In 2000 there were 360 million people connected to the Internet. After just under 16 years they are over 3 billion. This means that half of the world's population has internet access.
In a very short space of time the world has changed at such a speed as to make the distance even between neighboring generations enormous. The web, together with the innovations and technologies connected to it, is redesigning, with an exponential progression, the paradigms that regulate society: our way of being together, communicating, producing, having fun, working, learning.
Italy is immersed in this change but finds itself having to deal with an increasingly old population, perpetually crushed by the past, agitated by atavistic quarrels. And yet he has some good cards to play. We talk about it with Francesco Beraldi.
How does a young business take up residence in an old country? Many are wondering this in the face of the advance of the digital revolution. Perhaps the most amazing fact is that not even the protagonists – the innovators who speak the new language of 2.0 – have the answer in their pocket. “We are a country that cannot count on large capitals, in demographic and cultural decline and therefore allergic to risk”. Merciless but not desperate, the analysis given to us by Francesco Beraldi, president of Alkemy tech, digital consultancy company and first enabler in Italy, does not hide under the rouge of rhetoric the difficulties encountered by a country crushed by the past in accepting a change that before being economic, it is cultural.
Even in territories with a stronger entrepreneurial vocation ("I am thinking of Lombardy") a certain tiredness emerges, a tiredness that can also be traced in the behavior of those entrepreneurs who decide to make a bet on digital but with a slightly short arm - to put it as they say in Rome, where Beraldi lives and where we met him – throwing a few chips on the table, perhaps because "margins in traditional investment sectors have shrunk so much that, albeit reluctantly, we are looking for a return elsewhere". But, in fact, this "elsewhere" is still struggling to materialize. Which is why, in many cases, it risks remaining confined to the imagination rather than being embodied in the dimension of the company.
Why invest in digital in Italy? “Well, for many it is also a question of vanity”. Being there to appear, not to create value; mentality of an average Facebook user, albeit a little agé, not of entrepreneurs. “It also applies to Facebook: together with the need to communicate and share tastes, ideas, experiences, vanity plays an important part: an empire can be born from this complex mix of elements”. As long as we don't forget that empires rest on solid foundations, and that these foundations – in the case of Zuckerberg and his Silicon Valley classmates – are mixed with the mortar of dollars. Billions of dollars. The frame is also made of the same material, whose lightness is only apparent, an optical illusion induced by the fluctuating nature of the web, of the new lords of the sharing economy, above all AirBnb and Uber.
But on closer inspection it is not the capitals that make the difference (“indeed, they spoil at the beginning”) but the people. Beraldi is an anti-materialist, so to speak. He would not have gotten along with Ricardo and Marx: just the idea that the value of a good is a derivative of the quantities of labor it incorporates makes him shiver. Instead he has a soft spot for Schumpeter, who he often mentions in our conversation. He likes the idea of the economy as a relationship, which the Austrian school sees as inscribed in the market, in the logic of exchange as well as in competition (cumpetere means to search together, right?), and, obviously, he considers "creative destruction" the company manifesto and the compass of every innovator. Therefore he is frightened by the lack of entrepreneurial culture that he sees in certain "startuppers" of our house, young people who often "have good ideas" but who still don't handle the tools of the trade enough. Although fortunately this is not the rule. Positive examples? Well, take a look at Davide Dattoli, 25, founder of Talent Garden, the largest Italian coworking network, which has now also landed in Rome.
It is also true that the entrepreneur, if he does not have a vision up to date, if he forgets his function as a catalyst for innovation (and here Schumpeter returns), ends up running away from risk. Which is true in general but it is even more true in the face of a "disruptive revolution like the one we are experiencing". Not even this is the rule, but the Italian panorama is certainly not stingy with examples – negative this time – just think of the difficulties in understanding family capitalism and its taking refuge in rent rather than openly challenging the market.
Beraldi's fear is that our entrepreneurial system will polarize between these two extremes, between which he sees an incommunicability advancing that could turn into a very dangerous "fracture". It will be because in the presence of an innovation that affects man's way of interacting, one ends up undergoing it and "one is always a step backwards in our vision of the world", as Marshall McLuhan said, but the disorientation that one breathes in rarefied atmosphere of Italian capitalism runs the risk of degenerating into a "crisis of rejection". Many years have passed since Vittorio Valletta announced his intention to "extirpate the seed of electronics", yet at times it seems to be still there, at a time when Olivetti was jostling to affirm a "different, community model of work”, something that we then saw return under other skies, for example in Google with Larry Page. From Ivrea to Mountain View, a slender but strong thread holds together different stories within a universe of values that is structured around the person, his creativity and the value of collaboration. Beraldi also passed by Olivetti and, although "the company was in a terminal state", he was struck by it. Then, after a brief experience at IBM ("there people like me were only salesmen"), the arrival at TAS, a leading group in Italy in software for e-money, payment systems and financial markets, where "I learned what means doing business”.
In 1998 the internet was born and he fell in love with it, he understood that the future was open source - he called Microsoft "the cathedral", a sort of monolith opposed to the "liquid landscape" of the software making bazaars that was beginning to appear - and decided to try the destiny. He founds his own company, Orangee: he becomes a startupper, even if ante litteram. “I said to myself: I ask customers to bet on open source” rather than pass out for proprietary software and “in this way I can ensure a future for the company and for the kids”. Instead of standardization, it invests in the "customization" of Open Source software by creating its "community of web artisans", the only form of work organization that truly fits the horizontal production model of software. It is an image, that of the "community of craftsmen", which memory has archived in an old file, the image of the main street of his town, Caloveto, a small Ionian village in the Cosenza area, where the shops lined up one behind the other another: a “doing community” that allowed innovation to germinate spontaneously.
After having dodged some reverses of fortune, of those that in Italy bring to the grave so many businesses (to understand each other: customers who do not pay), and after a good few sleepless nights spent doing and redoing the accounts, Orangee joins of the Finmeccanica group "A healthy SME with 100 employees, 7 million in cash and 8 in turnover". Since she doesn't want to end her days as a rentier, she embraces the TSC (Talent Solutions for Cloud) with her innovation lab created by Alessandra Spada (according to MacPherson among the 10 most influential women in digital technology in Italy, to make it one of the first leading companies and forerunner in Italy in digital transformation.In 2015 he joined the Alkemy group, of which he became the main shareholder together with Spada.In the meantime he continues to follow another of his creatures, O2e, with which he participates and creates networks with innovative companies, from Superpartes , the startup campus in Brescia, university spinoffs such as DtoK up to Tag and many others according to the Open Innovation model.
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THE EVENT OF JUNE 23 – “The art of doing business, the enterprise of doing Art”
Auditorium hall of the Ara Pacis (entrance via Ripetta)
Program of the event
18.30 Welcome cocktail on the terrace of the Ara Pacis
19.30 Opening of the event with Gianfausto Ferrari and Francesco Beraldi
19.45 Journey with music and the enterprise from Counterpoint to Jazz by Maestro Nicola Scardicchio with:
• Gianfausto Ferrari – Superpartes President
• Luciano Belviso – President of Blackshape
• Francesco Beraldi – President of Alkemy Tech
• Davide Dattoli – President of TAG
