Francesco Masinelli, President

Ethic and Innovation

When I was asked to provide a topic for discussion, amongst many possibilities, I decided to borrow from the preambles that I consider essential foundations for companies aiming to a long-term success that can also evolve into a positive contribution to the development of our society.

Ethics and innovation are clearly two important themes but, at first glance, may appear unrelated.  Instead, if we examine them further, we realize that there is a synergy between the two, and the contextual presence in the company of these two vocations generates greater results.

Let us try to examine some concrete examples:

When interacting with the staff, it is clear how an ethical environment that rewards merit and not popularity, evaluates commitment and not appearance, and stimulate employees to offer sincere contributions avoiding conformism, encourages a warm personal involvement of all members.  This effect helps employees perceive that, within the complex corporate mechanism, their contributions are not indistinguishable, or worse lost in the mix, but visible, useful, appreciated and rewarded.  Aside from creating a result-oriented environment, this type of approach makes employees feel good as well as emotionally attached to the company and consolidates what has been and always will be a key-factor of competitiveness: human capital.

Clearly, if the company considers innovation, on all levels and in all processes, the engine of competitiveness and success, it is the environment described above that creates the optimal conditions so that innovation becomes a substantial part of the corporate culture, generating the best possible results.

If we analyze the relationship with clients, it becomes evident how an ethical approach allows us to evolve the merchant-client relationship, merely based on convenience, in a relationship founded on mutual trust that naturally tends to turn into a partnership.  Again, this approach helps stabilize and improve relations between the company and the clients and, in the long run, allows us to constructively resolve moments of tension, creating, instead, a climate or true cooperation.

It becomes even more indispensible when the service or the product the company offers is based on elements of ambitious innovation that tend to mutate procedures, policies, processes, mentalities and products continuously pushing forward the limit of the state-of-the-art.

This process of continuous innovation becomes extremely difficult and compromises the results if the company is unable to merge technical and professional skills in a context of ethics and transparency.

It is the entire flow of the corporate process between the internal human capital and the commercial assets that benefits of an approach that relies on two strong levers such as innovation and the capacity to conform the company to an ethical process.

We remain convinced that companies cannot create sustainable positive value if they are unable to conjugate innovation and ethic.  The latter, per se, being a powerful factor of competitiveness if we consider that corruption, nepotism and other unethical behaviors are strong elements of inefficiency.