Meet Erika, an aspiring entrepreneur from Italy
After meeting so many wonderful people at the Global Start-Up Youth (500+ youth from 100+ countries), we - the French team - have decided to share those people’s stories. Every other day, we’re going to discover the entrepreneurial ecosystem of a new country through the eyes of a local.
Today let’s meet Erika, an energetic and motivated young Italian girl who is more than ready to adress her country's most pressing issues - Pénélope
Hi Erika, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Hello aspiring entrepreneurs! My name is Erika and I'm coming from Milan, Italy, a city that is considered by many of you as being the European’s capital of fashion and business. I’m 20 years old and I’m a bachelor student in International Economics, Management and Finance at Bocconi University. After attending a Humanities and Literature High School, I felt that my personality and my attitudes better matched a different career path. Moreover, I wanted to be able to work within a truly international environment, which could broaden my knowledge of the world and present me with different point of views. The energetic and lively atmosphere of my course revived all my passions and gave me the chance to be active in different fields. At first I joined MILMUN - an association involved in International Relations and Politics - both as a delegate and a member of the Executive Committee for the organization of the annual Conference. My job as an IT & Design Manager in the Excom and as Layout Editor during the Conference gave me the chance to put into action all my skills in graphics, marketing, communication and management.
This year has been full of energy and positivity: I have attended Global Startup Youth Conference in Malaysia with other 500 hundred passionate and inspiring people: during 3 days full of games, pitches, brainstorming, coding and debating, each team created a fully-function mobile app in order to solve a specific problem in the chosen area among 4 of the MDGs – Health, Education, Women Empowerment and Environment. No better way to learn and gather ideas and connections for my future projects! We recently did our first “Online Hangout”, attended by more than 20 GSY Alumni, where each of us could update our fellows with current projects, launch a request of help or simply ask for an opinion.
With regards to my current project, I recently launched an initiative called “Languages Coffee Break”, in order to help Italian youth practise foreign languages and fill the gap in the academic education of this field. Participants of our weekly events join a network of people with the passion for foreign languages and can connect with potential conversation partners. One big difference between what we do and the traditional system of “language conversation” is that people are encouraged to form groups - or “tables” as we call them - and share their conversation experience with multiple “partners”. In this way, conversation is more natural, therefore effective. Since the very beginning, the initiative has been a success and we have big plans for the its future expansion and development. Stay tuned!
What is the start-up ecosystem like in your country?
Despite Italy’s conservationism that prevents it from including technology in schools and in education programs, the country has a lot of centers of innovation, especially in the main university cities. Over the last few years many start-up competitions, accelerator programs and workshops, focusing on entrepreneurship and business appeared. All this makes me even more confident into thinking that when a crisis is hitting the economy you'd better come up with creativity and innovation to shape up a better future. As a great man once told me: “from the depth of a gorge we can only go up”
The main places where start-ups are born and developped are definitely co-working spaces. The most famous one is surely TAG – Talent Garden: the idea behind it was to build an ecosystem where creative and brilliant minds can help each other, compete and collaborate, compare and contaminate themselves in a natural environment. Like most co-working spaces, the atmosphere is amazingly creative and mind-opening: among eco-friendly furniture and cardboard desks, you can find chaise-longues, big screens with Xbox and games. Talent Garden is open 24/7 and can host more than 445 talents in whole Italy. So far it’s present in 7 cities (Bergamo - Brescia - Milano - Padova - Genova - Pisa - Torino): as you can notice, they are basically all in the North of Italy. In terms of innovation and technology, the gap between North and South is still huge, but the latter is catching up with events like Startup Weekend Catania. All in all, the most active cities are, in my opinion, university cities like Milano, Pavia – check out this very active group of startuppers called Activators Pavia - Pisa and Torino.
With regards to competitions, accelerators and incubator, here is a short list about some interesting ones:
Startup Weekend Milan: next edition will take place on Feb, 1-3 (already sold out), organised in the beautiful TAG Milano I mentioned earlier.
Bit Bum Bam: its main goal is to give visibility to projects regarding education involving the new generations: the driving factor is the role of technology as a positive tool in education, useful for the growth of the youth.
Start Cup Milano Lombardia: a Business Plan Competition promoted by a group of incubators from the north of Italy, favouring the birth of enterprises with high innovative content. The peculiarity of the competition lies in the fact that most projects come from research centers of local Italian universities.
Speed Mi Up: start-up accelerator, whose focus is the growth of innovative start-ups and professional through an intense program of interactive training concentrated in the first 3 months in the incubator and a continuous support thanks to a revolutionary platform of cooperative social networking.
StartupBus: an international competition, taking place entirely on a bus. It’s a challenge for coders, designers and entrepreneurs who, during a travel from Rome to Wien, will transform ideas and projects in embryos of innovative start-ups.
TechCrunch Italy: some of the most recognised leaders and innovators of the technology and media industries in Italy, Europe and the US will participate to give a unique insight into the big changes and trends happening in the world right now
What would be the 3 main challenges for entrepreneurship in your country? What is missing?
Few incentives: one of Italy’s biggest problem is bureaucracy. When you're about to found your startup you should be ready to face many many problems. First and foremost, the huge amount of taxes, which is even more discouraging since our European neighboors set up special tax systems for new entrepreneurs in order to encourage them. The result is that, even before starting to make a decent profit to continue operation, the founders are overwhelmed by debts. Moreover, in comparison with other countries, accelerators programs offering prizes or financial incentives to new-born start-ups or original ideas are booming only in the recent years. As a result, the initial amount of money invested in a project is usually quite big.
Lack of Hacking Culture: a second problem we face is the poor quality or complete lack of hacking and coding skills among my peers, Italy's new generation. There are only a few high schools that include informatics and computer skills in their programs – and if they do, generally they are schools specifically designed for future technicians or computer experts. As far as I know, the programming languages taught are quite backward (mainly HTML). Therefore, people who are able to program either learnt it at University or self-taught through many website platforms such as the well known Codecademy.
Lack of Entrepreneurship Culture: Italian education system is very traditional, mainly theory-based and focused on general subjects such as Grammar, Mathematics, Science, History and Art. Except from some very specific schools, there is not such a subject as Entrepreneurship, Business, Leadership, Public Speaking Skills, Organization and Team Work. In addition to this, the traditional method of “the teacher speaks, you listen and take notes” is still the prevailing one. Techniques such as brainstorming, creative thinking and ideas development are not considered as effective ways of learning and enhancing a student’ success and personality building.
The three main assets?
Young people: innovation, technology and creative ideas are all to be found where youth is: universities, schools, co-working spaces, clubs, organizations. We are the one taking charge of leading the country out of the crisis, creating new resources from nothing, developing job opportunities and renovating Italy’s business tradition
Italian Startup Scene Facebook Group: a sign of the crucial role social networks play in connecting people and creating a network of innovators. This Facebook group now has more than 8,300 members, up from fewer than 3,000 last year and is still growing.
Initiative of regional governments: Regional governments have often more autonomy than central government and are dreaming up their own initiatives outside the dead-locked corridors of Rome. One of the fastest moving is the tiny regional state of Trentino who can benefit from its semi-autonomy to set up its own rules and facilitate the incubation of innovative projects through programs such as Trento Rise. In addition to this, the region also lowered taxes and allocated 3 percent of its provincial GDP to research - in contrast with the state government who gave only 1 percent of the country’s GDP to research.
How do people feel about entrepreneurs in Italy?
In Italy, the term “Entrepreneur” has historically been referring to two kinds of people: on the one side, to owners of small and medium size family enterprises, often pertaining specific industries such as agriculture, tourism, manufacture and raw material production or to big industrial groups managers. This is due to the country’s history: for many centuries, Italy has been separated in small counties or cities, each with its own kind or duke. One the other side, an entrepreneur was someone who owned or run multiple businesses in multimedia, infrastructure, transportation: just to make you understand, someone like Berlusconi.
That's why the idea of entrepreneurship applied to tech start-ups and especially to young people is perceived as very bizarre: enterprises have historically had a very fixed and hierarchical internal structure, have been ruled by mature and rich people and have been involved in quite traditional business fields. For sure nothing similar to university students with passion for hacking, programming and web designing.
What has been the most successful start-up in your country in the past 10 years?
If I may do so, I’d like to mention two of them:
Job Rapido: found in 2006, it is a website that includes job offers published in different websites around the world and present them to the user, who can look them up with a simple click of the mouse. The start-up was born in Milan thanks to an engineer of the Politecnico University of Milan. After only 6 months the company became cash positive and from that moment on started growing fast without any funding in addition to advertisement. The company has been acquired from Daily Mail, for 30 million euros.
Volagratis: a search engine for low cost flights, based in Europe. It allows members to search and book low cost carriers in tandem with others in a simple and transparent way. The main goal is to develop the best consumer service technologies, combining into a single application all the functions for finding, selecting, and booking a flight at the best possible price.
According to you, what's the most promising start-up right now?
VMSme!: an app for mobile, tablets and laptops that allows to communicate in the fastest way possible: you can send short vocal messages together with a written transcription of what had been said. It also allows people with old mobiles not connected to 3G to benefit from this service. In conclusion, not an SMS, not an MMS, but a VMS.
What's the dream of young people today in Italy?
Our dream is to build a better Italy: fairer, with no corruption and favouritism, where meritocracy exists and people are judged for their talents and skills and not for their relatives’ powerful position or their political preference. Although we love our country, many people feel that now we are not ready yet for such a big change, so most of us prefer to leave for abroad, where there are more job possibilities and where Italian talents are more appreciated than in their native land.
With regards to the job market, Italy has always been very conservative: every parent’s dream is to have her daughter or son employed in the state administration where one’s job is secure and there is basically no risk of being fired. This was surely true in the after-war period, where the state was the biggest employer and promoter of industrialization and modernization. However, now times have changed: IT technology and internet play a big role in our life, business models have transformed, new jobs have been invented and economy is moving fast. Such a fixed job perspective is unimaginable: we need to be flexible, creative, multi-tasking, to learn fast and adapt to any environment. Exactly the opposite of what you are required to do in a stagnant and repetitive administrative job.
Do you have a message for French youth?
Rêvez, créez, agissez ! Soyez créatifs, curieux, actifs ! Entourez-vous de personnes qui vous stimulent, vous aident avec vos projets et sont capables de vous guider et conseiller. N'ayez pas peur de l'échec : le succès est toujours au rendez-vous lorsque la passion et la persévérance sont présentes. La vie est trop brève pour ne pas poursuivre ses propres rêves.
Au revoir tout le monde, j'espère vous avoir inspirés ! Vous pouvez me contacter sur Facebook ou via mon compte Twitter.