INNOVACTION STORIES: IOVEL FESSHA, “PITCH REHEARSALS TAUGHT ME TO GO OVER MY LIMITS “

Iovel Fessha is 31 and he is a student of system engineering. He was born and raised in Italy by Eritrean parents. He is graduating with a dissertation on computational intelligence, studying the algorithms inspired by the theory of evolution. In this post he is telling how he radically changed during his three months at InnLab.

I have many friends who have been to America and have told me a little bit about the world of startups overseas. When I did InnovAction Lab, I realized that there was not a big difference between our situation and their stories. 

Of course Italy is smaller, but I believe that InnLab managed to put me on the high road. First of all it changed me greatly, especially as far as the way I approach people and the world of work, broadly speaking, are concerned.

Before starting InnovAction Lab I was the only person who could see in a world of blind people, that is the only one on the ball. Now I know that I am a person with specific expertise, but not as broad as I imagined, and that there are a lot of other people who are very capable, even more than me, and who can teach me a lot.

InnovAction Lab was the toughest yet most exciting experience I have ever had. Before InnLab I had done two internships, but those were nothing compared to it. Carrying your own project forward is extremely difficult and this is the main different. During my internships I was asked to slave away like a monkey, sit in front of a monitor , read information and write presentations, which, by the way, turned out to be badly done compared to what I learned at InnLab. None of the companies I have worked for cared for what I had to say or what my expertise was. InnLab was different: I worked with people who were interested in what I had to say and I did something that was truly mine.

Now I think I have that extra oomph compared to a lot of people who are asleep without realizing it, and think that they are doing things in the right way when they are not, as Augusto made us realize and told us often.

I feel much more motivated than before and I feel like doing many more things. I really want to be proactive. When you write your own resume, you often say that you proactive, that you have teamwork and problem solving skills, but you really do not know what that means. Working in a small group on a university project is not a team. Working in a team means confronting yourself with people you often do not know and who have skills that are completely different from yours. You need to be able to listen to everybody, learn from other and learn to give to others. Sometimes you need to step back and acknowledge your mistakes. You cannot learn this at university, also because you are not facing the problems of real life, as I have had to during my three months at InnovAction Lab.

A lot of people would say that the most difficult moment at InnLab is the first pitch. By the way I was the pitcher but then we changed our mind. That was not the toughest moment for me, it was after the second pitch rehearsal, when I realized that we had done a lot of things, but they were not enough anyway. We needed to do way more.

Between the second and third presentation, that had to be a video, I panicked because I had been asked to make a demo of the game and I did not have the necessary expertise. I had to work hard in order to gain it in the small amount of time that we had. In that moment I thought I was not going to make it and that I should step back. Thanks to my team’s and friends’ support I found the strength to do what I was asked and I stayed until the end.

My experience at InnovAction Lab was so peculiar from the beginning that I did not try to build a team according to my interests, but according to how I felt around those people. When we finally got the team together, we immediately brainstormed on ideas and we got one that was not actually among my interests but that I immediately liked: Digidoh.

Digidoh is essentially a videogame for children that uses gesture control and allows users to model shapes in a virtual space, thus stimulating a creative approach to technology and giving children the possibility to make their own games through a 3D printing service. Some kind of digital playdough.

We have currently taken some time off to finish some personal projects, which we had set aside to do InnovAction Lab, such as my degree, but we are working to enlarge our team with the roles that we need and we will soon get back to our project.

Written by:

IOVEL FESSHA