Overview

Roberto’s research focuses on how to create innovations that are meaningful for people, for society, and for their creators. He explores how leaders and organizations generate radically new visions, and make those visions come real. His studies lie at the intersection between leadership, design, and technology strategy. In his research, Roberto combines methodologies of in-depth analysis of cases with experimentations with pioneering firms, in a variety of industries and contexts. His research currently focuses on four streams: - How to start an innovation journey: finding breakthrough directions. We live in a world awash with ideas. Thanks to the web and to powerful ideation approaches such as open innovation, design thinking, or crowdsourcing, organizations have today easy access to an unprecedented amount of novel concepts. In this context, what organizations lack is not “one more idea”, but the capability to make sense of an overabundance of opportunities. They need a new meaningful vision, i.e. a new lens and a new map that indicates which direction to go. Without a meaningful vision, organizations tend to select those ideas that better address existing problems, and disregard solutions with higher potential, regardless to the number of ideas generated. How to find this vision? How to create things that people are not asking for, but that are so inevitable that people love them once they see them? - Leadership by Design. How can we reinvent leadership by leveraging on the perspective of Design? How Design can drive transformation and engagement in organization through the direct involvement of people in the making of things? How the deep search for meaning that is embedded in design can help leaders to create meaning in people’s work and drive their business to the creation of purpose? - Pairs in innovation. Why many successful innovations are conducted by two people? Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Indra Nooyi and Mauro Porcini. Besides individual’s ideation and team’s collaboration, the pair appear as a distinct space of collaboration able to lead to breakthrough outcome when dealing with innovative endeavor. Its singular sociological form seems to nurture dynamics of self-disclosure and mutual criticism, which may result as transformative when performing innovative tasks. In our studies we show how pair collaboration plays a central role in developing breakthrough direction. Where on one side individuals act as the bearers of ideas and teams as the bearers of competences and resources, the pair acts as a third space that bears a safe and intimate space of reflection. An intimate space that the pair enacts only in key moments during an innovation journey: the moment of daring, the moment of criticizing each other, and the moment of resilience. Still, these moments become crucial for the successful development of innovation itself. - Innovation and Artificial Intelligence. At the heart of any innovation process lies a fundamental practice: the way people create ideas and solve problems. This “decision making” side of innovation is what scholars and practitioners refer to as “design.” Decisions in innovation processes have so far been taken by humans. What happens when they can be substituted by machines? Artificial Intelligence (AI) brings data and algorithms to the core of the innovation processes. What are the implications of this diffusion of AI for our understanding of design and innovation? Is AI just another digital technology that, akin to many others, will not significantly question what we know about design? Or will it create transformations in design that current theoretical frameworks cannot capture?