Legacy Blog

Category: Articles in English

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

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.

Open Innovation and the 5 Pillars of a Startup Community

Open innovation and the 5 Pillars of a Startup Community from Nicola Mattina   In a world, where every company has to become (more or less) a software company, it is necessary to promote the transition from closed innovation (R&D centers) and open innovation models (crowdsourcing portals) to innovation ecosystems

InnovactionLab 2014

InnovAction Lab is an association founded in 2011 that introduces Italian university students to the world of entrepreneurship and innovative startups. Laboratories are aimed at students with multidisciplinary academic backgrounds who, through a series of seminars and webinars, learn to evaluate the economic potential of an idea and present it

Stamplay wins Hy! Berlin and opens a public beta

It’s not every day that you go to an event that takes place inside a pool. Literally! But I guess that in Berlin is not so strange to be in places that once served another scope. So, why not use pools to organize events? Just keep them dry 😉 Everyone

Playing with Lego Mindstorms

This Christmas I asked my father to give me the Lego Mindstorms EV3, because I wanted to play a little ‘;-) Here are my first impressions. 1. In the pack there is a huge number of small pieces (601) divided into various envelopes. It would have been much better if

What an amazing year for Stamplay!

It’s been almost a year since we started working on the current version of Stamplay. At the beginning of 2012, we were working on a catalog of applications for online marketing and loyalty programs. One day we asked ourselves: what if, instead of developing many different apps, we invent a

Stamplay wins the Facebook Hacknight in Rome

Last week, Stamplay won the hacknight organized by Facebook in collaboration with Ezecute and LUISS Enlabs in Rome. Among the mentors and the jury members: Luca Colombo, country manager in Italy, Daniele Bernardi, solution engineer, Andrea Lai, PMD program. During the night, the engineering team Stamplay (Giuliano, Alessandro, Mirko, Cristian