Dear Diary,
Today I begin a new stage in my professional career. I just came to a new company, the sixth in the 14 years of my working life, and I will carry out the R&D strategy.

In the previous years I worked in a GIS public company and in a consulting technology company where I became a Project Manager and Commercial Manager in ITC sector, despite of the fact that, because of my studies (environmental sciences) I would not have fit in these jobs. I have always thought that not being a computer scientist or an engineer has given me more closeness to the end user. The crisis came as you know, dear diary, and I became a R&D consultant, changing radically to aeronautics sector. I learned a lot from management of innovative projects and I knew all the so-called innovative ecosystem, with its bureaucracy and its peculiarities. But it was not enough for me. That characteristic is very mine, I am a dilettante, I am a person who needs to believe that I add value in everything I do, and in an R&D consultant I felt I was only a node where information circulated. In spite of meeting and interacting with the most influential people in this important sector, I saw that this was not my job, and I thought it would be great to join my two great experiences: the ICT world and R&D management. I wanted to manage my owns projects.

And here I am today, dear diary, starting a new stage, with the illusion of being able to really do R&D, with the conviction that innovation, far from short-term perspectives, is and should be profitable. The Board of Directors of the company, some with more conviction and others with less, support my philosophy: you have to innovate, you have to take risks with emerging technologies, you have to grow more beyond the day to day that marks the market.

New people, perhaps somewhat vitiated by experiences from previous R&D projects not well led or focused, to whom I have to convince that innovation is fun and profitable, that ideas, well focused, can lead to exciting projects.

We will try.

PS: yesterday I finished reading Zweig’s book “The World of Yesterday”. What a great novel to understand the life of a European guy born in the nineteenth century and who had to go through the madness and unreason of two world wars that annihilated the supposed reason and progress main civilization.