Welcome to Claudio Brachino’s for this new appointment with portraits or also portraits, because we use both Italian and English, precisely because Buongiorno America is a system of integrated newspapers that you know wants to act as a cultural and communication bridge between Italy and the United States. Today’s guest is Massimo Carnelos, he heads the Office of Innovation, Technology and Start-up for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
He also has a long experience in important economic institutes, there are two words that chase a little bit the part of our stories, which is technological innovation. Then we will also talk of course about the foreign dimension of our companies, because he works at the Foreign Ministry, and start-ups.
These are all words we use every day, and then eventually you have to decline them. The first thing I always ask for in the is a little identity card of yours to make yourself known to our audience.
Born in Rome, and grew up at least until the age of 18 in Rome, then I began to travel the world, passionate about the most remote places possible. Bachelor of Arts degree, and then after a series of experiences between teaching and international organizations, Brussels, Northern Europe; I landed in diplomatic career at the end of 2001, so I already have a good 20 years behind me, serving countries between Asia, the Middle East, Europe, the UK, etc., and I’ve been dealing with innovation and technology for a few years now. It’s a little bit anomalous for a career diplomat to be dealing with these issues, but when I started to get interested in the field, even though I don’t have any specific scientific or technological skills (at least inherited from my studies) maybe I saw it a little bit through, in the sense that on the one hand even we graduates have to be more and more informed and then also find a little bit of a specialization, an area in which we are somehow passionate because then this passion reverberates on the ability to operate effectively. So as early as a few years ago, when I was working in Rome in the analysis and programming unit, I was starting to get involved in technology issues, that is, what were the technologies, the dynamic evolution and then somehow impacting global processes. Then I had an ‘important five-year stop in London, where I worked both in the embassy as the head of the economic spindle and then at the same time in the European development bank, the EBRD, on the board, dealing with both innovation and technology and the interconnection that there is between finance and the world of innovation.
And then to come back to Rome, and this is the last part of my biography, to head this office, which is very important from my point of view, because in some ways it was created to my measure, if I may say so, because it is important for a foreign minister today to be involved in diplomacy and innovation, which is then a term thrown around by Minister Tajani, to the extent that a lot of international relations today have a strong technological component.
Today if you are at the forefront of these on technology issues you count more, that’s kind of why.
I start from the latter term, which I like. I also have a degree in literature and philosophy, however, my specialization is more on the philosophy of language, semiotics, literary criticism, a subject that then accompanied me in my career as a journalist. So I work a lot on words, I am innovation there as well. But the diplomacy of innovation fascinates me, because it brings together two themes, that is, diplomatic activity (we are talking about foreign ministries here), and we know how important diplomacy is today in a globalized, interconnected world, we have told many times the importance of geopolitics, but also (and we come to the second theme) how important it is that this happens on the level of technological discourse. I’ll give you an example now, then after that I’ll leave it to you to explain what innovation diplomacy is as you operate.
When I am responding in a talk about Musk’s satellites, I try to explain that the evolution of technology, of communication even at that level, is not something that accompanies a single U.S. president, but happens over the years and brings together, undoubtedly, many aspects that then affect many countries. To say, though, innovation and diplomacy are fascinating together. If you want to explain it to us, then afterwards we go into the specifics of start-ups.
The issue is very simple, in the sense that innovation and technology have always been the basis of economic growth processes and development processes, so it means better focusing on these factors of production, if we can call them that, as the added value of our country’s ability to grow. Therefore, at a time when countries are not happy islands but are interconnected with the rest of the globe, when we try to sustain the legitimate expectation of growth and thus of maintaining social achievements, widespread welfare, we can only do so if we continue to grow. To grow we need an increasingly intense component of technological innovation, but not so much on the technologies of today, but those of the future.
So we need to look ahead, to be able to imagine what the directions will be on which then our planet will orbit and on those try to make a strategic projection and then a systemic supportive action. There are the players in the world of innovations, which are the researchers, are those who work in the laboratories, but then there are those who are able to turn these innovations, these ideas, into businesses, because then our new systems revolve around businesses. Enterprises sell, they produce, they create turnover, they pay taxes, they hire and by hiring they pay salaries, salaries put income into circulation and income in turn, starts this, let’s say, virtuous cycle again.
Knowledge of technologies is important, because then without any fear or dread (although there is a lot of talk about this bogeyman of artificial intelligence, for my point of view very excessive) in order to master technologies one has to know them, one has to be on top of them, as they say in English, so know what we are dealing with, so that we can then make those technologies be to our use and consumption, because, to paraphrase Heidegger, in the end it is man who is at the center of everything and therefore it is man who asks the question about the meaning of existence and so what are technologies for? They serve to give us a utility to improve our quality of life.
You are a humanist, so am I, I like this view of man, you a technician, you deal with these matters every day, and you have a non-apocalyptic attitude about ‘artificial intelligence. There is no rational approach to the problem: we have those who are the faithful, shall we say, enlightenmentists of technological progress and the others who are frightened and speak precisely of the end of man. Perhaps in between there is a slightly more concrete, and perhaps even legitimate, view, for example we learn about our SMEs (which the ministry and its office follow closely) that they invest 10-15% of potential in technologies, so we are still at a level, more than fear of homo sapiens, of insufficiency compared to how other countries, other Western democracies or other major economic powers use technologies. Is this the case or not?
I think that this excessive fear or excessive talk about the governance of artificial intelligence betrays a bit of not having the clear idea and being perhaps a bit behind in the ability to develop technologies related to artificial intelligence. That is, I, from what I can see by delving into the topic both here and in the trips I make to the United States, or by talking to companies, I see a huge benefit that can come from artificial intelligence in the medical sector, in the scientific research sector, in the creation of new drugs: the landscape is endless and so to talk insistently about governance is like saying I can’t talk about anything else because on the other thing there is not much to show and so we talk about how to cage this thing, which basically we don’t know. Instead we really do know that there is very elegant mathematics behind it, which is then used to make these machines work and pull out predictive data, obviously it has reached very very advanced levels of sophistication, but then the important thing is to also move from words to deeds and then invest in artificial intelligence because it’s not so much by shutting yourself up that you avoid processes..in Europe there is a little bit to say about the fact that on certain things we have fallen a little bit behind, I’m not saying that, but someone a little bit more than me who is Mario Draghi says that.
I quoted that number not at random precisely, because instead of talking about the scare it pays to invest a little more in it….
Exactly why SMEs will face international competition that doesn’t cut anyone any slack. How do you deal with international competition, not by locking yourself into an autocracy but by trying to play the game and try to win, then overcome this challenge. But you do it how?
Continuing to innovate, and to this day a good part of innovation is also adopting artificial intelligence tools that simply make you more productive, more efficient and also make you work better. Because then basically, if we take a look at agentic artificial intelligence, as it’s called translating badly from English, it’s basically what automates a whole series of processes that we in the service world, so in the office world, do and they take a lot of time away from us, not allowing us to maybe think more about the strategic part because then we have to manage a series of mediums, of contacts.
Artificial intelligence basically allows you to do this. Now, let’s say, in the near future there will be upcoming innovations, so it’s quite a challenge for SMEs. Challenge that start-ups, on the other hand, have taken up fully and in fact are working very well on these areas.
Here, speaking of start-ups, I would like to talk about many places in the world, but let’s stay with the editorial theme of our newspapers, so Italy and the United States. I often quote, I don’t know if you know him, a consultant for SMEs and start-ups who lives in California, who wrote for me, his name is Cirolli: they called him all over the world, except in Italy, of course, as a consultant for start-ups. He used to tell me that in America, when people have an idea, they get in their garage and make a start-up, they’re not afraid to fail, and they run with it.
He lives in California, we are a little closer to the East Coast where there are more Italians and Italian Americans as editorial reference, however, it applies to the whole United States. Instead we Italians are brilliant in the idea, but then we mess up the roles, then we always have this blessed fear of failure.
So I ask you today, what does it mean to make an Italian start-up in America? And how do you help it in that sense, with rules, with incentives, with all that is your institutional apparatus?
Technological innovation and startups go together, in the sense that technological innovation is increasingly being done by startups, which are braver, probably, than SMEs. My office deals with enabling technologies, frontier technologies, and also deals with startups, because many of the frontier technologies, (we talk about AI, advanced materials, quantum, biotechnology) are often done by the startup, because more and more innovation is coming from the bottom, not so much from the top. How do we help them? By trying to open international markets to them, because Italy, but Europe itself, is too small for a start-up.
The “start-up model” is not a company that is born, grows and develops and then becomes medium and large. The start-up model, as it has been codified, is a business model that is born from a brilliant idea with a brilliant, very courageous entrepreneur behind it (genius is not enough, you also need entrepreneurial skills), that grows exponentially, because it is the exponential growth that justifies that high-risk investment that comes from venture capital: so the two are linked and therefore the company has to grow faster than any other company and that is why then one in ten on average survives, but maybe even less. So what can be done to help this rapid expansion?
Convincing our startup founders that the Italian market, but also the European market itself, is too small to have such rapid expansion, so you have to look at the world universe; it means that you as a founder have to be international from day zero, from the first day you start working. “My market is the world,” that’s what we do, first as an almost proselytizing activity, the second activity we do then, concretely, we take them to big international trade fairs, through the ICE agency, which of course is the agency that is under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for addresses and for supervision, where we then create Italian pavilions and match these start-ups with investors, with bigger companies that maybe are interested in their technological solutions. Finally, we opened an innovation center there where it needed to be opened, so in Sillicon Valley: for two years there has been a center called Innovit, which is a nice experience where there is a physical place, where we do a whole series of events, networking, conferences. Universities go through there, larger companies that maybe take a payment desk of course, but the core business is to bring Italian start-ups for certain technology sectors, so to play in the most important league in the world, which is what is basically played in Silicon Valley. That is perhaps our most important contribution, that is one of the results that I would say in some way we can always take home: even where the company then failed to penetrate that market because it is still too young, too small, or even where it failed to find an investor (because obviously these are investors of a certain level and they hardly look at such a fledgling company) those young entrepreneurs will certainly come back changed by the Silicon Valley experience because, for a week or two, they were able to see how it really is played in the Champions League of innovation. I, who already go to Silicon Valley a few times, can assure you, no matter how much the newspapers write a little bit about it, that innovations still get created there, because there is a particular system, talking about the risk participation, the courage of the entrepreneur.
With Italy we can have our say, because we have so many qualities, we have so many skills, we have so much creativity and innovation, and we need to give it a little more structure domestically, even with concessions, ad hoc financing (which are there because the regulations are progressively improving) but then we also need to give it that little bit of help to get it to international markets.
This then is internationalization for good measure, and it grows the business through the opening of additional markets than those in which the business normally operates.
I am very happy with these interviews we are doing, last week we had ICE President Zoppas, now you. In the end we slowly to this word, “internationalization” (which I find ugly as a humanist and as a philosopher or paraphilosopher of language) we are giving a semantics, a fuller and fuller meaning and in my opinion popularizing, because I find that in general we do a lot of communication, as Floridi says, but less and less information: things need to be told and we also need to tell what people and institutions are doing, because a lot of people criticize but they don’t know and I hope that these interviews, these issues on which we want to do non-institutional storytelling, but through a podcast, video, always reach as many people as possible, because we this we have to tell and as you know. The media only tell the controversies and never the things that are really done.
Speaking of going to the top of the class, I did theater as a young man with De Filippo: it was the first class at the University of Rome, he told us read you Guglielmo. We looked at each other, but who is Guglielmo? It was William Shakespeare in Italian: even in theater you read the top of the class, which is Shakespeare, and so in innovation you go to the top of the class, to Silicon Valley. The logic of the master always applies, there is always a William we must follow. Time’s up, if you’ve had a good time maybe in a while we’ll do a far check of some of the things we’ve said to each other, just to close a few seconds what’s the next trip you’re going to take, the next professional goal that occupies you?
Professionally there will be America, as for the next trip, next week there is a festival on artificial intelligence in Cannes: we have a nice Italian pavilion with a few companies and at least three seminars that we do there where we tell what Italy is doing in the topic of artificial intelligence.
Thank you to Massimo Carnelos, heads the Start-up Innovation and Technology Office, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: you have heard a biography of knowledge about this subject and also about the world, because I repeat by now we have to tell the world well, otherwise we remain closed only in our so-called territory. Thank you for your time and availability.
Maybe we’ll get in touch later to take some stock of this issue that is crucial to our economy and our future.
Thank you again and thank you to all of you who followed this new installment of Portraits of Good Morning America. See you next time, goodbye.
The article Massimo Carnelos, head of the Innovation, Technology and Start-up Office for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, interviewed by Claudio Brachino | Good Morning America Ep. 4 comes from TheNewyorker.