Little nightly thoughts
by Business Exploration

Dear Fellow Innovator,

In my previous life as Project Manger, I always held strong few ideas that have helped my projects to reach safe harbor.

If you compare them to the ocean of teachings of the PMI book, they are little things, but to me, they are like lighthouses:

they bring me home.

I often found experienced PMs and Project Management Courses that miss some of them, probably because deemed obvious, so let recap them here:

1) There are 3 levels of planning:

long, medium and short term.

You must have a clear understanding of the goal of each one:

• Long Term: activities…

Little nightly thoughts
by Business Exploration

Dear Fellow Innovator,

I have been challenged by a friend who asked me if I think Project Management methodology is applicable to manage “innovation projects”.

My gut would answer “not at all”, but my brain knows that Project Management has its place in managing innovation projects.

First let ‘s recap what “innovating” means:

Innovating is the sum of a change + the adoption of the change.

When we do innovate we create an utility, that (1) is a rupture with the past and (2) is adopted by others.

The ways we innovate have been classified by Altshuller in his TRIZ theory in different…

Little nightly thoughts
by Business Exploration

Dear Fellow Innovator,

Little nightly thoughts
by Business Exploration

Dear Fellow Innovator,

Changing the way an organization has worked for years, requires a good deal of expertise.

This is my personal collection of answers I got from colleagues, Client’s employees, Managers of any seniority and Customers, when executing my six sigma, lean and change management projects.

And because I worked so many years in Tuscany, trying to change the behaviors of a former state owned company into those of the mother of all privately ruled businesses (General Electric), I had the privilege to be addressed by the world famed citizens of Florence, whose tongue is said to have killed more people than…

Little nightly thoughts
by Business Exploration

Dear Fellow Innovator,

At the base of the Internet of Things there are “Smart Things”.

Things that may take action on their own initiative, without human operator as mediator.

This means that they can “decide”.

They can:

· decide (to perform a function)

· undergo an external decision

· influence an external decision

To take a decision these Things need an informative framework that you may have already seen represented more or less like a pyramid starting with “data”:

Little nightly thoughts
by Business Exploration

Dear Fellow Innovator,

I always had big fights with my father when we work together.

(Dad.. I love you, you know it…)

what makes me mad is his ability to make me do the same thing again and again.

He is damn good at it: he is a man of the past century, forged as Operations Director of the concrete industry’s european leader. He has been leading teams to perfect and repeat operations millions of times.

But my approach has always been different: I tend to learn how to do it and then make some machine replicate it. To me, learning means: “set…

Little nightly thoughts
by Business Exploration

Dear Fellow Innovator,

I just come out of the last #DubaiDataScience Meetup, with the convinction that Artificial Intelligence is a game changer in all the fields of business, but is of tremendous importance for SMBs.

Right now, in this very moment.

What is Artificial Intelligence is not to me to explain. You may find better sources. However put it very simplistic, with the forgiveness of specialists and bearing in mind that I want to talk about go-to-market and not about Data Science, here is “my” actual definition:

1. Artificial Intelligence is about taking decisions using mathematics,
2. It defines the output ( the resulting decision…

Dear Fellow Innovator,

Today I was at the Dubai Data Science Meetup in Deira City Center, an amazing group of “nerds” in love with statistics and business.

I discovered new things, like:

· how to map processes without mapping them

( thanks to Safdar Hussain who showed a machine learning algorithm capable to draft by itself a process map, starting from the logs of company transactional data)

· how to use a self-learning algorithm to pilot an helicopter

(thanks to Vitalii Duk who showed that it is not only possible but even simple for a machine to learn to control a complex system…