The Innovation Formula: interview with Paolo Dalla Mora on creativity, strategy and bold moves
28 April 2025One spring evening, surrounded by the greenery of Villa Guastavillani, the conversation ignited around a question as simple as it was challenging: what makes an idea truly capable of becoming a business?
On the stage of Bologna Business School, during the Leadership Workshop titled “The Innovation Formula: Creativity, Strategy & Bold Moves”, Paolo Dalla Mora – entrepreneur, visionary, founder of ENGINE and Campamac – shared with the Community his experience made of insights, strategic marketing, and countercurrent decisions. Fashion, food, spirits: each sector he explored was a new territory to conquer, always with the same concrete and creative approach. In the dialogue with Alec Ross and Barbara Lorenzini, Dalla Mora offered an authentic and powerful reflection on what it means today to do business with courage, while remaining true to one’s original vision.
We met Dalla Mora at the end of the workshop to further explore some key themes from his entrepreneurial experience, from the relationship between creativity and strategy to the bold decisions that transform an intuition into a distinctive identity.
In your speech you talked about the balance between creativity and strategy. What are the key ingredients to transform an intuition into a solid and recognizable brand?
Creativity always follows a process made of four phases: design, bright idea, execution, and verification. There is always a moment of discouragement that arrives when you have a good idea, but then you realize that it is not easy to implement, enthusiasm drops, and you feel tempted to return to your normal life – which, however, is not your ideal life. At that point comes the breakthrough: the bright idea, the stroke of genius that drives you to move to execution. The mistake many people make is stopping before execution. But you must overcome this fear because words alone no longer convince anyone: you must move into action. And you have to do it without fear of making mistakes. The greatest achievements in history were made by trial and error, and no one knows this better than us living in the land of Leonardo da Vinci. He created many things, but failed at many more. So the important thing is: try, try, try. I have learned not to seek perfection before starting. At the beginning I was very meticulous, today my approach is: 90% good is good. Start, then fix things along the way. The important thing is to show what you have created. It won’t be perfect, but it will be real, and that’s what matters. Later, you can fine-tune it – which is, of course, always necessary – but first of all: get real.
During the workshop you also talked about bold choices. How do you make a bold decision without losing coherence with your values and business vision?
The first true bold choice is starting. When you decide to become an entrepreneur or take on a leadership role, you take on an enormous responsibility. Brands, from my point of view, are like children. They must be nurtured, grown, and eventually let go. Letting go of a brand means allowing it to grow. And it won’t always grow exactly the way you want, because you are not building your own house, you are building the future of a separate entity. It’s like a child: you hope they work, that one day they become a parent themselves. Brands must be let go toward their own future. A bold choice I made? Allowing a company to become a partner in ENGINE, even though they did not fully share our communication values. They were very traditionalist. But it was a compromise: they had distribution in their marketing mix. So I let them in. It was a bold, but coherent choice: I kept the majority, I shaped the global strategy, and they followed me. It took effort: it’s not easy to explain to a traditionalist why you make certain choices. But once you build trust, they will follow you. And once they follow you, you can lead them wherever you want.
You have worked in different sectors: fashion, food, spirits. What skills did you carry with you from one field to another, and what did you have to reinvent each time?
The skills I carried with me are strategy and marketing. Marketing can be adapted to any business. We often think marketing is communication or product, but it is not like that. Marketing is a table with four legs: product, price, promotion, distribution – the famous four “P’s”. If any of these is missing or shaky, the table wobbles, and thus the strategy has problems. These are cross-category skills. What you need to reinvent, apart from the product, is the way you communicate to the target. Each sector has its own codes. The food target today has certain communication standards, fashion another, spirits yet another. Once in Italy, there was Chiara Ferragni who communicated everything – she even worked with us. But today there is no longer a single communicator. And in fact, if we think about it, she was a media outlet, like Elle or Vogue, and could have communicated anything. She went well beyond the concept of influencer. Personally, I don’t use influencers much. I prefer working with early adopters and ambassadors. Ambassadors must be identified in their world: if I have to speak to the spirits world, I speak to consumers and also to the bartenders community. If I speak about food, I speak both to the lady cooking at home and to the chef, who for me is an endorser – a competent figure who gives value to my product by becoming an ambassador. In fashion, it’s about dressing the right people, those who matter in that world. Once, there were Anna Wintour and Franca Sozzani. Today, you must find new communicators, because the fashion system is in crisis as the influencer world is no longer a reference point.
ENGINE is a project strongly linked to the territory and Made in Italy. How do these elements help build a distinctive identity on the global market?
It is essential to be clear. We think we have a project and that the consumer will understand it. But they only understand what you tell them and what they are able to grasp. With ENGINE, we chose not to tell the story of a place, but of an identity. Not the “gin from Bologna” or “from the Langhe,” but a story speaking to those sharing specific values: motors, racing, Italian style. If you make the gin of Bologna, you sell it to Bolognesi or Bologna supporters. For the rest of the world, it would not be relevant. We wanted to speak to people passionate about racing, engines, style. We needed a story relevant to that target. And then, attention: you don’t fight world wars; you fight one battle at a time. We started from Italy, then UK, then Belgium, Germany, Japan. Step by step. You need resource concentration. You must stay focused. And you must have vision. Above all: think global, act local. There’s no truer phrase.
What message would you like to leave to BBS Community students and young professionals?
I would like to leave more than one, after this conversation and the participation seen at the workshop. First: words alone no longer convince anyone. When you build something, don’t do it on paper, on PowerPoint, or on ChatGPT. We want real things: go into execution. Second: don’t be afraid to make mistakes. When I was a child, they used to say: you learn by making mistakes. And it’s true. You will learn a lot when you have something physical in front of you, even – and especially – if something doesn’t work. Third: don’t be afraid to fail. In Europe, and even more so in Italy, failure is seen as a stigma. But it’s not. It’s just a mistake. And I tell you this: an unsolved problem is a bigger problem. Better to fail and restart. Don’t fear judgment. And finally: stay hungry, stay foolish, someone who inspired me once said. But I also add: stay happy. Do things that you like. Things that entertain you. Once, people used to say: ‘I’ll drop everything and open a posada in Venezuela’. Please don’t run away from projects before you know them all the way through. Only drop everything if you are not passionate about it and do not enjoy it. It is the facts that count, no one is convinced by words any more, not even ourselves.
