Leaders are responsible for developing a team of best & the brightest minds, and together drive businesses to greater heights. Their own experiences help them to take their company to the dream vision. The magic behind achieving this success is sometimes simple appreciation, and understanding the team requirements. Such a leader with best and the bright mind in open innovation and Internet of Things is Michael Prisco, the Founder and the General Manager of Fair Winds Digital. He has been an entrepreneur for over 12 years and also worked as the Chief Innovation Officer of several companies. He is the proud inventor of IoT Catalyst.
Sparkling Career
Michael studied at the University of Perugia and was interested in technology since the start. He has vast industry knowledge in business strategy, management, cloud computing, etc. He was a former CEO at Securcantieri and also of Bway for 8 years and 4 years respectively. He was also the Head of Innovation at ADS Assembly Data System for almost two years. After gaining an experience of 20 years in national and multinational companies in Italy, he decided that it was the time to change, engaging his professionalism in a new entrepreneurial venture FWD. As an entrepreneur, Michael immediately realized that the main factor of success lies in the people who are part of the team. The people who work in FWD have different cultural and professional backgrounds and work together in synergy to make their experience and professionalism available to customers.
Identifying Business Strategies
Michael says, “Never forget the big picture having a holistic approach to the business, but be focused on highly specific and effective solutions when going to the market”. After about 2 years, huge investments and constant comparison with the market, the leader believes that the journey of Fair Winds Digital has finally begun. Today FWD is an established reality that can demonstrate its skills and vision by having them objectivized within its flagship product: IoT Catalyst. But the game of IoT is an ecosystem game, in which no one, big or small, can think of act in solitude. For this, Michael started an open innovation program by identifying companies that are best-in-class in their respective fields of application and have a similar vision of FWD . With these companies, FWD is also signing industrial collaborations agreements to create decoupled but strongly coherent building blocks with which the company’s customers can win their challenge of Digital Transformation.
Impacting lives by Building IoT Catalyst
Michael usually starts his presentations and speeches with “IoT Platforms are just pointing at the IoT Do not look at them, look at the IoT!“. The main promise of the IoT, the real revolution, is the Digital Transformation, that is the actual goal of his efforts. IoT technologies are, therefore, only a means to achieve this goal. His commitment was to focus the attention of Fair Winds Digital to create a product that embodied this vision: IoT Catalyst.
Catalysts are the unsung heroes of the chemical reactions that make human society tick. A catalyst is a substance that speeds up a chemical reaction but is not consumed by the reaction; hence a catalyst can be recovered chemically unchanged at the end of the reaction it has been used to speed up or catalyze. This is the explanation of the name of IoT Catalyst, the catalyst of Digital Transformation.
Future-Proofing IoT Solutions
IoT offers opportunities to the companies to be more efficient in how they do things, saving a lot of time, money, and often emissions in the process. Today companies are using IoT, AI, and machine learning to evolve rapidly. As businesses get more serious about IoT, they will face challenges such as interfacing different products without any consolidated standard, making them interact appropriately with the upper-level applications, and managing the different levels of the IoT Stack. Started in 2017, Fair Winds Digital support companies in the realization of IoT architectures using modern technologies. Fair Winds Digital was born with the intent of facilitating and accelerating IoT integration, leveraging the potential of edge computing and adding the expertise of a highly-skilled team of architects and IoT specialist to best-in-breed technology. Its mission is to help the customers improve business performance through the adoption of digital technologies.
Blockchain-Technological Impact on the Leader
The digital transformation is known as the last industrial revolution. The best minds in the world, the best companies are engaged in this field trying to extract value from the huge opportunity that this revolution represents. Blockchain certainly has the potential to impact on the functioning of the organization. Michael says, “The blockchain is a theme that fascinates me not so much for the technological component itself, but as a starting point for reflection on the new society, we as mankind are planning and shaping”. He believes that blockchain tries to reconstruct the trust by extending it not only to human-human interaction but also to the human-machine interactions, even in its most anarchic or more conformist expressions (cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and digital currencies). He thinks blockchain is helping to fix this problem because, without trust, a business cannot exist.
Why do I talk about “conformist expression” of the blockchain? asks Michael. Here his soul speaks. Those who have had, as he had, the good chance to experience the whole process of the rise of Information Technology from the birth of the Internet to today, living it with wonder and admiration, have certainly dreamed of the possibility of creating a new society, with new ideals and new values. However, he does not think it is so revolutionary to consider money (even if digital or crypto-digital) as the main incentive for social progress. Surely, we could be more imaginative and daring, as blockchain role is much more game-changer. In this context, for example, the partnership with the Telos Blockchain is inserted, and the industry is in contact with other industrial partners.
Michael Prisco | Founder and General Manager | Fair Winds Digital
