[Luca Manisera]

#735

Hi all!

I am Luca, a half-Italian, half-Japanese master student in Innovation Management at the University of Trento. I just came back from Tokyo where I did research at the Hitotsubashi University on regional economic development. I am interested in the intersection of economics, sociology, and geography and I particularly fancy studying ethical issues in the frame of urban studies.

My research has a lot do with the Silicon Valley, since it is a unique case study of regional economic development given its unprecedented exponential economic growth. Thanks to a course in Comparative Innovation Policies that I recently attended, I bumped into many papers on the subject and I feel like suggesting Saxenian’s “The New Argonauts”, which is a ten years old book, but deals with a very topical issue (immigration) and it does its job (for a shorter and easily accessible contribution I suggest this article). However, the book that mostly influenced my current research is Richard Florida’s “The Rise of the Creative Class”. Although I cannot say I completely agree with him, I found it very interesting and people say it is a must read for urban planners or economists studying growth models. These are my two cents, just to give a cue for the thread.

Beside urban studies, I like to discuss about innovation, entrepreneurship, technology and related ethical issues on my blog on Il Sole 24 Ore “The Errorist”. Thanks to the network of Il Sole 24 Ore, I managed to spend different periods at H-Farm, an Italian venture incubator that aims at becoming the next Silicon Valley (it sounds trivial and cheesy, I know, but few days ago they have just secured an investment of 101 million euros for their innovation campus and they have sealed a deal with Ca’ Foscari University of Venice to host bachelor level courses in digital management). In H-Farm I managed to get to know inspiring entrepreneurs, innovative startups and participate in tech events like hackathons and the Kinnernet (a tech networking event founded by Yossi Vardi, founding investor of ICQ) that provided interesting raw material for my articles.

Generally speaking, despite being sometimes critical about technological innovations, I consider myself a technology and innovation enthusiast. This is why I interned in a startup accelerator while studying in Trento (TechPeaks), I co-organized Trento Startup Weekend, I recently got close to an Italian venture capital (Innogest), and I constantly try to be updated with tech-news.

I would be eager to be given the chance to take part in the Silicon Valley Study Tour 2017. It would very interesting for me to experience firsthand and see with my own eyes how things work in the Silicon Valley. It is a place that was constantly mentioned in my studies and in my own researches and I find it a great opportunity to visit the venues where global innovation takes place. Plus, Silicon Valley is also the title of a fiction that I used to watch, and I think it would be fun to see the real places where the fiction is set. In addition, I have seen that it can be a very inspiring experience, like for the alumni that decided to start up their entrepreneurial careers after the tour (I actually presented Saverio Murgia’s and Luca Nardelli’s Horus Technology as a case study in a marketing course that I attended in Budapest almost two years ago). Nowadays, Silicon Valley is the place to be in order to create meaningful innovation and it is no coincidence that our previous PM Matteo Renzi is currently in Silicon Valley in order to learn from Elon musk and company how to spur economy through innovation. I think it makes sense to try to learn from who does it best.

As for the Stimuli that Paolo Marenco, referring to Lazlo Blok’s book, I would say that businesses should be people centered: whether you are talking about your clients or your human capital, people should be always an important focus. I am very interested in seeing how companies in the valley deal with HR, since they are famous for their employees’ benefits and nurturing programs. As for the story of Cambridge Analytica, I am a strong believer in the reliability of personality tests. I found out about the Myers-Briggs test in a course in Organizational Behavior at the university and I am currently digging into the topic since I was also provided a similar test during an interview. However, the history about Trump’s elections is kind of creepy, I was surprised to find it out even considering the big hype around big data.

I am eager to continue the discussion on this forum, cheers!

Luca Manisera

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