The Innovation Almanacs state that on July 10, 1962, the Telstar satellite was launched, the first to connect the two sides of the Atlantic and therefore to allow the transmission of television messages and intercontinental telephone calls. Big stuff, in short.
But in this column we try to highlight even much smaller things that serve to reconstruct the path of innovation in Italy. And therefore today I’m talking about The Innovation Game. It was a tv program for repubblica.it that the then director Ezio Mauro had very much wanted and entrusted to me in 2015. For fifteen weeks, starting from the beginning of April until mid-July, every Wednesday from the temple of Hadrian in Rome, a program was staged that for two hours, often a little more, tried to create a “culture of innovation”. There were two pillars: on the one hand a competition between students who wanted to start a startup; and on the other a series of interviews with women and men who had changed the world, people like Federico Faggin, Vint Cerf, Sandra Savaglio, Roberto Saviano, Roberto Cingolani and Samantha Cristoforetti who spoke with us from the Space Station.
With me there were many friends that in some cases I see less but I always carry in my heart: Carmen Manti as director, Giampaolo Colletti as author, Silvia Vianello and Antonio Perdichizzi on the jury, Ernesto Belisario to explain the difficult words of innovation, Jaime D’Alessandro for tech products and Stefano Andreoli to make fun of me, who always suited us.
I certainly forget someone, I apologize. But I don’t forget the interviews that I closed each time by asking what “the formula of innovation” was. There is a video that summarizes all the formulas which I advise you to review: I recommend Saviano who talks about “risking, losing and then winning”; Faggin who says that you need “courage, courage and then more courage”; Cristoforetti who explains that for the innovator a problem is only an opportunity to invent something new; but especially Umberto Veronesi. In the end, his definition of the innovator remains the best for me: the innovator is a big pain in the ass.
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