Divisumma 14. A name that will ring few bells. Yet this name answers to one of the most revolutionary products that made in Italy has ever launched on the market. It is the world's first electromechanical calculator capable of performing the four operations. It was produced in 1945 by a company in Ivrea that had on the roof of its headquarters the inscription: ING. C. OLIVETTI & C. FIRST NATIONAL TYPEWRITER FACTORY. Out of that two-story, red-brick building would come, in the early 1960s, the Programma 101, one of the first-for some the very first-programmable personal computers in history. Olivetti 's motto is a hymn to tenacity: "Your dreams become solutions". If we could exercise our imaginations for a moment and visualize the digital revolution as an exotic, dreamlike warrior, it would seem obvious that this from Olivetti might be the only possible battle cry. The digital has thundered on the interpretation of the world, changing and revolutionizing cognitive paradigms. In Italy, the reformulation of the vision of economic-social arrangements at the hands of the digital is a path that seems to have come to date with less bite than that Olivetti of the 1940s.
Surfshark Index
Surfshark's annual index, which estimates the Digital Quality of Life (DQL) of 85 countries (81 percent of the world's population), placed Italy 20th overall, 41st for Internet connectivity and 54th for electronic infrastructure. But what specifically is meant by digital quality of life? For Surfshark, it is an assessment based on five essential factors:
1. Affordability of Internet services: the cost and speed of using services related to home and mobile connections;
2. Quality of Internet services: their performance in terms of stability and speed;
3. Infrastructure: the number of connected citizens per 100 inhabitants and level of progress in the digital agenda;
4. Electronic security: related to the regulatory measures each country puts in place to curb and prevent cyber attacks and from actions aimed at protecting privacy;
5. Level of computerization of the state i.e., the degree of digitization of online services to the citizen.
Although we do not occupy the lowest step of the podium, the data compel reflection that is even more urgent in the post-Covid era. Indeed, it was precisely to the impact of Covid19 on the digital health of countries that part of Surfshark's analysis was devoted, pointing out that the lockdown has brought out imposing issues related to inadequate infrastructure in the suddenly materialized prospect of smart working. This state of affairs has, according to the cited analysis, crippled as many as 49 out of 85 countries with substantial problems. The association between the Internet, digital revolution and awareness must be a key evolutionary stage in emancipating a community's approach to innovation. The Web must wish to be a place projected toward horizontalization of access. An extremely edgy topic in today's Italy that has found itself fragmented and overwhelmed by the multitude of new digital needs that have emerged as a result of the pandemic. If the degree of peninsular DQL is partially influenced by the infrastructural skeleton, however, the figure of digital literacy must also be considered. As reported by CENSIS in early 2020 in the 16th Communication Report, "25.0 percent of Italians admit that they lack the necessary skills. The lowest values are registered among those between 30 and 44 years old (8.0%) and among the most educated (11.4%), on par with the youngest (11.5%): these are the people best equipped to live in the digital environment. While 57.3% of older people confess to a total skills deficit."
With Gaetano Di Tondo, VP, Institutional & External Relations Director in Olivetti, host of the Central Hall of #DIDAYS20, we will try to analyze some examples of realities that have seen the lockdown as an opportunity to ferry their work into the digital universe. How Camillo Olivetti brought back from his trip to Chicago the experience of the application power of electricity, shaping from this experimentation one of the most innovative and pioneering companies in our country.
Valentina Spasaro
Brand Ambassador Digital Innovation Days