From Pepsi to Samsung: The Italian Who Is Revolutionizing Design! Mauro Porcini Stops By BSD MDD!!

The ideas start to be liked, then companies start to say, "Wait a second, there's something here." And it's important because doing innovation is a risk, changing your business model, creating different products is a risk. So if you don't have certainty or at least confidence, as they say in American, I don't know how to translate it, that what you will do is appreciated both by the distribution chain and by customers, it's not easy.

No, thank you for hosting me in your basement, in my beautiful Italy, Milan, eh, where every now and then every now and then you return. And it's for this that I'm very happy to have managed to cash in.

But look, I was born in a family that never traveled. My parents took a plane twice in their lives. Eh, at school I learned French, I learned English very late, so I would never have expected to find myself traveling around the world. So what I'm going to tell you now is not something I say, "Oh, I've always thought it, but today, but for many years now I really feel like a citizen of the world." I mean, you can put me in Milan, in New York, in Seoul, a bit because I'm lucky, I'm privileged, I live in a bubble anyway because I'm in contact with international people wherever you put me, a bit because many of these friends of mine, regardless of where they live, then I find them around the world, events etc. etc. a bit thanks to social media and digital technologies, so you're always in contact also visually with the people you love. Eh, I didn't have a big culture shock, a cultural shock when I moved to Seoul and when I return to Italy I return often anyway. It's always a huge pleasure. My Italianness I carry it around the world. I've combined it with international cultures, for many years with the Anglo-Saxon American one and this combination between my Italianness, but then what I learned from foreign cultures, has created an identity, a way of doing, of thinking different, original that creates value both on one side in the United States, and eventually in Italy. And now let's see in this Korean adventure. It seems to me that I arrived there yesterday, actually in April it will be a year that I'm there.

In April I moved.

No, but you know what you cited? Let's take exactly these three people. There are so many others. Fabio Volo, Benny Benassi, Stefano Domenicali. They have one thing in common, even if they do different jobs. They are all good people. The first person with whom I created a studio, a company is Claudio Cecchetto. And Claudio always found a whole series of people, they were talking before about Mazzoli or another, but so many others, all people who had something in common. One, Lorenzo Giovanotti, another friend, they are good people. Two, they have this desire to innovate, to create, but not for fame or money. Today you open social media, you open the newspapers and to young people we tell them that the goal is to become rich, to become famous and the greatest innovators I've known over these years are good people, they are good people and they are people who were pushed at the beginning and then continue like this from this desire to do something irrelevant, I say it from a design point of view or cool if I say it from a street person's point of view. Once I had my I do my interviews when I launched my Italian book and I interviewed Claudio. I said to him "But what is the common thing that all these people have?" I spoke to him about goodness and then the spirit of innovation and he told me a very interesting thing. What they have in common is the desire to entertain, the desire to make people dance. They enjoy when they see people enjoying. And it's true, innovators in all sectors, in my world of design, from art, music, what you do, we enjoy when we see people get passionate about our content or with our products. Then those who make it understand that you build around also a part of business, that is there's everything something like that around but it's not the primary driver. The primary driver is this desire to create something relevant for the world, for society, for people that then gives value to yourself. In my American book The Humanide of Innovation the subtitle is The Power of People in love with people. people in love with people sounds better in English and that is I speak of three forms of love. One, love for yourself and what you do and so all the innovators I've known have this passion for what they do. The second form of love is love for the people you serve. Translated I make a product, it can be a television, a can of Pepsi or a post-it. I speak of the three companies where I worked over the years, the biggest ones where I worked over the years. you do it to create value for people, that is not to make money, but to create value. And the same can do a musician, an actor, you want to create emotions, you want to create some kind of value. The third form of love is love for the people around you, that is to bring others with you, to do it with others, to share with others, which is an important thing regardless, but from the business point of view then, because then I work in for-profit companies, of course. This love creates synergy, creates productivity, creates teams that trust each other, creates really a business value and this has been a bit the keystone for me, understanding how to combine values that my parents gave me, that I've always lived, that are totally linked to humanity and the concept of love with the world of business, otherwise nobody listens to you in today's society, but when you show that you can combine positive values with financial value creation, then they start listening to you and then that becomes a platform, that of these companies, of these multinationals, of brands to push something that at this point in my life, in my career, goes beyond the product, the brand. I am my purpose in life is to push this message of love.

Overused and perhaps exploited also in the wrong way often, but the reality is that the strongest word is the beginning of everything and should also be the end of everything and often in this journey from beginning to end we get confused, we're told different stories, we get lost, but then in the end there there you arrive because where there is love there is happiness, there is meaning in life, eh there is everything that we seek in our life. But once again we live in a society that often directs us in other in other directions, but then those directions a bit I'm learning are those that then are directions that take you down roads that are blind or that even have, let's say, a somewhat shorter duration compared to such a strong initial mission.

And I answered, well, if you start like that you're already starting badly, that is the goal is not success. I never thought of becoming the Chief Design Officer or becoming a multinational executive or anything like that. My passion was to create, to share. I loved literature, writing, philosophy and then I loved art, painting, then I discovered design. Over time then I discovered that indeed my passion was actually to communicate with different media platforms, so from writing to photographing, to making products, but indeed that is the main driver that must lead you. So, often when I speak to young people I say "Guys, first of all if your goal becomes fame, success and money, already 90% of you won't make it". So already there. But the positive thing is that even if 10% of you make it, the interesting thing more than positive is that if you build everything around that, you will arrive you will be totally empty and and you will realize that actually the goal had never been that. The goal, indeed, is a goal of having a purpose in life, giving meaning to one's life and trying to do it with others, that is to have a journey. There's a Harvard study very interesting on happiness that is the longest study ever done, I think we're almost at 100 years of study, eh on happiness that demonstrates that the main driver of happiness are relationships, relationships with others, so you your family, friends, your closest community, so sharing your your journey with others, having a a purpose that you have in life, doing it with passion, loving what you do. This is the message we must send to young people today and I repeat, it must be done for purely ethical, moral reasons, it's the right thing for our society, but thank God increasingly this also combines then with economic, financial success, anyway there's that too.

Of course, of course, but you can't vote for a president or create a board of a company or if you think of communities of every kind and thinking exclusively about the economic side, the business side, we must really remember what the important values are.

Look, yes, I am you're right, I'm the first non-Korean president in the history of the company, so it's the first time at those levels and I think it's the manifestation of how the world is changing, that is we live in an increasingly global world in which the idea of a company that creates a business with a strong anchor to a specific country, creates it in its own country, then exports it, so the international business doesn't work anymore there. Italy has seen it for a long time. This Korea has managed anyway to create companies that were global, that are global, but with a strongly strongly Korean stamp. So this is a new phase in which you have to globalize even more and and so this is an opening that demonstrates that type of transition. In my opinion there's an interesting message for Italy. Italy from the end of the Second World War to the end of the last century, at the beginning with the economic boom, then created a whole series of incredible brands and companies that everyone knows around the world in various sectors. Then in the last 20 years we've gotten a bit lost and the reason is indeed that we created these we're very good at small and medium enterprises, we have the enlightened entrepreneur, I'm then a designer, so I always also cite the creative who's next to the entrepreneur who who dreams together with the entrepreneur. Then behind the scenes, unfortunately for them, there are those who bring those dreams to life, those who realize them, namely the artisans and the technicians, all the world of technology and R&D and manufacturing. And this type of trinity created incredible realities until the end of the last century it was enough to create a very strong business in your country and then you exported it. Italy, oh yes. Ok. Italy though then has always struggled to do scale up, that is to transform these small and medium enterprises into multinationals. And the reason is very simple. We're very good at vision, at creativity, at innovation that comes from the belly but we don't have what other countries have instead, from Korea to the United States, in a way, by the way, very different from each other, China in its turn, but all very different realities, but they're able to do scale up, that is they understand the Americans are the best at this, of strategy, delegation, empowerment, organization, processes and and so they're able to take a winning idea and make it global. And the Americans, indeed, were first because they were the ones who managed to do it in the most international way possible. Italy and many European realities, but Italy in particular, have been left behind. Eh, Korea, Japan first and Korea after, so Japan in the 80s-90s, Korea at the beginning of the 2000s, until the 80s, early 2000s, have managed to create realities that have scaled, that have managed to become global. Eh, but in this new phase, with the arrival of China, with the incredible push of China, not only of Chinese brands but then of what's behind, how they're organized and pushed by the government itself and all companies must find a way to become even more global, become even more diversified, so we're in a moment of great of great change and Italy, in my opinion, has to understand how it can leverage on the incredible values we have. I call it the Italian cultural brand. Wherever I go in the world, I say "I'm Italian", people's eyes light up, starting from policemen at customs and and so how to create value on that Italianness, the Italian cultural brand that is made of our fashion, our style, la dolce vita, our food, our It's incredible how strong it is, in the sense that perhaps the top of all this happened already some years ago. Exactly. So how how to leverage on what we've created over the years, but globalize it, eh integrate it into other cultures, eh arrive in other cultures, not as Italians who go and create an international business, but as global realities. What can we learn from Korea? I now find myself in Korea a year there, a small country like Italy, a peninsula there with at the population level, well, it's not China and it's not America, they're small like us. They have an unpronounceable language. Very difficult to pronounce Korean. Japanese is much simpler for Italians to replicate the sounds. Korean. I often struggle to replicate the Korean sound, very difficult language to learn, despite this they created K-pop. Golden Golden just won the Grammys. It's the most listened to song in my family. I get into it too. I think having seen the the film at least four times. My daughter who's 3 years old, by April 4 years. Until now she only watched Minnie. Not even Mickey. Her. Minnie, Minnie, Minnie, Minnie, in a continuous loop. K-pop Demon Hunters is the first one that managed to dislodge Minnie and now she watches K-pop Demon Hunters. Well, it's all a great moment for Korean pop culture, that is from K-drama to music, music now K-pop. I on the radio started talking about it 6 years ago and it seemed like a thing. Now I don't have to explain who BTS are anymore, I don't have to explain also in my content maybe what certain things are.

But look, eh and that's where I was going, because then trying to extract also some teachings, let's say, something that can inspire us in Italy, um the Koreans have been very good, music, cinema, cosmetics, all the world the beauty, but then also other realities that haven't exported yet, like the world of of the coffee experience. So I expected nothing. It's full of coffee shops, everywhere. Now I'll tell you eh how they've interpreted them. It's a common matrix to all the other more known phenomena, that is they take global trends, like pop music or a certain type of cinema, cosmetics, that make sense for them, they don't do it from the start to create these global businesses, trends that make sense for them, they bring them as they are and then they put a cultural layer, a Korean twist. The coffee, for example, these coffee shops are beautiful, they're designed in a really sophisticated way, they have they have a beautiful taste, the details of everything from So how should we imagine it, not like a typical Italian bar, imagine, no, it's not our bar, it's a very cool space, sophisticated, but actually it's difficult to describe because some are have a lot of green, woods, so anyway always colors also a bit bright, no? And indeed the colors are quite neutral, but you go from more natural to instead metal, artificial, so there's a lot of diversity of expression, but in common they have a very sophisticated experience.

And the same thing let's take K-pop, it's anyway the model, the American matrix of music and then they stick in, they sing in English, but they stick in phrases or anyway parts in Korean. The style is totally Korean, that is they're almost cartoons, they're beautiful, but they're almost not human, in the sense like the hair, hairstyles, clothes and they're really another dimension. But the model executed in a completely different way, but it's what over the years Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, eh Lady Gaga, with Luke, no? have done, they elevated themselves beyond humanity, they became icons. K-pop uses that model there, that is the way they dress, the way they dye their hair, the way the faces they have. It's it's something unique. And and that is studied to perfection. I was talking, I was at CES in Las Vegas and we were presenting our products and they put me next to a K-pop band called The Rise and Anton who's one of the leaders of the group, was sitting there next to me and I didn't know it's not that I know all the stories of K-pop bands, so I start chatting with him and and I ask him "But but how did you have success? How did it happen? Tell me your story." And he starts to he's very Korean, that is you see him, he speaks English perfectly, but you see this really Korean face, beautiful, that is you're a handsome guy, cool and they dance like gods. One of the SAG Boys, of of of K-pop Demon Hunters. Exactly. Eh, exactly. Just that one you see Anton K-pop Demon Hunters. Exactly. Um and so he tells me "Well, I but I was born in Boston." But how did you go to Boston? Scene. I grew up in New Jersey. But how? And yes. And then it's eh it's I liked dancing, I liked singing. I saw that K-pop was coming to my country, I said "Well, let's go back and see a bit, I'll try it". And then with an incredible humility he said "Eh, it went well for me and a humility". That's another aspect, the humility they have, I haven't met them all, but some I've met, they have a humility that often you don't find either in America or in Italy in these types of superstars, no? Eh, I've chatted with him now I feel like a kid, but now I'm 50, but I really feel like a child. But there was this guy who was a kid, he was 30 years younger than me. And so at a certain point I found myself giving him advice, but precisely because I felt his goodness, his sincere curiosity, no? And so I spoke to him, you know how many stars oh, they get a big head, they have success for 23 years and then they disappear. Unfortunately this is the world of music today that's consumed at the speed of light. These singers don't have time to to stabilize to settle down and stabilize, to become to enter into people's culture, as happened in the past. And so I told him about some of the characteristics of these unicorns that I talk about in my book and he was very interested. A few hours later in Amer in Korea there are a whole series of paid social media, you pay and you enter their communities. In one of these he started talking about this experience he had with me, but in a completely different way from what an Italian or American megastar would have ever done. The first thing he writes is eh I had to meet the Chief Design Officer of Samsung, I felt really nervous, that is I was I was agitated and he writes it, he writes it to his fans and then he says "But then afterwards we started chatting, it was very nice, he gave me a whole series of advice, it was really interesting, then afterwards I sent him the book, he suggested my book to his fans, etc. etc.". And and so that aspect of humility.

I'd divide it into two groups of Italians, the creative Italians, so designers, stylists. Anyway as soon as you say "I'm Italian" they say "Well, you know a bit more than us", that is anyway there's that allure. You Italians are cool about creativity, Leonardo, I don't know, Leonardo da Vinci, that is there's people who came before us who made us look good in business. Instead, anyway you say "I'm Italian" and they say "Ah, you're a bit chaotic, you guys". So business leaders who anyway made it, like, I don't know, there was the CEO of Estée Lauder who was Italian, the CFO Maestri of of Apple was Italian for many years, eh the CFO was Italian, Maestri was Italian since he was born actually. In fact and these chapeau because anyway it's not simple in finance to say Italian, it's not like ah yes, we like the creative finance guy. So no. But for me as there are sectors where obviously it's a boost, in others you have to prove it. Exactly. At the level of image, perception. Having said that, instead, at the level of quality, of soft skills, the Italian, in my opinion, today has very important values in the global market that we must realize because we must celebrate them, export them, invest in them, that is America in particular built the American empire with all these mega brands, these in the various industries with a very simple model. First of all they have a dream, the American dream that then translates into all these enterprises, these activities, these brands. This dream has a purpose, that is I will create something that has an impact in the world, in music, in in tech, in all in all sectors. And then after at that point, with this incredible vision, they have these armies of soldiers who execute, specialized, eh they work on delegation and empowerment, so in the in the chain they tell you you have the freedom to do certain things, everything ties back to the initial purpose and so this model worked very well. In the last 20 years something has changed, the market has become more global, social media, China which started growing, India etc. etc. and so everything moves at the speed of light and this organization instead where everyone has a role is too slow, adapts too little, is too little flexible and so there's a need for people with critical thinking, agility, flexibility, ability to move in the gray areas or as I just described the Italian, Italian mentality and so this what we call the art of arranging things, which Americans call in a much more elegant way problem solving, because they're incredible marketers. This we're very good at pro and solving, that is we're So if we take that type of approach that the designer has, the finance one, the marketing one, all the disciplines and you unite it to the classic American strategy culture, as these characters I cited and many others have done, what happened to me, you unite the two things, the strengths of your culture with the strengths of the other culture, you can create a model that's original that works. So there's a great opportunity from this point of view also for many kids or for whoever right now is working hard.

I in 98, 1998 went to study in Dublin. the first time I was outside Italy for a few months eh to live. That experience changed my life. It's something I suggest to all kids, if you can do an exchange year, of studies, of going abroad, spend a few months abroad. It changed my life because it taught me to appreciate a whole series of things that Italy had, that I took for granted, but it also taught me to identify a whole series of weaknesses of our culture that once again I took for granted. At that point I leveraged the strengths and tried to correct the weaknesses and then I did the same thing with great humility and respect when I approached other cultures, in particular in my case the American one was very important over the years, now the Korean one, trying to understand what were the strengths of that culture and what were the weaknesses and how to bring my culture, the strength of my culture as a solution to their weaknesses. So once again learning the processes, the strategies, but then bringing Italian creativity has been a formula, now summarizing it very strongly.

Well, first of all if we cite what we study at design school. I studied at Politecnico di Milano. They teach you, the first thing they teach you is to observe people, understand what are their dreams, their needs and whether they need to sit down, they need a chair or not, maybe you can invent something different. Their need in that case is I need to sit. You need to move from one point to another, eh, you need a car, a scooter, a bicycle or maybe something else. Needs can be articulated into three types of different values. The first is the utilitarian value, that is I have a car to move from A to B or I drink a cola to hydrate myself and because I like the taste. The second is the emotional one, that is and it relates both to the product and to the brand. They're two different things. Um, for example, I take a car to move from A to B, but I like a Fiat, I like a Ferrari, I like a BMW, that's the reason. I like it because I look at it and it's beautiful or maybe I like the functionality or certain details and aspects. And then there's the brand, I might like the brand or not. Eh, there are situations, ideally you like both the brand and the object, but there are many situations where maybe we think of fashion, maybe I like Prada, I like Hermès but the specific product in that case of that collection I don't like. But still I like the brand. How many times do people buy the brand, even if the product in the end but they want the brand because Yes. So, anyway there's love for the product and for the brand. This is the second level of value that's called value that I call emotional value. And then there's a third value which is the semiotic value, that is I buy something because I'm telling a story through that object about myself to others. I buy a Rolex to demonstrate my material, economic value. Eh, I buy a Harley Davidson because it says something about me, especially maybe if I'm a CFO of a company, I go in suit and tie all week and then on the weekend I take the Harley, the leather jacket. That's both emotional value because I like the object and the brand, but also semiotic value because I'm telling the world that I'm much more than what you think. And so these are the three values and this is the first thing they teach you as a designer, that is you have to understand people, feel them in your gut just as much as intellectually and and understand what they want, but also what they perhaps don't yet know they want. That's because that's where innovation happens, no? And then after that they teach you, well, there are also two other variables you have to consider if you want to be a designer. One is the world of technology, that is when you have an idea then you have to build it. So at school at Politecnico I studied mathematics, physics, materials science, digital technologies, etc. etc. And then they teach you the last thing that designers never like, which is business. They say "Ah, look, you also have to sell these things". You say "No, come on, I make that beautiful product, but let's give it to the world". That is, if you think about it philosophically design likes to do cool things, meaningful things, to see them to more people, as many people as possible. You want as many people as possible to wear, use your products or your brands, for then design is product, is communication, fashion and many other things. So there's this variable. These are the three lenses of design thinking, people and people, business and technology. technology, that is the desirability of a product and of a brand, the feasibility and then does it make sense for my business. And so these are the three questions that are asked to designers. So this is what designers do, they create products, solutions, stories of value for people and they have the skills to bring them to life with considerations both of business and of technologies.

But look if you ask the man on the street or the woman on the street what design is, they'll tell you it's style, it's aesthetics. Even today people think that. So in industries where style and aesthetics create a concrete competitive advantage, that is making companies make money, design has always been there. So fashion, obviously, furnishings, lighting, eh little by little it arrived at consumer electronics, but already in the times of Dieter Rams, in the 70s, Olivetti and so on. Obviously in the modern world all of today's brands, automotive, same thing, design, think of Ferrari, just to cite one of our beautiful brands. And in other sectors instead they arrived in more recent times when they understood that designers didn't just do product style, but they were very useful to understand people, to create something that people would desire. So when you understand the design methodology, the design culture, how to do design, at that point you can apply it to anything. And it's been applied over years to Healthcare, so hospitals, insurance. In my world I worked 13 years at PepsiCo, so the world of food and beverage and it's very interesting that in those sectors where design wasn't obvious it developed in a way that in the end was even more sophisticated than in traditional sectors, that is it became a much more strategic tool, much deeper, the business levers are much more understood, while in in more traditional sectors, let's cite fashion, fashion as an example, is still even more tied to style, more visceral, to intuition, to the sensitivity of the creative director. So what I'm trying to do at Samsung, the world of technology is another of those worlds that was historically traditional, that is the aesthetics of the product together with functionality to create desirable products. I'm bringing that because that's what I did for 13 years before PepsiCo, that is I did my thesis on wearable technologies, I started working at Philips, 10 years at 3M in between, Cecchetto, but with Cecchetto we did really digital technology, the world of internet that was beginning, so that was my background. But PepsiCo instead taught me the world of business, of branding, of experience and then how to create design in a different, unexpected way and leverage on culture and methodology. So my challenge today at Samsung is to combine the two worlds, the two approaches I've learned and in a very symbolic way it's 13 years in one industry, 13 in another and everything then started from my thesis at Politecnico on wearable technologies which back in 99 were a dream, today they're happening, smart glasses, the cameras you wear and all the accessories that will be born in the coming years called So the jewelry that will become smart, so beyond decorating your body, it will gather information about your body, it will help you monitor your physical, mental health.

But look, um that is we must keep a sort of ethical and moral compass all humanistic and human and the two words have a slightly different meaning from each other, but it's really trying to understand how to use technology at the service of the human being. So we must be very careful not to do the reverse, that is put the human being at the service of technology. So the task, in my opinion, of design in particular, but then of all these companies, but design, because design usually has this humanistic approach, is to try to make it so that the human being always remains the beginning of everything and the end of everything, that is the first thought and the last in the innovation process and technology and business are enablers, but at the service of the human being. So where will we arrive? My hope is that we arrive at something where technology continues to create exclusively value for us as people and for us as communities when we interact with others and not the reverse, that is we become slaves of technology or we become eh technology invades areas of our life where we don't want it. At Samsung I created this formula. Formulas are useful because they're easy to remember, eh, but behind them there's obviously a much deeper meaning. The formula combines AI, that is artificial intelligence said in English, eh with EI and HI, EI and HI. Um EI and HI are the two fundamental characteristics of human beings. One EI is emotional intelligence, that is our instinct to connect with others, create relationships. We were saying before, Harvard, the study on happiness, relationships as an absolute driver of happiness and and HI is our instinct to create since thousands of years ago, when man, or woman, the first prehistoric man-woman took two stones, rubbed them against each other and created the first object, the first act of design, of innovation, of modifying nature. So these are two totally human characteristics that define us and must always be combined when we talk about AI with indeed the world of artificial intelligence in two moments. When upstream, I always say it in English, upstream, that is what is upstream? upstream, um in the innovation processes, when we create the message here AI must always be amplified by the human being, that is the AI that Samsung will have, that you have, that multinationals of every kind have, that individuals of every kind have, little by little will become more and more a commodity, like the internet today, we all have it. What makes the difference, what must differentiate Samsung or your product and your contents, regardless of the fact that you use AI or not, is you, it's us, it's the human beings. That will continue to make the difference. Exactly. So AI amplified by emotional intelligence and human imagination.

And and the other instead downstream, when instead we talk about products, the idea is every time I put AI in a product it must be at the service of man, that is it must be an amplifier of emotional intelligence. Translated translated means that I give you AI because I free you up, I free up time and you can go to the gym, you can go take a trip, you can meet your friends. Technology serves only to give you time for yourself and to be human. Or the other aspect, I give you technology to amplify even more your creativity, to create contents or or to create emotions. And this is our is the ambition, should be the ambition.

All over the world. And it will happen that AI will take some jobs, it will create others. Eh, but my answer to this is we should change the the topic of the conversation, that is it's not AI yes AI no AI a threat. If you think, if you had said to Men and Women thousands of years ago: "In the future you won't need to work because there will be robots that will work for you, that will clean the streets and drive the taxis and the buses that then weren't invented yet, they'll do everything you have to do." So if you want to work work, otherwise don't work. It's cool, it's a dream, an incredible thing, no? So, the conversation isn't do we need AI or not, do we need robots in the future or not, automation or not. But yes we need them, we want them, we want them. The idea is though is in that type of society how do we redesign Of course. How will I earn money to live. Exactly. That is, in the sense, we take for granted that the current model is natural, instead we created it. The idea that you have to work and that they give you money is totally artificial. That is, thousands of years ago everything started with indeed that man and that woman who took two stones, rubbed them against each other and started creating the first objects, the first tools to satisfy primary needs that Maslow thousands of years later defined in his own pyramid of needs, that is these stones first of all became the tools for hunting and then immediately after for preparing food and cooking it. Right after, and so this is the base of Maslow, safety, physiology, right after he started creating objects to decorate his own body, clothes, this is the middle of Maslow, identity and relationship with others. And then they started using them to decorate the caves, to eh create objects to decorate, to celebrate divinities. And this is the top of Maslow's pyramid, which is all transcendence. It's something bigger than you. So, since the beginning design, innovation are the same thing for me, they were an act of love towards yourself and towards the people around you. At a certain point though they started producing so many objects that they said "You know what? Maybe it's better if we specialize. I make the cooking tools, you the hunting ones, you the ones that decorate the body". And then at that point they said "Well, we have to exchange them". They invented barter. Then subsequently currency was born, corporations were organized, these became companies and then brands and then little by little over the years Bitcoin to arrive at today dematerialized, but over the course of history we've forgotten that design, innovation was this act of love towards ourselves and others and we started to get confused and we were told that no, the goal wasn't to create value for each other, but it was money, power. fame. And today if we put things in perspective, if you have machines that do for you what we started to do, if you don't need, if if you rethink the way we support our communities, so I'm not a politician, but politics will have to give answers because we can't delegate these answers to companies, it's the governments that have to understand what the answer will be, but we must make it so that people don't need to work to support themselves, for for the simple reason that there's a risk that there won't be enough jobs in the future. The middle class has already been disappearing for years, it's increasingly polarized, increasingly poverty and increasingly mega rich and this will polarize more and more. So we must find solutions so that the argument isn't AI yes or AI no.

And yes, absolutely, robots, all of this, but let's talk about how to reorganize our lives, our society to support this. For us, it's the most beautiful design project of the future. The designers of the future, the kids studying in school, or governments, prime ministers, the chief design officer of a country — of Italy, the United States, Korea, and all countries — with the goal of understanding how to design a society with the human being at its center.

At the end of my book, I talk about how to design happiness, starting from the humanities, so I haven't invented anything, and there are three things you must do. The first is to invest in yourself, in your identity, and it's something you do from when you're little, from when we're born. It's a journey to define that identity. Translated into the world of work, it often means we identify ourselves with the work we do — that is, we're known for the work we do, we're often proud of it.

It's not a privilege for everyone, obviously — many people work and aren't proud of what they do, but for many, one of the mistakes often made is putting everything into that job. The moment you lose the job, you erase your identity. So it's very important, the work-life balance, and understanding that it's not just about work. Though that you're friends with Fabio Volo — he's told me this many times, really. And so this is the first direction. The second, it's the third time I've mentioned it in this conversation, is love for those around you.

But love for your family, your friends, and in the world of work, your colleagues. Often in the world of work, people find wives, husbands, friends. For many, it's not simple — if you don't have a workplace, to find a way to make friends, to meet people. And the third dimension, which we often arrive at later in life, is when you understand that you have to do something bigger than yourself. You have to give meaning to your life. We arrive at it later because we get there when, at a certain point, we understand that we're not immortal — sooner or later we won't be here anymore — and so doing something for which you beat death by creating something for which you're remembered, and it can be from inventing the telephone that changes society and changes the world, all the way down to small acts of kindness toward strangers — so that whole range.

So going back to what we were saying earlier: in a world where you choose whether to work, and many won't have to work, how do you recreate the conditions to define your identity, to create relationships with others, find friends, and then people with whom to build a family, and give meaning to your life? How do we create a society that guarantees this to people, that creates the conditions for this, regardless of work, which will become a choice? If you want to do it, you do it.

I mean that if you have robots that in practice do the work humans do today, there will be fewer jobs. Fewer will be created, but you'll have to work to earn money — unless, and that's exactly the project, finding a simpler solution that many people listening right now will be thinking about: the universal basic income, which is politically charged — those who love it, others hate it. But actually, beyond the specific solution, making it so that a person can live without necessarily having to work, because today we have enough resources to guarantee this kind of situation, especially if, as I said, the machines were created thanks to the effort, the collective intelligence over tens and tens and tens of years — the patents, the research — not done just in the last 10 years, but done over the last 100 years or more.

So making all of this available to society and creating a society where, when I say there's no need to work, I also think that even if we don't create more jobs in the tech world than we remove, we'll arrive at an even more extreme polarization, where you have no choice — the growth is very fast, and besides, as you say, all of this can't be stopped. AI technology, yes, we want it, but also because you can't stop it — it's already part of the journey and of evolution.

Look, that's not naive at all — on the contrary, it's spot-on regarding my job. My job has two dimensions. There are today's business units: Samsung makes cell phones and wearables, the whole world of televisions, speakers, soundbars, and then the whole world of home appliances — washing machines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, microwaves, etc. — and then there's a network and healthcare division, which isn't in all countries, and then for the future there are robots. We acquired a company a few years ago, Rainbow Robotics, which makes robots, so that will also be in the future portfolio. And so part of my job is designing the products of the coming years in those categories — the TV of the coming years, the cell phone of the coming years, etc., etc.

Yes, absolutely yes. Anyone listening, if you have any input, let us know — find us on Instagram, the link, I'm there. And the other part of the job, which is really fun, is the one you just described — the future. And there's a very simple methodology, which I also mentioned earlier: understanding where the world, society, is going, starting from people — so what people's needs are, what kind of frustrations they have, what doesn't work today in their lives, what their desires are. Maslow's pyramid is essential — I've used it in every industry I've worked in — that's where all of humanity's needs are.

I've categorized these needs in Samsung into four categories. I'll name them in English, then we'll translate. Live longer, live better, live loud, live on. Live longer — living longer — for us that's all those wearable products that monitor your body for your mental and physical health, and then everything related to safety starting from you: in the future, wearables that save your life because they monitor your heart, your glucose, etc., etc. That's in the future, although slowly we're getting there. And then the safety of your home, the safety of your loved ones, of your pets — that's the base of Maslow.

Live better, synthesized as free time to do whatever you want because technology does it for you. So robots that do things for you. Or, in this transition moment, if you have to do them with technology, making your work more productive and also more fun, because it's not just the rational part. Live loud, which is hard to translate, and it's basically that world of creativity, of expression — live loud, a full, noisy life, but it doesn't translate well — but it's your self-expression, your creativity, your imagination, so all those technological platforms for creating content. Even now, your format, the idea of the podcast exists because technology made it possible, and this has unleashed an incredible level of creativity.

Before, we needed defined platforms — radio, television, etc., etc. And here, technology is a glaring example of how music really changed everything — the technology of the entertainment world. And the fourth category, Live On, live beyond — today, already today, we preserve our memories through videos, photographs. I have a million photos and videos of my children and almost nothing of my grandfather when he was little. So already today, when we're no longer here, we have a lot of memories, but at this point, through artificial intelligence, we can also know everything about our health, the films we choose, the trips we take, anything.

We can do it passively — artificial intelligence observes and stores — but also actively: we can tell things to artificial intelligence in the future, when we have smart glasses with real artificial intelligence, or earbuds, or other wearables that we could develop now in Milan. We'll show some alternative wearables in terms of form during the Salone del Mobile. So when we have these objects, they'll start seeing and hearing everything we see and hear, storing information. Then we can choose whether we want to do it or not — obviously it's up to us — but there's the possibility of creating this virtual twin of yours.

Now, on one hand, it can seem a bit worrying, right? The way I tell it — but my parents, my father is almost 83, my mother is almost 80. I hope they live another 40 years, but sooner or later they won't be here anymore, and that's life, right? And so I would like, in a future where they're no longer here, in a moment of difficulty, to be able to ask my father: 'Dad, what would you do right now?' Or when I want to make my mother's carrot cake recipe that she made for me when I was little, to ask my mom: 'Mom, what was the recipe? I want to make it for Beatrice, for Leonardo, for my children.'

So there's a positive side to preserving this kind of memory, and it will have to be designed in the right way, with ethical guardrails, in the right way — but it's definitely something people will want: preserving emotions, preserving the know-how, the intelligence of a whole series of people who are dear to us. There's definitely something unimaginable, probably today, like what we're living through was unimaginable.

Even here, internally, we've had — from the very first days — a TV that we put in vertical mode for all the Shorts, because the language of video has also become vertical. So from that point of view, I think there will be plenty of fun.

Look, on one hand, the idea of having a monitor — of visualizing something, interacting with the monitor — I think will remain until we no longer need the physical monitor, meaning we'll be able to access holograms or there will be flexible screens that integrate into the sleeves of your jackets. In my thesis in '99, I had flexible screens on jackets, as a concept. So when we get there — with technologies that today aren't available — then maybe we won't need the traditional screen, but until then, the phone, in my opinion, won't change in terms of screen.

In terms of size, there's an ideal size for a whole series of tasks of a certain type, which are the majority — so they're quick tasks — and that's the reason why these foldables still have an external monitor that you can use while keeping the phone closed. But the idea is that you can open it and you have practically a tablet in front of you, and in particular for looking at photos, for watching movies, or even for writing emails or reading the equivalent of a newspaper, it's truly an incredible thing.

I'll do a product placement — I have the trifold in my pocket, which hasn't arrived in... this is a novelty. And the trifold — I'll say it here — has only been launched in Korea. Okay. So this becomes... this, so it starts — I don't know if you can see it. Here, no. This, like this, is also in terms of thickness, it's not even that thick — it's a normal phone. Okay. Okay. And then you open it in three parts. And like that it becomes... it's bigger. It's more than a tablet. And looking at a photo — let's take something, a photo, let's see if these photos are presentable. No, these photos stay in the family, at home, in pajamas, but... well, well, I mean, it's a picture, it's important, and then you close it and when you want, you use it as a phone. So the direction is that. That's what I wanted to tell you.

And again, there will be the choice — there will be the possibility: whoever wants one, and whoever wants the other, right? Today I was talking with a friend who said he wants smaller phones because he likes them smaller, but one of the problems he had over the years with the smaller ones is that on the smaller ones they put fewer features than on the bigger ones. Exactly. Even the cameras. And he says: watch out, there are people who want it smaller, but with the exact same features as the bigger one. It's just a choice, right.

Yes, from a Roman mother, a father born in Lucca who then moved to Rome already as a boy — they were looking for work back in the '70s in Italy, people often migrated. But my father always tells me he had two choices: one was to work at the hospital in Gallarate — he was an architect and they were creating new pavilions, so it was a long-term project in Gallarate. The other — he never told me the city — but it was in Sicily. So I said, you could have ended up... if Sicilian, very much so — Varese, the Lombard League, right? Maroni, Bossi — the two opposites, especially in those years the League was being born, imagine just the two opposites.

So I was born there, and this is something I also mention in my book. I was a bit of a fish out of water there anyway, because my parents had moved there just 3 years earlier, and so at home they still spoke with these inflections, these Roman accents. So I said 'coltèllo' instead of 'coltello', for example, and I had these inflections. But above all, the grandparents of my playmates, of my friends, all spoke in dialect — because then I did Gallarate until I was 5, then Varese, so more or less we were there, but they were all in dialect.

Then the dialect of Varese, Lombard, is a dialect that's almost French — incomprehensible for a child with Roman and Tuscan parents. So there I always felt a bit different, but I was always super social, I had 1000 friends. Then in the summer we'd go to the sea, we'd go to Rome, and then we'd go to the sea near Rome, and there too I was a fish out of water, because there too I had this accent with these... and it was from the north and had nothing to do with it. And so I define this condition as a suspension between two worlds that I've had since I was little. And it's a leitmotif of my whole life, because then I studied design, I became a designer, but very quickly I entered these multinationals and started living between the world of design and the world of business.

Yes. And look, I loved, as I told you before, literature. I wanted to do literature and then art. I liked it, I could have gone to the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. My parents — it's not like they were swimming in gold, it was a normal Italian family — told me: 'Look, we'll send you to university, but then you have to find a job immediately.' And so they advised me to do neither literature nor art, because it was more complicated, especially at the time, to find a job that could support me immediately. But that kind of mentality, right? And so I decided to do architecture.

A few days before the entrance exam, a classmate from my scientific high school called me and said: 'Look, there's this new faculty inside the Polytechnic, it's part of architecture, it's a degree program' — at the time it was a degree program in industrial design. I chose it exclusively because I said: 'Well, industrial design is maybe new, there are more opportunities to find work, and if I don't like it I can move back to architecture.' So I took the entrance exam for industrial design and came first out of — there were like 2,500–3,000 students taking the entrance exam — and I said: 'Ah, maybe this really is my destiny,' but I had no idea what it was. I thought: 'Well, it'll be design of industrial machinery,' and it wasn't clear.

And then I started and I discovered it was the job of my dreams. I mean, this stuff is so cool. I mean, you're there, you have to observe people, invent products that can be useful to them, but also beautiful. Exactly. In every sector. So a designer can design a guitar — I see a guitar in front of me now — a shoe, I see the shoe, that microphone, that sweater, a brochure, an experience, a service, anything. I didn't know a job like this existed, I had the slightest idea, and so that's the fact.

Well, I did this thesis with Philips and I joined Philips, and so there it became a job. And then...

No, when I was 19, I met Stefano Marzano, who was the head of design — he's Italian — of Philips worldwide. And Philips in those years was Philips — it had cell phones, it had televisions, it had a ton of products, it was a very cool brand, let's say. And so I met him, I fell in love with his vision, with his passion. He also had a very humanistic, very Italian approach, but then you could really see he loved what he was doing. And consumer electronics always appealed to me. So I started following him almost like a stalker.

Emails weren't as widespread back then, so I wrote him letters. He lived in the Netherlands, and because I was passionate about philosophy, I remembered all these philosophers — there were masters with their students, and they wrote to each other. From these correspondences we have much of the information about ancient philosophies. So I wrote these philosophical letters, and for about a year and a half, more or less, he didn't reply to me — I don't remember, I sent him maybe two or three — until one day, surprisingly, these two books arrived at my home: one was 'Visions of the Future', which he had published, and the other was 'New Media Old Wall', something like that. Anyway, visions on the future of technology.

I still have them, they were dedicated, and on one of the two he had written: 'Look, I had this book in Italian too, but I'm sending it to you in English because if you ever want to join Philips, if you ever want to join any multinational, you have to learn English.' He had already told me that the first time I met him — the first and only time I met him before he sent me the books. I often cite this story because I had studied French in school, I didn't know a single word of English until I was 23, and if he hadn't written that to me on that book, I would never have decided to go do Erasmus in Dublin.

I had won an Erasmus scholarship to go to Paris. Since I couldn't afford to go abroad twice, I cancelled the first scholarship for Paris and waited a year. I took a big risk because the spots were very limited and we were thousands of students at the Polytechnic, and I tried to go to Dublin and I made it. And there I started learning English. And so Stefano changed my life, changed my life.

And there are two things that happened at that moment. On one hand, a super busy person, of great success, took the time to send these books — and this is a message to all leaders, all successful people. Something I strive to do daily. Just when people write to you on social media, when they reach out to you — it takes one word, one phrase to impact a person's life. And over the years, because I've been active on social media for many years, I've had hundreds of people who over the years wrote to me and told me: 'Ah, I changed my job, I changed my business, I did this, I did that.' Because of something you said? Because of something I read in the book, or often because of an answer I gave — it takes a second, 30 seconds, a minute — but we're all rushing.

So on one hand, for leaders, that. The other message is for young people: I was totally fertile ground — I wanted seeds to plant in my soil, I was open, I was searching for inspiration. I sought him out, Stefano, I stimulated him through my letters, and if I hadn't written to him, hadn't chased after him, it wouldn't have happened the right way — because you also have to know how to do that. You have to get it across the right way.

Yes, exactly. Thesis with Philips, I joined Philips, and then I met Claudio Cecchetto by chance. Again, an analogous story — I cite Stefano and Claudio as my first two great mentors.

In 2000.

Yes, yes, yes. In practice, he had just sold both Radio Deejay and Capital. He had already sold Capital, he was really coming out of — I mean, he had just sold Capital months earlier and was working with Soru and Tiscali, investing — in practice he was creating digital platforms for entertainment, but what he was really doing was trying to understand how to create business in the digital world that was being born.

So a friend of a friend of mine — she was his secretary at the time — arranged a meeting for us, and we could have gone just to meet the celebrity. I had never met one, Claudio I only knew through television, we all knew him, to get an autograph and that's it. Today we'd take selfies, right? With a Samsung phone, obviously. And instead we went — it was me and three other friends, that friend of mine and two other designers — proposing a project to him. We knew he was working on the Tiscali platforms and was trying to understand how to create a digital currency — already in 2000.

And I still have the printed version of this project at my home in New York, and we proposed a designed digital city — you know, I started at the Polytechnic drawing with pencils and Pantones. Midway through my 5 years at the Polytechnic, digital technologies arrived, and so we were the first designers coming out of school, out of university, who mastered digital technologies. And so we drew in 3D, we were really at the cutting edge in that world, like today's young people who know how to navigate all these new technologies.

So we went and proposed this virtual city where there was the square where people could gather, the bank where there was this digital currency — in other words, all the intuitions of what then became... exactly, what is the metaverse: the idea of social media, you gather in a square and meet people, the idea of digital currency, crypto, which was his idea. And I'm not saying we were geniuses, because I'm sure thousands of other people were working on similar ideas — it was too early. Even Claudio himself often says it in interviews: timing is everything in innovation. So we were too far ahead.

There was — he was financing everything, we didn't have investment funds behind us. But what happened that day, he — as a great talent scout, as a person who sees potential in other people — asked us: 'But what do you do in life?' We, kind of bluffing, answered: 'Well, we'd like to create a studio together.' And he said to us: 'Fine, do it with me.' So a month later we were signing with him, creating Wisemed, this agency, and we moved into his villa on Via Meda at the time — a dream villa with a pool, a music studio. We were kids arriving from Varese — I came from the Bustecche neighborhood of Varese, a pretty tough neighborhood — and so I find myself in this dream, and for us just being there was a dream.

And then we started working on all the digital content of the 883's CDs — so it was the first time CDs started having digital content — then the whole multimedia world, the websites, etc., etc. Little projects here and there with Jovanotti, Soleluna, other things with other celebrities, and so we were very happy with this. And instead Claudio — I remember it well — every day he'd arrive, he'd come to the office in the afternoon and then work on into the night. He's a night owl, and he'd tell us: 'Guys, I don't care about making websites for singers — I mean, if I wanted to set up an agency, I didn't need to create this reality with you. What I want to do is something no one has ever done before.'

And that was what changed my life as an innovator, let's say. And Claudio had this obsession with always doing new things, whether it was the smallest, most trivial thing or changing the world. This mentality where you always have to renew yourself — which is something that many friends I have, many people that Claudio discovered, from Lorenzo Jovanotti, Fabio Volo, and many others, have this kind of mentality: innovate, innovate, innovate continuously.

Claudio innovated himself — that is, not only innovating where no one else has done it, but when you innovate, don't sit on the innovation you've created, but keep trying to change continuously. That's what he tried to do at Radio Deejay, constantly changing the programs. And then you clash with the realities of companies that say: 'Wait a second, now that we've found a good formula, let's extract financial value from this.' But true innovators can't stay still, they have to keep creating, innovating, changing. So he instilled that mentality in me.

I define Claudio as one of the greatest innovators I've ever met, and as you can imagine, working in multinationals like 3M, PepsiCo, Samsung, I've met plenty of innovators. Because he did it without ever talking about innovation — you ask Claudio, he'll never use the word innovation, without the eloquence of these people who work on strategy at McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, or IDEO in the world of design. He didn't talk about innovation, he did it, and he had that kind of mentality that I then carried with me all these years.

That adventure ended because it was too early, you couldn't make money, we didn't have investment funds behind us to support you for years.

I had done my thesis on wearable technologies and had worked with many technologies coming from the world of 3M and other companies, and my thesis advisor had received an offer from 3M to become the head of design for Europe in the business, consumer and office world for 3M. He had just opened his own agency, he was, I think, about 10 years older than me, so he asked me: 'Do you want to go?' And I was really just a kid for such an important role. And in those years, an entrepreneur in Switzerland had contacted me and I was actually thinking of doing something with him in Switzerland — Varese is 12 km from the border, so this person was based in Lugano.

So I went to 3M, just out of curiosity, and when I realized the number of brands they had in the most varied sectors — well, they have famous brands, Post-it, Scotch, but they had products, multimedia projectors. Almost all the stethoscopes in the world are Littmann 3M, dental products, so many technologies that went into the cell phones of the time and still into today's, they worked with NASA, they worked with the automotive in every type of... I mean, it was a Candyland for designers in a company that didn't understand anything about design at the time.

And so that's another story that I tell, that I've told in the book, that I often tell — because in a situation like this, you say: 'I'm creating my reality, I have someone about to invest in my agency,' and you find yourself in front of a company that doesn't understand design. Many would say: 'You know what? Better to steer clear.' Instead, when I found companies that didn't understand design but had potential — in this case, brands and technologies — I got really excited. I said: I see the potential, I see the possibility of really doing interesting things. So I joined.