From Big Ideas to a big move
Innovation isn’t the holy grail of the moment only for publishing. It can, in fact, mean a leap of faith away from the day-to-day heart of the business for some of our industry’s players.
One of the most familiar faces in TheFutureBook.net community, Marcello Vena, has just shown how this can look, with his departure from RCS Mediagroup to form his own venture, All Brain.
Less than a year ago, in November, Vena was one of the “Big Ideas” presenters at The FutureBook Conference in London, using RCS Libri’s Rizzoli Lab “YouCrime” experiment with social-media-savvy thriller writers to explain his concept of co-publishing with platforming authors. [Note: the call has just gone out from The Bookseller’s Philip Jones for 2014 Big Idea proposals.]
Now, Vena turns his attention to another big idea: As my colleague at The Bookseller, Lisa Campbell, wrote up the news of Vena’s move, “The [AllBrain.org] website adds: ‘We envision a new corporate role: the chief future officer.'”
And that, if anything, may define what Vena is making of himself: his own “chief future officer.”
“Operations will start in September,” Vena says in an interview, “and the internal structure has been designed to adapt to the market. Start small and quickly ramp up. There certainly are growth opportunities for talented people and, as well, for smart shareholders.”
Seed cash? “Funding came from myself, but it’s not a scarce resource,” he says. “What is very scarce and very valuable is the availability of top-notch brains — people who can holistically envision the future and make it happen.”
“An innovator, not a publisher”
While we in the international publishing sector know Vena as one of us, he points out that his own entry into business was a matter of “growing up professionally as an innovator — electronic engineering and Ivy League MBA degrees are not the typical qualifications in a publishing powerhouse.”
A 17-year background in consulting with elements as diverse as aerospace, pharma/biotech, and apparel now leads Vena to come out of his role of manager for RCS Libri’s trade book business planning to create All Brain as “the world’s first on-demand leadership service for top executives across the entire values chain of the media industry.”
Read the full article at TheFutureBook
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By Porter Anderson | @Porter_Anderson
The FutureBook: Marcello Vena: All Brain’s chief future officer
Read the full post at: The Bookseller’s The FutureBook
