INNOVACTION STORIES: GIUSEPPE ARRIGO, “THIS IS HOW I CREATED A NETWORK OF INNOVATORS IN MESSINA”

After attending InnovAction Camp in 2013 Giuseppe Arrigo, 28, from Messina, went back to being what he was before: an entrepreneur. However, he went back to it with a completely different mindset, and this is what changed everything. With the help of his experience at the Camp, Giuseppe managed to gather a group of people who meets once a month in Messina in order to talk about the startup world and young entrepreneurs. This is the story of his experience.

I am 28 and I have been an IT consultant for a long time. I have also had my first company in this field in 2010. In 2013 I applied to InnovAction Camp, after some guys from Sicily had talked to me about it – they had participated and were very enthusiastic about this. I was a little bit puzzles though, because I was afraid I could not make it. When Augusto Coppola called me it was surreal, because I did not know his number. He called me and said “Hi, this is Augusto. You have been accepted at InnovAction Camp”. After a time that looked like eternity to me, but it was only a matter of seconds, I said “Great”. And he said “Yes, it’s definitely great. Better get ready or I am calling someone else”. I immediately went back to having my feet on the ground. The camp would start in two days and I still had to organize everything. A week later when I went back to Sicily I was a mess.

InnCamp is really unusual, because even though everybody tells the same story, you cannot believe them until you find out for yourself. I only slept eight hours in five days, without drinking coffee but just because of the enthusiasm everybody had. The friendships I made in such an environment are crazy. Time is tight and you have to open up with people. This way you get to know them in an extraordinary way.

The most important thing that I have learned at InnLab is, so to speak, the art of networking. The camp has changed me in the way I relate to others. Learning to meet new people in just five days helps you get to know them more rapidly. When you meet someone and you realize that they can be interesting from a personal or professional point of view, you try and strike up a relation with them as soon as possible, trying to understand what value that person may have for you. I developed more contacts in the year following InnCamp than in the previous three. I am still an entrepreneur, but my way to relate to the others has changed.

This was an incentive to start thinking about creating a network here in Messina as well, where to be honest up until a year and a half ago I found it difficult that there would be so many people interested in such an activity.

Together with other people I have created Startup Messina, a network for entrepreneurs, startuppers and wannabes. I founded it three months after attending the Camp. Today there are thirty to fifty people who attend our monthly meetings. They all come from Messina and the area around it. I am the only one from InnovAction Lab.

After the Camp I had started hanging out at the Working Capital accelerator in Catania. There I met other innlabbers and people from Messina who had the same interests as me. So naturally we gave life to small ecosystem and organized a first cycle of meeting as an experiment, a small introductory course to talk about what pitches, business models and revenues are, all the things that we had to deal with and we wanted to share.

We had an average of 150 participants per meeting and this gave us that extra oomph. Since then, we meet once a month and anybody can present their idea or startup, and get a feedback in InnovAction style. Not everybody immediately understands that expose themselves to criticism is the only way to improve quickly, but finally it pays off. Some of the ideas that were presented went on to winning local competitions for startups. The mere fact of creating a network allowed many organizations to find co-founders or members of the team that they needed.

Written by:

GIUSEPPE ARRIGO