Bologna, Emilia-Romagna
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2018
I’m looking for nascent companies who are tilling daring ideas about education and technology and searching for pre-seed or seed funding to grow these ideas into products to empower anyone – from children and parents to adult, professional lifelong learners and their mentors and coaches – to learn and teach better. I will support and finance ideas with the potential to have a positive impact on our future through education at every stage of our life. I will respectfully, discreetly stand by the entrepreneurs believing in these ideas, from the beginnings and at least since that impact leaves its first dent. I care about each startup in our portfolio getting the full value a hundred years old education company like Zanichelli can offer, wherever our expertise can be a lodestar because of our history, our mission, our network, our resources; and I believe in getting out of the founders’ way elsewhere, if we don’t add value. I care about financial returns and self-sustainability and about bringing collaboration opportunities, insights, innovative thinking and entrepreneurial energy back to our company digital products designers, editorial staff and IT, searching for mutual advantages. Only in the long term, as we and the founders build trust through intense collaboration and shared stakes, and after a startup fully spreads out its potential as a maturing company, I believe in searching together for possible paths to a deeper partnership.
2009 - 2018
2013 - 2018
Along with a most awesome team of three, I support senior management in working out our digital strategy and I lead the creation of a modern software house in the middle of our 150 years old textbook publishing business, as a sort of in-house startup. We design and develop a cutting edge integrated educational digital offer, often breaking new grounds: from extensive assessment applications enriched by our own adaptive, IRT-based engine or our intelligent step-by-step assistant in solving mathematical exercises, to comprehensive, widely enhanced, multimedial, interactive, mobile-enabled print-replica and reflowable ebook platforms, to augmented textbooks via smartphone app, to teachers’ tools to easily assemble lessons or tests from our vast repositories of validated digital content… We introduced and adapted design thinking and agile approaches to be receptive to our customers needs and to adapt our roadmaps as they changed: leveraging Schwaber’s Scrum empirical process control and, more recently, Larman’s LeSS guidance in scaling scrum and in system thinking, we coordinate distributed teams of more than 50 from half a score of different suppliers. We practice user research and care for our users’ experience interacting with our products, evolving to be at least as beautiful and clear to look and learn from, and as simple and enjoyable to use and learn with, as the textbooks we’ve been perfecting for decades. Working with our IT, we wired and instrumented our offer and built the infrastructure that’s enabling us to be driven by data. We successfully prod and coach the teams to choose and adopt what they feel are best technical practices, from moving in the cloud and automating the full deployment pipeline to domain driven design and test driven development, supporting their autonomy and responsibility. We spread lean thinking and practice in the wider organization, and we work together with other business units as innovators and change agents.
2010 - 2013
2009 - 2010
2008 - 2009
2008 - 2009
2005 - 2009
2005 - 2009