A smart future: interview with Marco Patuano

Telecom's CEO discusses with Joseph Grima the evolution of telecommunications and how they are changing towards the environment.

Nuvola Intervista a Patuano
Joseph Grima: I would like to discuss the links between communication, technology, design, urban planning and the city because this, I believe, is what the Expo represents. Let’s start with where the idea for this project came from. What drove you to do it with Domus because the theme of the city, or smart cities, is not core to the project although it does seem to represent an increasingly important theme for telecommunications companies?

Marco Patuano: What you say is very true. I am constantly telling the company that the evolution of the telecommunications world becomes very clear if we base ourselves not on technology but on the needs that must be met by technology. We have moved on from the need to communicate, i.e. transmit simple words, to a far broader concept which is that of digital life – in which communicating is just one of the components – and even the concept of communicating has been greatly extended.

It has already changed to include the sharing of pictures, photographs and videos. It is no longer just communicating but putting our emotions out there for others. That is why we say “communicating is sharing”. In this sense, expanding the space for needs that can be satisfied by digital technologies finds its natural complement in daily life. On the one hand, telecommunications is extending its reach to the world of entertainment and the enriched communications world but the production world is also expanding its space with all the cloud-computing technologies.

In terms of our living dimension, the package of solutions that can be used to improve our quality of life and, therefore, our surrounding environment, urban and non-, has totally changed. In this sense, the domestic environment is the first part of our Expo collaboration.

We see this expansion as totally natural because it takes us towards the smart city or smart environment, on the one hand, and the smart home, on the other.

Marco Patuano
Marco Patuano's portrait. Photo Diletta Parlangeli

JG: You have mentioned the relationship with the digital and hence immaterial world but everyday life is made of relationships with very concrete urban environments. There is a paradox that would have been unthinkable even just 10 years ago, I believe.

More people have access to mobile telephony today than to toilets. I am speaking in global terms of the comparison between the number of people with access to telecommunications platforms such as mobile phones and those with access to toilets! I find this fact truly incredible and staggering, as well as symbolic of the challenges of our era. What does this opportunity mean to you? 

MP: It is an opportunity but also a major responsibility. We have lived through a radical change in people’s relationships with devices in terms of the customisation of the communications and digital worlds. I mean that, in our increasingly connected lifestyles, every one of us has developed a hugely symbiotic relationship with our connectivity tools – connectivity, not telecommunications.

People want mobile phones not just to be able to talk while they are on the move but to have their own hub as they go about their daily lives. I can give you an example. We do not have to worry about toilets and have developed the following relationship with technology: if you leave home without your personal hub, you go back for it. If you leave home without your wallet, you might not go back for it. This is the major change – having what we are beginning to call a companion device that forms part of our everyday life, because it becomes the hub of our digital life – and our digital life is ever more in symbiosis with our material one.

It is constantly getting harder to separate our material life from our digital life because the latter enables us to share our material life with others. This change is very natural because it is not a technological change but a sociological one.

JG: I would like to talk about a term currently much in vogue although not always used appropriately and central to contemporary culture and research - Big data. For the first time, Big data is giving us the opportunity to analyse truly huge quantities of data, draw conclusions and gain information that we could never otherwise have obtained. What opportunities for exploring this theme do you see in Expo Milano 2015, which will also be the first one in the Big data era?   

MP: Big data is one of the components in this digital Expo and one that I believe is important when seen within a broader picture. We tend to use the concept of Big data as a means to conduct customer profiling and using the huge quantity of data that can be analysed for better business opportunities.

The Expo will say something very different: Big data can be placed at the service of a better, more sustainable and more intelligent world that is closer to the needs of its citizens. These are the concepts we adopted for the title of our competition. The use of Big data is fundamental. It enables us to extrapolate real trends, some of which may not be very clear, and this can be used in total anonymity to build patterns that will improve the reference environment, which may be the city, the home, the purchasing experience perhaps or even our control of the environment and territory

JG: You have spoken of Big data as an opportunity and one of the 21st century’s core resources but in recent days we have witnessed some of the risks that come with it – technological intrusion into people’s private lives by government agencies. You are in a position of great responsibility towards citizens, Italian and non-. I am not afraid there is an Italian version of Prism but I believe that anyone managing the telecommunications of the future will have to consider the political issues raised by Big data. How do you think we can cope with these risks of extreme control?

MP: The privacy risks involved when we talk about Big data are substantial so we need a privacy policy that is scrupulously managed. Europe has proven to have extremely rigorous policies on this front. The problem today is the unbalance between legislative policies in Europe and those in other parts of the world. Although Europe applies extreme rigour, the rest of the world has a different take on the same concept. All this doesn’t work in a digital space where geographical boundaries are of relative significance. On the other hand, we have to abandon the hypocrisy and start focusing on public safety.

Public safety can no longer be seen as just physical safety. It has to include the concept of cybernetic safety. The crucial point is who controls the controller and not whether to have someone who guarantees cybernetic safety, which is desirable. I am happier in the knowledge that there is someone who can assure me that my digital life is just as safe as my physical life, or rather that my digital life will help make my physical life safer. Police forces are crucial in this sense. It isn’t true that they do not have rules; they have very strict rules and, right now, we are seeing that the people who break these rules must be punished.

The issue is not whether there must be rules that create a safe digital world. There must be rules but we have to make sure they are always respected and not abused.

The change is very natural because it is not a technological change but a sociological one

JG: A last question on innovation. According to Moore’s law, the number of transistors a chip can have at a certain price doubles approximately every 18 months. This means our computers and telephones will always be faster and more powerful. Perhaps the same thing is happening with innovation, partly thanks to this technology. The speed of information and innovation is getting faster. This is a great opportunity and a huge challenge for a company such as Telecom, which has to keep a core focus on technological innovation. What role does innovation play and how do you encourage a culture of innovation within the company?

MP: We have a slight advantage as a company because the sector we work in feeds on innovation. I believe that innovation moves a little faster than analysed by Moore and our sector demonstrates this if you consider the acceleration witnessed in recent years with several industrial sectors coming together.

What is interesting now is that the digital space is drawing other industrial sectors into it and revolutionising them. I was talking earlier about the entertainment industry but we could speak of the IT industry or that of consumer electronics. Think of the media, communication, magazine and information industries. Think of education and what education will be like in a few years, or the health world. Consider the fact that all sectors will have to accept the fact that the digital world will dramatically change the ways things are done.

With regard to Domus, people talk about a magazine with a highly specialised readership, well the architect of the future will have to be familiar with telecommunications. It is unthinkable that the architect of the future will not be telecommunications-friendly.

JG: How do you see this? It would be interesting to think of a new type of school in this sense.

MP: Our company is talking seriously about whether to offer free digital technology courses, to the Architects’ Association for example, because the way houses will have to be designed, with extensive use of home automation, is totally different from the way they are being built today.

Joint Open Lab

What are we doing? First of all, we have hugely revitalised our internal research and development laboratories, which have a longstanding tradition. Several hundred researchers work in our laboratories today and we have resumed extremely important work on patent development. We also research new technologies around the world. We can’t just wait for someone to come and offer them to us. To give you an idea, I have visited Israel several times recently to gain close-up knowledge of startups in the digital world. I was in Silicon Valley in January and I shall be in the Far East in September.

The second sphere is that of our surrounding environment. So far, I have not said anything earth-shattering. These are normal approaches for those doing my job but we are way ahead on two fronts, in particular. The first is the way we are working with the universities.

On the one hand, we have launched a programme that sponsors 100 PhDs in Italy on subjects close to our hearts and that we have in common with the universities. We have financed Masters in some universities and even sponsored a chair in innovation at the Bocconi University in Milan. Also on the subject of our relationship with universities, we are opening Joint Open Labs (JOL) – research and development laboratories inside universities for which we provide the infrastructures and the universities supply researchers working in areas of mutual interest.

Working capital

I can give you a scoop on this – on 23 July we will inaugurate a new Joint Open Lab with Milan Polytechnic, on what was the Campus Leonardo. It will be called S-Cube – Smart Social Spaces Lab. As you can see, participating in the Expo gives us the opportunity to open a JOL in Milan on subjects close to the heart of the next World Exposition.

The second programme we are using to push innovation is Working Capital, which helps the creation of startups in Italy and continues to be the largest startup programme in the country. Working Capital is now in its fourth year and we are firmly convinced about it. It is a feeding programme. A few weeks ago, we held a national competition for ideas and received 1,023 projects at our Innovation Centre collection point in Rome alone.

The portfolio now has in excess of 5,000 projects, which are stored in a database that we have made available to a number of our partners around the world. One is Saudi Arabia’s Technological Innovation Fund. There are also two venture capital funds in Silicon Valley and now several European venture capital funds are interested, including some Italian ones.

I can say that, if you look at the top ten projects that have secured funding in Silicon Valley, four came out of this project.

Sodales purus vel vero possimus temporibus venenatis

Sodales purus vel vero possimus temporibus venenatis

Read more
China Germany India Mexico, Central America and Caribbean Sri Lanka Korea icon-camera close icon-comments icon-down-sm icon-download icon-facebook icon-heart icon-heart icon-next-sm icon-next icon-pinterest icon-play icon-plus icon-prev-sm icon-prev Search icon-twitter icon-views icon-instagram