The Social Business Forum is a story of inspiring encounters.

The Social Business Forum is a story of inspiring encounters.

We are the people we meet.

We are shaped by the relationships and contributions of those we meet, in a more or less random way. In this decade we have had extraordinary meetings with men and women. People who showed a great availability and agreed to come and talk to our forum.

We felt the need to call people from afar. Especially at the beginning it was a big bottom up movement. A public movement, open to all. The path of this decade has taken us where we are. Especially in the early years we made up for a public deficit in Milan; only afterwards many people realised the importance of the issues we were raising, and the Milan Digital Week was born.

Now we celebrate the forum at Microsoft House in a more restricted way, because it would not make sense to do it again as before. But we want to pay a tribute of thanks to all the people who we have encountered along the way. A celebration to thank all those who have contributed.

We had the intuition in 2008 at the University of Insubria. We realised that the institutions were not ready, the university was lagging behind. So we opened the doors and tried to bring innovation there. For ten years it was a minimal but mass event. An increasing number of people followed us. Every year we were trending topics on Twitter. In several years we condensed our thinking into an authoritative magazine like the Harvard Business Review. Today it's easy to talk about these things, it was harder to talk about them back in 2008 when we were celebrating the successes of the New Economy... not many people were able to see the iceberg that was coming.

The important stages of the Social Business Forum were the following:

 2008

The first forum, entitled Enterprise 2.0, was held at the University of Insubria in Varese. It celebrated the tenth anniversary of the university. At that time, I tought a Master on Web 2.0. OpenKnowledge was founded in September 2007. We decided with the dean to bring an innovative event in the celebration: OpenKnowledge would organize it, the university would host it. We thought a few dozen people were coming, more than 400 arrived. We understood that the forum responded to a widespread need.

From the very beginning we called high-level experts, and they all talked about a fundamental paradigm shift by touching on topics such as collaborative models, social networks, tagging, crowdsourcing, social learning, prediction markets. Among them, Laurence Lock Lee was already talking about Organizational Network Analysis and the organization as a living organism; Richard Florida with his book Who's Your City and why certain contexts of intersection and contamination (like Silicon Valley) have generative value and enable innovation; Thomas Van der Wal, international expert inventor of the term "Folksonomy", explained the dynamics of social tagging; Luis Suarez, a well-known blogger and evangelist on social computing at IBM, announced that email was outdated and needed to be replaced by new forms of communication and exchange in networks. 

2009

The second forum had the same title Enterprise 2.0 but, realizing that the underlying topics were increasingly central to all companies, we organized it in Milan. It is no coincidence that we were able to do it in Assolombarda.

In that edition we talked about how the new collaborative paradigms related to digital networks can impact human resources, research and development, marketing and sales, also dealing with the specific issues of small and medium enterprises.

 A relevant theme in that forum was given by the so-called "communities of practice", a topic analyzed in the book Community Management published by Apogeo in 2008. That year too we had important keynote speakers, such as George Siemens of the University of Manitoba (Canada), Ross Mayfield of SocialText, and again Luis Suarez. 

2010

The following year, keeping the same title, we moved the forum to the Marriott Hotel in Milan, which was able to accommodate the growing audience that was following us (many hundreds of people).

The agenda of the event describes the topics discussed that year: innovation, social networks, emerging leadership models, informal exchanges, participatory models, banking 2.0. Italian and international experts, from Alfonso Fuggetta to Massimo Pettiti, from Normal Lewis to Esteban Kolsky, were called to debate those issues. A series of business cases of great interest - such as those of IBM, Intel, Dassault Systèmes, Citroen, Telecom, Barilla – were also presented. 

2011

 In 2011 we decided to give the event a new title and renamed it Social Business Forum. In the international debate the expression ‘social business’ had become the shared way (but still little perceived in Italy) to recall the many facets of the new collaborative practices that, transforming the way markets work, were changing how companies create value.

 The topics discussed in the forum were closer to business practices, and dealt with both the inside and the outside of the organization: employee empowerment, customer engagement and open innovation had become equally important strands not only in the reflection but also in the concrete processes of companies.

 The forum addressed those issues and many others with the contribution of experts of the caliber of Sameer Patel, general manager at SAP, and Bill Johnston, director of global community at Dell, who came to speak with us for the first time; and of fellow travellers who at that stage had entered into a continuous debate with OpenKnowledge, such as Luis Suarez, George Siemens, Esteban Kolsky.

2012

 In 2012 we made a real quantum leap. In the digital universe it was a moment of great euphoria, and we were aware that we were connected to an international ferment. This led us to dare a little, leading us on the one hand to develop our own interpretation of the extraordinary transformation underway, and on the other hand to get in touch with speakers of the highest level at worldwide.

Our interpretation of processes took the form of the Social Business Manifesto: a document of 59 theses which, taking inspiration from the famous Clue Train Manifesto, made clear the need to look at new phenomena with new eyes

(see www.socialbusinessmanifesto.com). The title also gave its name to the first supplement to Harvard Business Review Italy (no. 6, 2012) edited entirely by OpenKnowledge.

From the periphery of the empire, we were bold enough to call keynote speakers such as Steve Denning, the author of The Leaders' Guide to Radical Management; Frank Eliason, the author of @Your Service; John Hagel, one of the leaders in social business thinking; and Ray Wang, the Californian expert in social technologies whose blog has a following of 10 million page views a year. The level of debate rose again and everyone noticed. In particular, the video of John Hagel's speech, one of the most appreciated (https://vimeo.com/45347497), should be watched by all. 

2013

In that year the Social Business Forum was consolidated. Always conducted at the Marriott Hotel in Milan, it included other great speakers of international renown and scope.

Among the many speeches, three should be mentioned and the related videos really deserve to be seen. Jacob Morgan, the author of The Future of Work, a reference text to understand how work changes in the social enterprise, told this topic in a fresh and funny way

@SandyCarter

Sandy Carter, then vice president of IBM and now vice president of Amazon Web Services, treated the topic of enterprise collaboration in an exemplary way - with a kind note of recognition of OpenKnowledge’s work (https://vimeo.com/69528830). And Bret King, the greatest U.S. expert on Banking 3.0 issues, explained the formidable evolution taking place in the world of banking and payment systems (https://vimeo.com/69471161).

In that same edition of the forum, we produced another attachment to Harvard Business Review Italy (n. 6, 2013): the Social Business Toolkit, an insert accompanied by 59 original cards that explains how to move from the phase of vision of phenomena and models to an operational phase of transformative action.

2014

 In 2014 we decided to give the Social Business Forum a subtitle, aimed at giving a sign of what was changing – Be Social, Get Value! Consistent with this, my introductory speech was titled From Vision to Value. The whole forum was dedicated to underline that it was time to move from trends to implementations, giving concreteness to the digital transformation. Another attachment to Harvard Business Review Italia, called #Social&Digital Transformation, accompanied the event (n. 6, 2014).

 To fully express this passage, we called several guests of great importance. Michael Brito, the author of Your Brand: the Next Media Company, explained in a nice speech why the adoption of social business is good for marketing strategies (https://vimeo.com/102354195).

Lee Briant, in another very effective speech, showed how organizations can take advantage of social technologies (https://vimeo.com/100806464).

Ray Wang and Esteban Kolsky created a duet, half acted, to convey to the audience the very real differences of views that can be had in trying to change the role and functions of the chief digital officer. And Maria Cristina Ferradini, author of Umano digitale, tackled the problems connected with the cultural transformation that digital implies.

 As a conclusion, there was an exciting speech by Dave Carroll, the famous author of the video and song United Breaks Guitars, who not only told his story as an exemplary case of customer experience in the age of the web, but also sang the song itself (and some others). Many companies were present, both in the public and as speakers - among them ENI, Mediolanum, BNP Paribas, Intesa SanPaolo, BPER, Magneti Marelli, Coin, Philips, Artsana, Danone, Vodafone, Banca Ifis. 

2015

 The 2015 forum maintained its usual title, accompanied by the invitation: Embrace Digital Disruption. The thesis we brought was that digital disruption is inevitable, full of risks but also opportunities, and should be embraced without hesitation trying to get the best out of it. The appeal of the forum had grown to exceed one thousand participants by far.

The themes of the forum had become more sophisticated: openness in leadership, ubiquitous marketing, reinventing organizations, reality data mining, next-gen digital workplace training & support, augmented storytelling, collaborative economies, business value redesign, social cloud computing, new retailing frontiers. The authors who discussed them are on the frontier of the current debate. Frederic Laloux, author of Reinventing Organizations; Vijayanta Gupta, head of industry strategy at Adobe; Michel Claassens, head of digital marketing at Philips; and again personalities like Sandy Carter, Samee Patel, Ray Wang, Bill Johnston, Laurence Lock Lee, and many others.

Among the Italian speakers, Cosimo Accoto presented an interesting reflection on the need to review the vocabulary with which the transformative phenomena underway are evoked, suggesting among other terms and neologisms that of platfirm. Numerous business cases were presented at the conference. Among them those of Invest Bank, Damiani, Acer, Unicredit, Intesa SanPaolo, Mediolanum, Enel, Sky, several of which were involved in an interesting final roundtable moderated by Enrico Sassoon, director of Harvard Business Review Italy.

2016

 2016 was the year in which the forum focused on the formidable relevance acquired by the new digital platforms. Following the inspiration of Accoto, the subtitle of the event was The Platfirm Age, which is also the name of the attachment to Harvard Business Review Italy published during the forum (n. 7/8 2016).

Special Guest, considering the theme, was Sangeet Paul Choudary, one of the co-authors of the best-selling Platform Revolution.

The topic of platforms was addressed with an emphasis on how they redesign value creation, market competition, organization and leadership. The lexical shift from platform to platfirm was designed by us to highlight the profound organizational transformation from 'firm' to 'platfirm'.

Sangeet was not the only important speaker. The forum also saw the participation of Scott Brinker, author of Hacking Marketing; and Barbara Cominelli (then in Vodafone and now in Microsoft), who dedicated her speech to the way in which Vodafone understands the phygital dimension of experience, another frontier theme (https://vimeo.com/174498340). Among the companies that made contributions in the form of business cases, Piaggio, Barilla, SAP, IBM, Unicredit, Heineken, Certilogo, BIP, Sanofi, and various others.

2019.03.11

This year, as I said at the beginning, the forum celebrates its tenth anniversary in a different format. Today, in the context of Milan and Lombardy, conferences on the themes of digital transformation are multiplying. The evangelist function of our forum is much less necessary, while it is still essential to make every possible effort to anticipate change. In this perspective, also taking into account the size of the prestigious Microsoft House hosting us, the Social Business Forum X will be limited to a selected number of innovation leaders of the most significant companies, gathered to reflect on tomorrow's challenges.

The X next to the title stands for 10, since it is the tenth anniversary, and for experience, a crucial topic today that will be the common denominator of four main areas of discussion: employee experience, learning experience, space experience and augmented experience. A way of celebrating the past and re-launching our ability to foresee the future

Digital business becomes business us usual.

rosario sica