I’ve recently been at a reserved (thanks to Marco Massarotto for the invitation) dinner about innovation (or, better, how to foster, finance and spread innovation) at the Lago apartment in Milan.
I’d say the best of breed (actually, part of it) of the people involved in innovation were around that table: we had the CEOs (both from startups and from well-known companies), we had the managers (from Kilometro Rosso… and Gabetti too ), we had the investors (dPixel, Working Capital and new entries too), we had the bloggers too (Emil’s got a complete list of participants).

It’s been really a nice evening with great food designed (yes: designed) by Gionatan and we also had a chance to test a brand new B2B pasta product from Barilla with top notch quality talks (and I also have been “zamped” by the Funky Professor gaining much more prestige )

Shot courtesy of Marco Massarotto

Here below some of the most ispirational sentences I’ve recorded:

• Food is a language; as a language it’s subjected to design and planning. Gionatan;
• In Italy it more risky that a good idea is not financed then a bad idea can grant finance. Giorgio de Michelis;
• We have to armonize all the innovation related projects. (I haven’t noted down the name, sorry);
• We need to have the investors competing for funding projects. Giorgio de Michelis.

What I think: ideas are not the problem. Nor it is money. We – as Italians – have a deep cultural problem: we need to get acquainted to the idea of failure. We need to start loving failure as the best way to success.