INTRODUCTION

INNOVATION IS AN ACT OF LOVE

Innovation is an act of love—or at least it should be. Always. It is a gesture of empathy, respect, generosity, of one human being’s devotion to another. This is the innovation that I hope for. This is the innovation that I want for my children and their children, for the society of today and of tomorrow. This is the very best innovation: meaningful, useful, beautiful, and sustainable innovation, the kind that continues to improve the status quo, now and for always. This is the innovation that the new world we are living in requires. Not only because it is the right thing to do, ethically speaking—this should be the first and final word in the matter, though it often isn’t. But also because, at last, in our global, technological, and digital society, ethical goals are increasingly aligning with business goals for both enterprises and individuals. Innovation as an act of love is today (also) becoming good business!

It has not always been this way, of course. We are surrounded by thousands of products, brands, and services that represent the outcomes of a very different kind of logic. Yet today, matters are changing. There is no alternative. This is a real historical turning point, one that needs to be understood, celebrated, and accelerated. Mediocre, poorly thought-out innovation, without any humanity—selfish innovation dictated only by the economic interests of the individual enterprise, at the expense of users and the society the enterprise serves—is beginning to struggle to keep up, and there is no turning back. The old world’s traditional barriers to entry are gradually crumbling away in the face of a global, hyperconnected, accelerated universe. The kind of innovation that wins out today is genuine and authentic, and it aims to create personal and social value first and financial and economic value afterward, as a consequence.

But this kind of true, deep, long-lasting innovation is not easy to do. It does not just arise from processes, data, and tools; it doesn’t pop up spontaneously from artificial intelligence, financial analyses, and economic plans. This kind of innovation flourishes naturally in the mind of a certain breed of human beings: the visionaries, the dreamers—real visionaries and dreamers who sincerely believe in their visions and dreams. This kind of innovation burns like an unstoppable flame ignited in their hearts; it breathes through their skin and explodes in their actions. This kind of innovation comes from the guts and brains of individuals who are able to understand other people’s needs and dreams, all while looking at matters with a different and unique perspective, finding solutions that no one has ever thought of or acted on before. This kind of innovation is generated, essentially, by people who are inspired by a deep love for humanity and a constant desire to generate real value for those around them and for society as a whole. They are people in love with people: that’s what I like to call them.

These people in love are the ideal innovators—whatever other title they might have. In the business world they can be CEOs or scientists, designers or marketers, lawyers or singers, caregivers or sales reps, governors or writers—and they may play many other roles as well. The people that these innovators love are similarly categorized in a vast range of ways, according to any given cultural context: sometimes they are end users, at other times they are consumers; sometimes they are clients, at other times they are the target audience. I like to call them what they truly are, each and every time: human beings.

Innovation Should Start from Our Personal Lives

Then there is all the innovation that does not occur within a professional scenario. Over the course of our lives, each of us, in one way or another, is constantly called upon to innovate. Some of us decide to accept the invitation; others don’t. For some people, there is no choice: innovation becomes an obligation, imposed upon them by circumstance. Some do it often; others very rarely. We innovate for ourselves when we decide to take on a new job, to throw ourselves into an unexpected project, to move to a new city, to become part of a different community, to learn to play an instrument, or to get out of a difficult relationship. In all of these cases—and in an infinity of other situations—we take on a double role: we become both innovator and target audience, both the lover and the loved. We innovate within our private lives as an act of love toward ourselves, willingly or otherwise. People who don’t know how to love themselves, who aren’t able to innovate for themselves, are rarely able to love others—and it follows that they are rarely able to innovate for someone else. Private and professional lives, when it comes to the innovation mindset, are intimately connected.

This is the story I want to tell you in this book—the story of a world that is radically changing and is forcing us to innovate as never before, both in our personal and professional lives, with a new, humanistic focus on people. I want to tell you the story of these people, of the ones who innovate and the ones we innovate for. I want to take your hand and have you walk alongside me on a very personal journey through the human side of innovation. It won’t be a story about processes and tools. And it won’t even be a story made up of case studies and projects. It will be a personal story instead, told by a human being with a warm, beating heart. The story of a kind of innovation entirely focused on people and experienced, imagined, and sweated away at by people. I will, of course, mention processes and tools, and I will cite some case studies and projects, but I will do so only to provide some chromatic accents, some tones and details, to make the story more three-dimensional. I will begin with the description of a society that is changing, and I will then dive into the sea of some of the many projects I have dealt with in my professional life. I will share these stories in a way that is entirely personal, intertwined with intimate and private experiences, weaving between logic and emotion.

You Can Do It, Too!

But this first section of the journey is only a preparatory stage, getting us ready with the facts for the story that I really want to tell you—the story that I love the most. This is the story of the innovators, those human beings on the constant hunt for new ideas, for the most meaningful, valuable, and relevant ideas. They seek to improve the condition of other people, society, and the planet—and ideally, in the process, to improve their own lives, too. This is a story about all those people on the hunt for the best version of themselves, for their own happiness and the happiness of everyone around them. It is a story about those human beings who see their lives as a journey in which there is space for growth and improvement for everyone: for each one of us and each one of you, whatever your own natural talent and background might be. This journey involves a kind of growth nurtured by education, awareness, sacrifice, and passion, in which a collective effort to achieve personal excellence creates excellence for the whole community: a democratic excellence, spreading on a mass level, from which everyone benefits, both the rich and the poor, the strong and the meek; an idea of excellence that is both human and humanist.

As such, this cannot be anything other than a story told through the eyes, heart, brain, and gut of a particular human being: Mauro the designer, the romantic, and the poet; Mauro the pragmatic executive of a multinational corporation; Mauro the dreaming teenager and the wise man. Each one of these characters weaves a tale that is at once very personal and also, in some way, absolutely universal. Biography encounters practice and brings theory together, painting a picture that is anchored in daily activity but reaches outward into those principles that have the ambition and the desire to be universal, general, and shared by all. I try to take a curious glance at all the different Mauros who appear between the lines of this book. I harness them into the logic of the story I want to share with you, but I also leave them free to express themselves in their own way within this container, with all of their passion, their differences, their poetry: a poetry that keeps me warm and that warms me up.

Innovation in the Blood

I was born in the 1970s in Gallarate, a small town in the north of Italy, nestled between the Alps and Milan, suspended between the spellbinding lakes and mountains of Lombardy on one side and the frantic, intense life of Italy’s economic capital on the other.

When I was growing up, I had no idea what innovation was. I didn’t even know that it had anything to do with any single form of work. When I was young, I just wanted to be an artist—or maybe a writer. I loved writing. I loved drawing. Both came to me quite easily. I ended up, however, becoming a designer, pretty much by accident.

I came from a middle-class Italian family, one of those many families that make countless sacrifices to send their children to university—a public university, to be clear, not a private one. Mine was one of those families that didn’t have a way of supporting their children after university either, when they would need to look for their own path and follow their own dreams. In other words, when I finished studying, I had to go out into the world and get a job—right away. And in Italy, getting a job was far from taken for granted, whatever grades you had or school you went to. The job market was extremely difficult to break into. This is why, ever since I was young, my dreams were always injected with a healthy pragmatism. The uncertainty of my own path ahead was limited by the certain variable that once I left the university, I needed to find a fixed salary.

My parents were convinced that the chances of finding a steady job as an artist or a writer were not particularly good in our country back then. And the idea that I could go and search for my fortune abroad was out of the question for a family that had never left Italy, except perhaps to hop across the border into nearby Switzerland for a Sunday walk.

In the end I decided to listen to my parents’ advice, trusting their wisdom, and so I opted to study architecture at the university Politecnico of Milan. It was a discipline that could give me some real job opportunities, while also being the area of study that was the closest to the world of art that I loved. It was also the discipline that my dad had studied, and my dad was a constant source of inspiration for me—a man who was an architect by profession but an artist in his heart and daily life.

A few weeks before the entrance exam, however, something happened that transformed all of my plans—one of those “sliding door” moments in life. It was a hot afternoon in the summer of 1994, a day I remember as though it were yesterday, when I got a call on the cordless Panasonic phone at home. It was Giovanni Martinengo, a friend from high school, who was calling me about a new degree course, the first of its kind in Italy. Called industrial design, it had been launched at Politecnico university the previous year. Giovanni was considering taking the entrance exam. I had never heard of this discipline until that moment—a new and interesting path defined by two words that back then sounded magical to my ears. The term “design” spoke to my dreams and my obsession with art and creativity. The word “industrial” resonated with pragmatism and business.

It wasn’t entirely clear to me what kind of job the course would prepare me for: the world of design was completely new to me. But those two simple words—“industrial” and “design”—seemed to be the perfect bridge between my need to dream and my need to get real, between art and commerce, between passion and labor. And so I decided to throw my lot in with this course of study. Martinengo never took the exam, and he actually became an engineer. I took the exam, with results placing me first among thousands of candidates. Thus it was that I began along the road that would soon take me into the most beautiful profession in the world: a profession called design.

The Attraction of the Unknown and the Different

This choice, this leap into the void, crystallizes a lot of what has characterized my own professional and personal path over the past forty years. If I hadn’t had the courage to dive into a discipline that was, essentially, entirely unknown to me, I would never have discovered this new world, made of creativity that has an impact on all of society, a world that I have fallen completely in love with.

This has been one of the main and recurring themes of my life: I have always been fascinated by the unknown. I have sought new worlds with the utmost curiosity, and somehow I have had the courage to dive in. I found my comfort zone within this feeling of discomfort. And this holds true not only for my professional path: the exploration of new situations and different cultures has always drawn me in—whether through physical voyages, enabled by airplanes and hotels, or virtual ones, enabled by the internet and fantasies; whether through intimate journeys, composed of precious conversations with friends and strangers, or public ones, based on the curious and intrigued observation of those who surround me.

I have always felt this tension within myself. I grew up in an Italian suburb, in the midst of an extraordinary, triumphant natural environment. Since my early years, I was surrounded by nature, I immersed myself in it, and it made a deep impression on me—and it has never left me. But the city lights always attracted me nevertheless. I lived all my life suspended between the two worlds, surrounded by jungles of trees and flowers on one side and mesmerized by very different jungles of asphalt and buildings on the other. Milan and Rome were the first metropolises that I learned to call my own. They are mere villages, perhaps, on an international scale, but mysterious, boundless cities measured by my standards as a young man from the outskirts of town. I loved the design of these cities’ urban fabrics, their unresolved mixtures of ancient and modern, their tensions between sacred and profane, constant conversations between earth and sky. Art and architecture already meant for me the tangible sign of the human capacity to dream, to imagine, to plan, and to do.

But the deepest nature of my curiosity for the stimulating city transcended a mere exploration of somewhere that was simply “different.” What fascinated me the most about the metropolitan forest of a city such as Rome or Milan was not so much what I saw and encountered, but rather the potential of what I might see and encounter. I was attracted by the possible, the diverse—by everything I didn’t know, everything that might happen there. The big city meant the reification of something that I could discover, something that I couldn’t devour in a single moment or ever fully understand: a mystery to be apprehended little by little, in a journey that would resonate in a nearly infinite way, tasting one bite, one experience at a time in a journey without any clear goal but with a very clear direction—the direction of exploration.

There are people who run away from the unknown, from the diverse; they fear it, they fight it. I have always been fascinated by it. And so it was that, ever since I was a boy, I have always been on the hunt for potential, in order to transform it into action. I look for it within myself, in others, in places, in events, in experiences—everywhere.

One evening, while we were dining in one of our favorite restaurants in New York, my dear friend Denis Dekovic, back then the head of design for Adidas, described me with an image full of poetry: “Mauro, you’re like a straw bale that is ready to catch fire—you’re always looking for that spark that can set it alight!” I imagined myself as straw: light, suspended in the air, on the lookout for that spark in new worlds, new cultures, in the uncertainty of the possible, in the darkness of the unexplored. This sacred fire is the initial flame of innovation. The attraction for the unknown and the love of diversity are its fundamental ingredients. The curious exploration of the world and an obsessive fascination for what’s possible are its main drivers.

Innovation in the Eyes of a Child

All of this is part of my DNA. It has defined my life as something I have experienced every day, from my earliest years. My mother tells me that I came into the world with my eyes wide open, without crying, looking around me with curiosity, as if to ask where I was, fully enjoying the magic of that moment. Obviously, my mother was projecting her own emotions onto me, with her own interpretation of my first moment of life. But this image has remained with me and has intrigued me ever since, because it is exactly with that curious child’s gaze that I have continued to explore the world.

There is another story that my mom loves to share. She never misses an opportunity to tell people about our first summer in Borghetto, a small seaside town in Liguria. I was two years old, and she couldn’t keep me under the beach umbrella, not even for a moment. I was always driving her crazy, running away to explore every inch of the shore, speaking with anyone who passed by, with all of my infantile noises and gestures. That hunger for exploration and discovery started early on and never stopped. It has accompanied me for my whole existence and will only come to an end when life itself leaves my body, because exploration, discovery, and life have always been a single, inseparable substance that feeds my body. And they always will be.

This book is about precisely this: innovation and life. It discusses this topic, for the most part, through the filters and tales of my professional life, but the sensitive reader will find reflections and ideas that go radically beyond the professional dimension, with roots that dig down into the personal world of each and every one of us. Being able to innovate in the world of business means thinking and acting as innovators. And that begins with our own private lives. The two worlds are completely, intimately bound up with each other. You can’t switch off your innovation mindset when you get home from the office. If you think you can, well, then probably you’re not an innovator.

Creating Value for People

My five years of design at the university Politecnico of Milan were extremely illuminating. They made me discover a fascinating discipline that no one had ever mentioned to me before. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that I have decided to talk about it so much in the past twenty years, especially outside of the world of design, in every kind of situation and on every kind of platform. I wanted to expose as many people as possible to this incredible universe full of creativity and optimism, packed with joy and style, saturated with meaning and value, all of which I had discovered by accident through a phone call that I hadn’t been expecting.

No one had ever told me about a school that teaches you how to be an innovator—or, to put it more exactly, not (only) a designer but an innovator! Innovation is what designers do and what you are taught to do in design school. You learn how to observe people, how to understand their needs and desires, and how to then invent meaningful solutions that respond to those desires and needs. These solutions can take the form of products, brands, spaces, services, or experiences. And then you learn that these solutions need to be technically realizable and also need to be able to be commercialized. In other words, you learn how to make something desirable, technically feasible, and economically viable. Well, these three dimensions are quite simply the key pillars of any innovation process. They frame the three fundamental ingredients of any successful innovation, which can be summarized using three relevant keywords: “human being,” “technology,” and “business.” Designers innovate through a constant balancing of these three dimensions.

On top of all of this, designers do something else as well, which makes their approach more important in today’s world than it has ever been before. They try to create value for people, for society, for the whole planet. Designers are driven by a sincere desire to create solutions that impact people’s lives in a meaningful way. People value before business value: that’s the kind of value designers are after. That’s priority number one, two, and three for them!

If business leaders are assigned mediocre products to manage, they can still become stars in their field and have a wonderful career path if they find a way to grow their company and obtain financial success despite the mediocrity of those products. Designers who produce mediocre products are merely professionals who are as mediocre as their products, whatever economic success their sales might lead to.

And so let’s ask the question: Who does our society need? Design thinkers in love with the excellence of their products, who create solutions that add value to people’s lives, or business wizards, capable of drowning the world in mediocrity, without regrets, drawing vast riches into their own companies? Obviously, I’m making generalizations. I have met many business leaders in my time who are positively obsessed about the quality of their products, as well as designers who have aimed more at economic returns than at the exceptional character of their own projects. But on a cultural level, the truth is that the typical mindset of the design community—the design-driven mindset, the one that design school teaches you—is an approach entirely focused on the creation of meaningful value for society as a whole. That’s usually what designers care about. And that’s what design school teaches you to care about and expects you to care about.

“Design-driven,” in other words, is a synonym for “human-centered.” It’s a human-centered way of thinking. Our world needs more people who think and act like designers. We call these people design thinkers, whether or not they are designers in the strict sense of the term. Yes, you—whether you are a marketer, scientist, musician, or politician—can be, and should be, a design thinker, too!

Therefore, let’s be clear: this book is not a design book as such. Nor is it a book about designers. It’s a book about innovation and innovators. But the world of design has had a fundamental role in my journey; it has transformed my natural and personal instinct for innovation into a profession, a real and recognized one. It has given this instinct a definition and, above all, a purpose, one that is greater and more important than I am.

I am sure that many other people have arrived at this vision of purposeful innovation by traveling down different paths. This book, nevertheless, is full of my own biographical experiences, which provide color and form to the book’s messages—and this means that design, the vital element of my existence, will be a recurring filter, whether hidden between the lines or explicitly discussed in the text.

The design-driven and human-centered approach to business has perhaps often been considered superfluous by many organizations until recently, as this approach wasn’t always necessary to win in the market. But today, in our new modern society, this mindset represents a primary competitive advantage: it is vital, essential, and unavoidable for any enterprise. The world is changing under the inexorable winds of globalization, new technologies, and digital platforms, and in this new and democratic competitive landscape, any form of mediocrity in products and brands can no longer be easily defended. A more humanistic business vision becomes indispensable: either you create extraordinary products and brands for the people you serve, or someone else will do it for you—and take your place.

To create extraordinary products and brands, you need an extraordinary breed of leaders. These individuals put the creation of value for other people at the center. Able to decipher and understand the dreams and needs of those people, these leaders know how to translate this understanding into extraordinary solutions, convince companies and investors to bet everything on those ideas, and inspire armies of other people in the direction of the leaders’ own dreams and toward the creation of meaningful value for society and for business. These leaders are, yet again, people in love with people. You need to find them, to inspire them, to coach them, to retain them—to “create” them sometimes, uncovering their potential, unleashing their hidden talent. These people could be any of you, any of us. I will talk extensively about these individuals in the pages of this book.