Today the Advanced Marketing class enjoyed Tomas Barazza‘s speech. It was really a pleasure to have him sharing his entrepreneurial experience with the students.
Immediately after graduation, Tomas completed a Master in Innovation Management and started working as consultant for important business consulting firms, such as Arthur Andersen and Ernst & Young. He also experienced working in Benetton as senior analyst. But soon he understood this was not what he wanted to do in his professional life.
He was part of the founding team of H-Farm Ventures, one of the Italian most active private business incubators, located in Roncade (Treviso province), and specialised in digital media businesses. H-Farm was founded in 2005 and in 2006 Tomas started to officially take care of the incubatees. His entrepreneurial spirit came up and in 2007 he founded his first company, LOG607 – a new venture incubated in H-Farm, which pioneered in Italy some of the first immersive games and interactive solutions, combining on-line and off-line experiences.
One of the most interesting products created by LOG607 is Whaiwhai, an interactive touristic guide based on a gaming platform developed to offer a new way of sightseeing the less touristic and unknown treasures of cities. Players are invited not only to walk the city collecting clues but also to discover popular and traditional tales that are difficult to find in any common tourist guide. Whaiwhai is a mix of game and narrative and this is what makes it tempting to different tourist targets: groups of young people, families, sophisticated tourists. Players can play the game without limits 24 hours a day all year long, setting trough the first sms how long they wish to play (1-9 hours), how challenging the enigmas should be (easy, advanced) and how many players they want to involve in a single gaming session (hunt by yourself of challenge with other players). This product attracted the attention of Marsilio Editore, which decided to invest in this business. Nevertheless, despite the innovativeness of the product and the edutainment pourposes of the project, the launch of Whaiwhai encountered some troubles, and was not able to pay back Tomas of all the efforts spent for realizing it. Maybe the times were not yet mature enough and the digital world was still something far from the everyday life of the majority of people.
Another interesting project Tomas talked about is Frammenti. Frammenti is a new concept of online entertainment, where reality, fiction and the real life of the viewers are involved in the narration. This is a show in which the new rules of cross-media storytelling become a mystery that everybody is asked to solve. Frammenti is both fiction and an alternate reality game, a spread-out story in which the Internet is expressed in its limitless potential. An amazing project, developed also thank to a partnership with current tv, which was able to involve a wide community of gamers now addicted to the series…but still waiting for a sequel, since the project is now stopped…also because of the facts related to current tv. Current was an American television channel from August 1, 2005 to August 20, 2013. Co-founded by da Al Gore, ex US vice-president, the channel started out as a user-generated content channel with content made by viewers in 15-minute blocks. The channel later switched formats to become an independent news network aimed at progressive politics. Neither format brought the desired success, therefore, after multiple alterations in programming, the channel was sold. In Italy, the tv programmes started in may 2008 and stopped in July 2011.
Tomas left LOG607 in 2013, just in time for co-founding Digital Accademia, which represents now the third generation of services offered by H-Farm. The core business of H-Farm presently is no more that of incubating business ventures. During time H-Farm moved into other two businesses: education and digital trasformation. Digital Accademia signs this huge transformation. Digital Accademia is an innovation school and a company which operates in the field of knowledge management, innovation, corporate training, communication, storytelling and employees engagement. It supports people and leading companies to face digital challenges. Digital Accademia is a new organization form, a flat organization, organized around tasks and project completion, which are handled by people working within the company in a non hierarchical manner. The human resource management is left to the self-organization of internal-to-the-firm temporary project managers which autonomously lead the project. Budget is allocated and tasks are fulfilled without a top manager controlling system. Emergent and not deliberate processes characterise the project organising activities. Interesting enough, the experience in Digital Accademia pushed Tomas to create a new business, a spin-off of Digital Accademia, namely: Wethod.
Wethod was founded in 2015 and it is still a start-up company in the first stage of development. Planning is a complicated activity that requires the coordination of many elements like priority, resources availability, skills distribution, budget allocation and deadlines. In addition, involving people in a variety of projects gives them the opportunity to grow professionally, learn new skills and acquire new know how necessary for future growth. The mainstream solution for the above challenges is putting senior and more experienced people who have the right authority and vision to manage planning activity. In most cases this solution results in a long and costly planning process where experience is mostly used to micromanage while the rest of the team has little or no direct responsibility. A similar approach is used many times also for controlling projects. Wethod offers a completely new approach to work planning in projects. In Wethod planning is managed in a collaborative manner: after creating a new project and defining its budget every project manager can freely plan and schedule resources. The system assures consistency between the planned and allocated resources eliminating the need for supervision. Project control is managed by collecting data on regular basis and displaying timely and up to date information to all project members with no need of any further data elaboration. The result is an integrated system that manages essential information in a project oriented manner.
I wish Tomas good luck for this new adventure, and I thank him again for sharing with us his enthusiasm and competences! Hope that some of my best students will have the opportunity to be enrolled in an internship in Wethod, for sustaining with marketing actions the launch of this new business…
Advanced Marketing 