Italy’s Digital Business Transformation By Design: Laura Licari and Roberto Leonelli
Interview by John Maeda @ Publicis Sapient
We bridge strategy and engineering.
JM: The world looks to Italy as the capital of design.
But that classical perspective has not led to solutions to transform businesses digitally there. Do you agree or disagree?
I believe the huge obstacle designers in Italy had to overcome to impact businesses in the last few years has been to get the chance to show their actual capabilities beyond the stereotype.
The Italian design myth originates in three decades of fortunate partnerships between pioneers of design and those enlightened entrepreneurs that embraced such visions and acted as patrons.
While Italian designers have always been able to extend their skills to address contemporary strategic challenges, business leaders have conflated design as a kind of wrapping paper just for marketing efforts. This flawed perception has crystallized over years as the primary representation of design in the eyes of the majority.
It’s been hard to replicate the designer + entrepreneur synergy in the digital era with such entrenched misconception.
While Italian designers have always been able to extend their skills to address contemporary strategic challenges, business leaders have conflated design as a kind of wrapping paper just for marketing efforts.
If Italian design is globally iconized as high-end product design (furniture, fashion, cars) when I think of masters as Bruno Munari, Tomàs Maldonado and Ezio Manzini … it’s clear it has always been front and center in our culture the importance of impacting positively people’s life in all its aspects and beyond channels, leveraging ingenuity to innovate, and navigating seamlessly between craft and systemic thinking. These are all essential skills to drive transformational programs.
Despite that, while in the last decades, Italian design evolved into a richer practice, the stereotype slowed down in lieu of a newer recognition for the wider stake that it deserved at the business table.
Entering the 90s, large organizations started to take longer to evolve. And they missed the chance to embrace the new available channels in their strategy.
Today design roles are finally widespread in all large organizations in Italy, but still, just a handful of Italian brands can really say to have fully embraced experience as part of their transformation strategy.
Slow, generational turnover in executive boards and a traditional caution on diversifying channels promoted the protection of the status quo. Furthermore, the historical misalignment in digital access between the few large Italian cities and the majority of rural towns didn’t create at first the urge for larger brands to transform.
Now, right before the C-19 pandemic, we got into yet another phase, where businesses — FinServices among the first — got into a regulation-led wave of transformation. In such contexts, looking for consultants that are able to navigate technology, strategy and service innovation, Italian enterpreneurs and businesses re-discovered the value of experience design and systemic thinking as a Digital Business Transformation (DBT) crucial resource.
Today design roles are finally widespread in all large organizations in Italy, but still, just a handful of Italian brands can really say to have fully embraced experience as part of their transformation strategy.
Design is living the paradox of excellence.
The pioneers of industrial design, in the 60s and 70s created a new discipline. You know, they were real geniuses — because they were at the same time Artists, Architect, Philosophers, Anthropologists, Engineers and more.
After their era, the market tried to bring design to a larger scale, reducing costs and increasing profits. Today in Italy, design is too often confused with art and beauty, almost as if people had to adapt themselves to the product, and digital is only useful to add the “show” component. In the designers’ caste, technology is something for geeks, not valuable at all.
This is the paradox of Italian design excellence, but today Alexa, Google Home and so on, are starting to move something, even in Italy.
On the other hand we have excellent designers, outside of the “magic circle,” that are really excellent, thanks to Italian ingenuity. I strongly believe that such a rich heritage exists. But companies and entrepreneurs don’t take the opportunity to listen to them, because their business is apparently going well, and they continue to reach their conservative revenue targets, even without taking the risks of digital transformation.
This is the paradox of Italian design excellence, but today, as the boundaries between products and services are more blurred, I believe that a new renaissance of meaningful Italian design is possible. I firmly believe that Laura Licari joining our team is the key to this renaissance for our teams and partners.
JM: The longtime resistance to change how business gets done has now met with a global pandemic that has disrupted supply chains, retail channels, and has taken many human lives. What needs to happen in Italy to plot a path to recovery?
Roberto Leonelli: The global pandemic is our zero moment of truth.
In this crisis nobody can lie anymore. Italian companies, even the most innovative, cannot hide their analog culture anymore. In the meanwhile, Italian citizens have discovered their digital maturity, that is higher than expected. People have experimented the power of digital in shopping, in ordering food, in connecting with friends, in managing their bank account, and they will never come back.
Now, we have to manage the digital transformation coming from the new normal. What will I do with my 300 shops in Italy? How can I change my business model? What about my supply chain? How I can bridge the gap with my competitors abroad? How do I have to manage my relationship with traditional retailers? How I have to deal with Amazon? In a sentence, how have I to re-shape my entire business taking into account the acceleration and “normalization” of new behaviours, created by the crisis?
In the future we will have incredible opportunities, but we will have to explain the huge difference that exists between digitisation — which is about engineering — and DBT — which is about business design, organisation and experience.
Laura Licari: In these hard times, we’re witnessing two main behaviors that are very typical of our culture: single individuals’ triumphs of ingenuity.
We’ve seen how makers and doctors have partnered, for example, to resolve the lack in medical supplies through 3D-printing. Meanwhile, slower organizations are instead stuck in denial and hope to go back to the “old normal” as soon as possible.
In the meantime society is changing forever: people of any age that have never widely used digital tools before moved from messaging only to videocalling their family and friends 24/7, shopping online and working remotely.
Brands will soon have to go with a “make or break” approach and start defining their identity in the new age that is ahead of us. More than ever organizations should recognize in their teams those single individuals that embrace new challenges with vision and a problem solving attitude. And to entrust them with leading the path through this phase while silencing conservative forces and traditionalism.
It’s essential in this context that each organisation plans activities to shape their brand’s service vision in the post-C19 trying to intercept the new trends that will emerge.
More than ever organizations should recognize in their teams those single individuals that embrace new challenges with vision and a problem solving attitude. And to entrust them with leading the path through this phase while silencing conservative forces and traditionalism.
We’re kicking off a phase in which we’ll all feel more vulnerable and uncertain about our future than before, and we’ll probably adopt forever new, more cautious, ways to communicate and interact, we’ll have also to re evaluate if our hyper-productivity trajectory is sustainable — or even needed/wanted after this pause from our habits.
What is ahead of us? New remote aggregation rituals will become usual. Commercial real estate will transform as we realize we don’t need large offices anymore. We will probably see a shift from centralized to proximity online shopping (and from centralized to distributed warehouses). We’ll witness the involution of travel from long-haul commutes to local trips. Older users, that have always privileged in-person interactions before, may actually be now the driver to accelerate healthcare professionals’ adoption of tele-health and digital therapeutics.
All of this will require organizations to embrace this phase — even if forced by external events and not desired or planned by any of us — as a call to overcome the systemic barriers to change.
JM: What do you hope that the new leader of Experience for Publicis Sapient Italy can make happen for the many companies that you support in that vital region of our world?
Roberto Leonelli: I am certain that Laura’s capabilities and the culture of Publicis Sapient will create something totally new for the Italian market.
In my opinion, we need three main ingredients to succeed: design capabilities, consulting skills, and the ability to listen to the world. If we are able to mix these three ingredients in the right way, we will be able to find the right answer — and I think that only one good answer will emerge for our markets.
We need to experiment in Italy as an experience-led DBT model, where experiences drive consultancy, leveraging on data, AI and engineering. That’s why we’re delighted to have Laura on board. That’s because we will be not able to win on the tech side, but we will win by changing the rules of the entire game of bridging strategy and engineering with experience.
Laura Licari: Someone told me recently that it was crazy to have made such a big change in my life and career in a moment of so deep and sudden societal transformation.
On the contrary, I actually feel it’s a great opportunity to have joined Publicis Sapient in such exceptional times: I appreciated the transparency and directness of Roberto in sharing his vision for Italy, and found a team enthusiast and eager to grow, not frightened of embracing the unexpected.
As the Experience leader for Italy, I’ll bring our clients’ both a local context understanding and a global perspective matured working with international clients and extended through the strong connection with the wider Sapient Experience leadership team. We’ll support organizations in building a new future by co-designing their path to transformation and bringing to life exceptional experiences.
The Experience offering will in fact prove essential in this peculiar DBT context as we integrate service and product thinking with strategy, data and engineering. We’ll also partner with the many organizations that are already building experience competence centers in-house to bring strategic acceleration, cross-pollination and to contribute shaping their transformational experience roadmaps. We have a great Experience team here in Italy, just ready to get onto its next systemic challenge.
Learn more about Publicis Sapient at publicissapient.com
