Heads up!
Since the beginning of 2021, I moved to Substack. You can find all my writings here: An Innovator’s Sketchbook
iPhido: a service to track dogs based on Lorawan (student project)
Every year, I ask my students of the Digital Product Design course to design a product starting from a challenge. This year, teams had to choose a technology and explore their potentialities. The iPhido team chose Lorawan, a wide area network technology for the Internet of Things, and has devised
DRD4-7R. The Wonderlust Gene
According to a very common myth in our society, people are against novelties and change. The truth is that people do not like the changes they perceive as too dangerous. In the absence of risk, human nature makes us instinctively attracted to both novelty and change. Leonard Mlodinov discuss these
Innovation can be learned, but you should be prepared to make (many) mistakes
Last Thursday, I was invited to speak at the inauguration of the Palazzo Innovazione, a beautiful medieval building in the historic center of the city that today – thanks to Roberto Ascione, founder of Healthware International – hosts a hub dedicated to digital innovation: 4,000 smt, 300 desks, a 100-seat
How to interview potential customers using Jobs to be Done (JTBD)
If you are an aspiring founder or a designer, you know how tricky can be doing interviews with early adopters. Fortunately, the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) framework can help us, by providing a step-by-step template to use during customer discovery. When designing and developing a new product, it is
Why I’m not teaching the Lean Startup anymore
In the last twenty years, a plethora of models and tools have emerged whose aim is to help innovators to design, develop and distribute a new product while minimizing the risk of failure. Among these: IDEO’s Design Thinking, the Job-to-be-Done theory by Tony Ulwick and Clayton Christensen, Steve Blank’s Customer
The Innovation School of Rome will train 1.000 innovators in 5 years
In the last ten years, I have designed, organized, managed or supported many initiatives to promote the birth and development of new innovative companies. From TIM Working Capital to Microsoft BizSpark, from Appcampus (a joint venture between Microsoft and Nokia) to the Founder Institute. Moreover, I was a mentor for
Building a chatbot with Stamplay and IBM Watson: lesson learned
In recent months, my company Stamplay worked together with IBM to create a chatbot for a small town in Tuscany, Poggio a Caiano. The initiative was promoted by the vice-mayor Francesco Pugelli, IBM provided its natural language processing and conversation management technology, while the Stamplay team used our platform to develop
From solution to business in 4 steps and a lot of know-how…
Whether you are a startup or an established company, you need to create new products, bring them to the market and growth them to a sustainable business. I tried to sketch the four key phases and what do you need regarding knowledge and smart money. We can apply this
Some quick notes on food and innovation
I’m passionate about food, and I’m doing some thinking on innovation in this sector. It is a very exciting space and I believe that there are many opportunities to innovate and to change things for the better.
A Non-Developer’s Thoughts for Software Developers: Design What You Need to Learn (4/4)
During the last 20 years I’ve designed many applications. In the late 90’s my job was to develop functional specifications, resulting in writing long documents that were given to software engineers who would write other more technical documents.