BBS Alumni Network. GetConnected
18 July 2016Where has your experience in BBS has taken you? The BBS Alumni share with us their projects. In this edition of BBS Alumni Network we introduce Simone Pancaldi, Alumnus of the Executive Master in Sales and Marketing, and the project: GetConnected.
In short, Simone Pancaldi’s story. From high school straight to a job in order to devote himself to his passion, computer programming and start dealing with the world of work from its harshest part: raising through the ranks. The Executive Master Sales and Marketing followed and then he joined GetConnected, the young Bologna-based IT solutions company for which Simone is in charge of the Sales and Marketing team. Straight from the Bologna Business School Digital Fair the tale of a professional path and a few reflections as well.
A qualified technician… full of life
He attended the prestigious Bologna high school Istituto Tecnico Industriale Aldini Valeriani. This school “produces” the best technicians in the manufacturing and technological fields. Simone had a clear idea in mind and from the “Istituto”, the best one in Bologna for technical training, he started off towards a very consistent professional career. “IT has always been a real passion for me. Once I received my high school diploma, I decided to start working right away instead of attending university. I wanted to learn by doing.” Thus, he started working as a developer and spent 4 years in Milan. Then he came back to Bologna, with a new interest for sales and marketing.
BBS
It was at this point that Simone encountered Bologna Business School attracted by the first edition of the Executive Master Sales and Marketing. “I decided to enrol as an investment for my future. I found myself in a classroom with many businesses that were bringing their sales & marketing experience, but at the same time they shared the need of establishing a closer relationship with customers in the B2C area.” During the Master’s, Simone found a new job. “While I was at BBS I got to know the company I’m still working for. They were looking for someone who could relaunch their sales & marketing department, which was being temporarily managed by the CEO.” It’s an innovative IT company that helped Simone widening his perspectives, interpreting technological development in a different way, not linked to the traditional world of IT.
Merit in action
Simone’s case is special. The only one among his Master’s colleagues who did not hold a university degree, he was nonetheless allowed to participate to the Master’s at Bologna Business School thanks to the 10% threshold with which BBS, for the Executive Master, grants itself the possibility to accept candidates without a university degree. “The fact of working for 7 years in IT for a company, and 5 years dealing with sales, all over Italy, played a fundamental role during the admission tests and the interview, as my experience was highly valued and it turned out to be decisive to be enrolled at BBS.” The experience he gained by doing, a classical working one’s way up, raised the interest of his graduated colleagues at the Master’s, to know more about the internal dynamic of companies. “Starting by being the ‘handyman’, from photocopies to errands, was frustrating at the time, but it allowed me to get to know, in depth, all the cycle of a business, the way in which the structure works hierarchically, the way in which the team is managed.” About BBS, Simone mostly appreciated the experience and the faculty’s willingness to help and support. “Corporate managers who after a hard week of work came on Saturday morning to tell us about their experience, to train us. And we, the students, entered those same classrooms every weekend, knowing that we’d go back home with an enriched and renewed supply of knowledge.”
Digital Fair
“The app in itself is never the killing feature. We’re experiencing an app boom, everyone wants to come up with one but just a few know clearly how to make it and its real purpose.” Simone very precisely, as for things digital, outlined the opportunities in the field and the risk of a “bubble”, chasing the creation of technologies that must, in the first place, solve concrete problems. “At the BBS Digital Fair we presented a cloud marketing automation product that manages the relationship involving store, loyalty and user advocacy. It’s a system that can be integrated with existing apps or with newly created ones, allowing you to develop campaigns based on individuals and configure different activities based on the actions materially performed on the device.” Simone also brought some Hololens to the Digital Fair: Microsoft holographic goggles that allow understanding how augmented reality works for industrial design and in general for the creation of a product.
Ferment
“At the Digital Fair I experienced the ferment of ideas that gravitate inside and around BBS and while observing the 35 projects that were presented I felt like saying “well done, you’ve come up with a great idea”. We were able to spend all day talking to the representatives of the different companies, to understand how ideas had come to be, how they’d been developed.” And then, Simone adds, true to the spirit of the School there was also the exchange of views with the BBS Faculty as they were the jurors, with whom there was an exciting exchange, to improve ideas and get valuable feedbacks.
Don’t judge the book by its cover
Right in the middle of a relentless surge of digital projects, Simone tries to provide advice, in order to optimise energies and ideas at hand: “My suggestion is not to stop at the look of the projects, but to understand whether they’re useful.” The target is that the project “becomes one of the 10 apps that, on average, users utilize in a week. Understanding why you’d use it, why your friends would, why all the others.” Basically: you should not be seduced by your own idea, by the love for your creature. And finally, a forecast based on already developed tools: “We’re getting to the point when technology allows you to do very exciting things. Establishing relationships between businesses and users in real time will be the new frontier”. Always with a multi-channel perspective: “By way of simulations, “mixed reality”, it’ll be possible to see a preview of product details, establishing a contact with the product, interacting, and thus having an immediate feedback with users at a global level.” This way users will have the chance to step into physical stores with a higher level of awareness.
Read here the other projects published.
Are you a BBS Alumnus? Do you have any project you would like to tell us about? Send us an email to marketing@bbs.unibo.it
