our School which shares stories, points of view and projects around key themes of our mission.

This issue is focused on “Innovation with a human touch”, discussing the role of human and humanities in technological progress and innovation.

We interviewed  Giovanni Valente, who explains how much human and social sciences are essential to face any innovative challenge in the scientific and technological field, making the interdisciplinary approach fundamental in scientific studies.

Man must be at the centre of digital transformation and technologies have to be developed for and not instead of humans, as Raffaella Cagliano, Claudio Dell’Era and Stefano Magistretti tell in their editorials about Industry 4.0 and Design Thinking.

But can technological innovation be truly on a human scale? Giovanni Miragliotta tries to answer to this question considering how much new technologies deeply changed our society and work.

Finally, we feature some of our recent research ”Stories”: the economic impact of climate change, the re-use of electronic waste to create eco-compatible products, the distribution of Venture Capital in Europe.

 

 

To read SOMe’s #6 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”

Disruption? No, thanks. Innovation and Leadership in the New Normal

Whatever the post-Covid future, the new normal will require a fundamental change in the leadership of companies. What kind of mentality should leaders have to do business and innovation in a world that will be completely different? In a period in which the temptation will be to be increasingly competitive due to the scarce resources available, learning to share may be the only strategy that can guarantee survival.

 

Roberto Verganti, Professor of Leadership and Innovation
School of Management Politecnico di Milano, Stockholm School of Economics, Harvard Business School

 

Many executives wonder about a fundamental question: how to get ready for the “new normal”? How markets will look like when the main wave(s) of the Covid-19 pandemic will recede? How to redesign products, services and operations to address potential structural shifts?

The start line to rethink how we operate is getting close. Those who get ready now, will start with the right foot. Those who wait, will look like dinosaurs from an old era (though that era was just a few months earlier).

Magazines, futurists, consultants, organizations. Everyone is trying to picture how the scenario will look like as people open up their doors to a new normal life. And everyone agrees on two things: first, the world will look different than before. Second, this transformation will not be temporary. Even when Covid-19 will be fully defeated (and hopefully it will be), our attitude towards socialization, our openness towards the world, our need for health (and anxiety for new infections), will be radically different, for the bad, but also for the good.

Yet, as we move closer and try to get into the details of how life will look like, how markets and operations will work, the real challenge emerges: the phenomenon we are facing is so unprecedented, disproportioned, and swift that capturing the essence of what will happen is implausible. A simple figure to explain the rapidity and magnitude of the discontinuity: in March 2020 more than 7 million Americans have filed for jobless claims per week. This is about tenfold compared to what happened during the financial crisis in 2008. So, regardless to the intelligence and effort we invest to predict what will happen, we need to admit that the answer to the question “how the world will look like?” is: no one really knows. This is a bit of a dismay for the classic way we picture leaders (and experts), who are supposedly those who always know. Yet, in this context, “pretending to know” is the most dramatic mistake we could do.

Amy Edmondson illustrates in her book The Fearless Organization that when a person admits that she does not know, then she opens the doors to learning. To understand how to do business in the new normal the mindset we need therefore is not to guess how it will be, but to get prepared to learn.

How? Being the context completely new, we cannot rely on past experience. We will need to learn “on the fly” through continuous experiments and adaptation. There are two ways to experiment and learn: by competing (learning by trying) or by collaborating (learning by sharing).

Learn by Trying. This the classic way of learning. The purpose here is to learn by yourself in order to beat your competitors. In this approach, organizations compete by conducting different experiments. Each organization tries its own ideas, fail, learn, adjusts the direction, and iterate. As companies aim to disrupt their competitors, they do not share their findings and insights with other organizations, nor the data that fuel the learning. This implies that every time an organization has an idea, it needs to explore it by only relying on its own resources.

Learn by Sharing. In this approach organizations conduct again different experiments. They generate their own ideas and iterate. However, they share the data and findings of their experiments. Why? Because this way they can leverage the trials of other players. If an idea has already been tested, and fails, others can avoid this unpromising path and focus on other options. And if the idea succeeds, others can build on top of it, instead of having everyone starting from scratch. Of course, this path reduces distances among competitors. Disruptions with one big winner and many losers are less likely to happen. But the advantage, however, is that that this approach requires less resources (individual and collective) and less time to get to good solutions. This increase in overall productivity and speed facilitates the growth of demand for solutions, which fuels returns to each player. In other words, this mechanism of learning replicates the mechanisms of the prisoner’s dilemma: cooperation between players leads to higher yields than what players would earn if they would maximize their own individual returns.

Learn by Trying is the kind of learning that has been prized in the past decade by many innovation thinkers and epitomized by the motto “fail often to succeed sooner”. It worked as long as the environment changed rapidly but in a linear fashion, so that learning from one experiment could be applied to the next one without the context being changed dramatically meanwhile. The change we are facing now with Covid-19 is however discontinuous and unprecedented. If in this context everyone conducts experiment by itself, each player has not sufficient time to explore this uncharted space of solution and then iterate before the context evolves again.

To innovate in the new normal we need to learn by sharing. This strategy is the only one that can guarantee sufficient scope, speed and productivity of the experiments. In fact, data sharing enables a larger community of players to participate to the experiments, from a larger variety of settings. And the sharing of findings enables to avoid unproductive trials.

Learning by sharing is already practiced in scientific research connected to Covid-19. Foer example, PostEra, a start-up based in Santa Clara, CA, and London, UK, is coordinating a massive collaborative project, Covid Moonshot to rapidly develop effective and easy-to-make anti-Covid drugs. The focus of the project is to design inhibitors of the SARS-CoV-2 main protease (the enzyme that enables the virus to replicate). The project leverages data shared by experiments conducted in a synchrotron radiation facility, Diamond Light Source, that has identified 80 fragments of molecules that might attach to the protease. A community of scientists and manufacturers use those data to design compound inhibitors, which are submitted through the PostEra website. The start-up then runs machine learning algorithms in the background to check for duplications and prioritize candidates for testing. More than 3’600 molecules designs have been submitted with only 32 duplications in the designs.

Shared learning is getting its way also in ordinary business not connected to Covid-19. Microsoft has recently launched an Open Data Campaign. The Open Data movement promotes the sharing of data, similarly to what Open Source does for sharing of software code. Microsoft will develop 20 new collaborations built around shared data by 2022, including, for example, publishing a Microsoft’s dataset around broadband usage in the US.

Note that shared learning does not imply that different players collaborate on the same idea or solution, like in consortia. On the contrary, organizations explore different ideas and experiments. This enables to explore the entire space of solutions. What is shared, instead, are the data that feed the experiments, and/or the insights and findings they generate.

Learning by sharing is built on a will to cooperate. Which is not easy to achieve. Especially in a period of scarce resources. The temptation is to look inward, and behave even more competitively, to secure the few things left, instead of focusing, collaboratively, on building more. What kind of culture and mindset will innovation leaders need to promote learning by sharing in their own organizations?

Whatever the future will look like, the new normal will require a fundamental change in the way we create innovation and lead our organizations. Whereas the innovation mantra of the pre-Covid era was to “disrupt competitors”, this is not really the moment to disrupt. This is rather the moment to collectively re-build a new economy and a new world. The real heroes, in business and society, will not be the disruptors, but those catalysts who will foster a cooperative mindset. Which, in innovation, it means to share data and learnings from the experiments everyone conducts. Organizations will need to try different competing ideas, but they will also benefit from sharing insights, in order to avoid unpromising avenues, improve collective productivity, and rapidly build a new society. Covid-19 is the moment of truth for leaders: where they can prove their authentic orientation to lead organizations around purpose and meaning.

«Good ideas aren’t enough: at MIP I learned how to develop them»

Dialogue with colleagues from the master’s programme, two years of experiments and progress and, above all, a mentality devoted to continuous improvement. Martin Leban, AMIE (now IMIE) alumnus, tells us how the idea of a shampoo contained in biodegradable marbles came about.

Training in the family business, discussions with colleagues in the master’s programme from around the world and, finally, the establishment of a startup that, inspired by principles of social and environmental sustainability, gives life to a small product, but with a large potential. It’s the story of Martin Leban, a young Slovenian entrepreneur and co-founder of the startup OneTwoThreeZero, as well as alumnus of AMIE (now evolved into IMIE, International Master in Innovation and Entrepreneurship) at MIP Politecnico di Milano: «The master’s taught me that there are a lot of ideas, good and less good. What makes the difference is the effort put into developing them. And that’s exactly how I and my colleagues conceived of shampoo in biodegradable marbles».

From the idea to its implementation

Leban comes from a family that owns a small hair care product company. «An environment in which I learned a lot, observing day by day», says Leban. «Creating no waste cosmetics has been a goal of mine since I was working at my family company and saw how much plastic we produce. When Renata Alessio, Indira Pambudy and Sarra Elamin started the project of biodegradable shampoo marbles at AMIE I immediately liked it and asked them to join the team».
The ecological potential of this idea is clear: «The cosmetic industry uses a lot of plastic for its packaging, even for small quantities of a product, as is the case, for example, with the vials distributed in hotels. We started from a product conceptually like the detergent capsules used in dishwashers. In that case, however, the covering is a plastic material. For us, the challenge was to find a biodegradable material that at the same time was resistant enough to contain the shampoo inside it». A challenge taken up by his two partners and chemists, Anja Pajntar and Uros Novak. «It’s a research process that has now lasted for two years. The difficulty is due to the small percentage of water in the shampoo, 10%, which on its own is a big savings compared to the 80% of average shampoos. We could have fallen back on a product without water, but the effect on hair wouldn’t have been the same». The roadmap for OneTwoThreeZero foresaw a series of important tests in April 2020, but the current health situation has forced Leban and his team to postpone. «By now we’re there, however. So much so that the laboratory that hosted us until now is no longer sufficient; we will shortly start to produce larger quantities of our product».

The importance of not being satisfied

Leban doesn’t hide that the MIP experience was crucial for the creation of this startup. «Starting with my classmates, from 17 different nationalities. This diversity has proved to be a real value added, because it gave me exposure to different points of view and cultures, which generated a true creative flow. Now I make use of the principles of design thinking learned thanks to the master’s programme, which taught me how to set up a balanced team, evaluating the most strategic individual characteristics for the company».
The project work experience was also important: «It’s one of the reasons I chose MIP. I learned what makes up the development process, which isn’t only a matter of notions, but also of mentality. Focusing deeply on an idea, to discover its real potential and give life to a series of virtually infinite possibilities».
Finally, some advice for those are about to enrol in a master’s programme: «The best way to experience it is to try to arrive with clear ideas on what you want to achieve. And never be satisfied, but work on yourself. The level of lessons is very high, and pushes you to aim even higher, to increasingly deepen your knowledge. It’s this mentality that allows you to approach your goals, both if you want to work as an entrepreneur, or as a consultant. The job prospects tied to this master’s are manifold».