#43 - Federico Frattini - How AI empowers new generations of business minds

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform the education sector, and my guest is Federico Frattini.

Federico is a Full Professor of Strategic Management and Innovation at the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and Honorary Researcher at the Lancaster University Management School (UK).

His research area is innovation and technology management. On these topics, he has written more than 200 books and papers published in conference proceedings and leading international journals such as Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, Academy of Management Perspectives, California Management Review, Journal of Product Innovation Management, and many others.

In 2013, he was nominated among the top 50 authors of innovation and technology management worldwide by IAMOT, the International Association for Management of Technology.

In my hunt for compelling stories for my podcast, I stumbled upon an article regarding the launch of Flexa, an AI-powered personalized continuous learning platform that was developed under the leadership of Federico. This triggered me, hence I invited him to my podcast. During our interview, we explore the changes in the marketplace, and how this is putting more and more pressure on the education system and the students they serve. The goal should not be just to successfully graduate, but to actually be employable after you graduate. This changes the requirement 180 degrees on how students, employers and universities communicate and collaborate together.

Here are some of his quotes:

“FLEXA is many things, actually. We can call it a personalized continuous learning platform which is designed for our students.

The basic idea is to give our students exactly the knowledge they need to achieve their career goals faster and to make them more employable.

It's something that represents a big change in the traditional business model of a business school or of a university. We're not doing that by using only our knowledge, our courses, our programs, but integrating into FLEXA contents, expertise, events coming from any angle in the world.

Through FLEXA, we will bring to our student exactly the piece of knowledge they need, when they need it to achieve their career goals fastest.

FLEXA exemplifies our view as a school about what is the real value of artificial intelligence, which is not, of course, substituting human knowledge but is amplifying the abilities of people.”

By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

1. Why it’s so key to take an outside-in approach to arrive at solutions that have transformative impact.
2. That the only way to keep up with the pace of change is radically shorten connections and eliminate noise.
3. How it’s possible to drive radical innovation in sectors that are known for their bureaucracy and barriers to making progress.