2019 EdTech Insights Hub Header - Individual Page Header  Riccarda Zezza

Life Based Value |Italy| maam.life

Share a short description about your company:

MAAM is a solution of Life Based Value: an ethical social enterprise that empowers businesses to transform life experiences into valuable business skills. They aim to shape a world of work where everyone can fulfil and realise their potential. Life Based Value was founded in 2015. Through our life-based “digital+real life” method, we help employees and businesses capitalise on the skills gained in parenthood and caregiving experiences. To date, MAAM has been used by more than 5,000 participants in 50 organisations in 23 countries.

 

How does your current role allow you to make a difference to the education and learning space?

We started with motherhood, but we’re expanding a whole new set of opportunities for everyone. We are developing life readiness that comes from transitions and transformative relationships. We ask companies if they are “Life Ready”— are they ready to accept the fact that life has entered the workplace, to make room for this fact and take advantage of those new resources? My biggest dream is for there to be a general awareness in the world that life and work have a synergy, that having more roles in life—as a parent or caregiver, for example—makes people more resilient and effective at work. I hope we can stop talking about “work/life balance” because the level of stress people are experiencing is not sustainable. We need a new framework that views work and life together.

What are the key trends you believe have the power to transform the way we learn?

In my work, which is focused on the skilling and working opportunities of the future, I see the workplaces trying to keep up with:
the challenges that the mix of digital + human development brings along,
with the new “portfolio career” approach of Millennials, who will most likely have many more than one career during their lifespan,
and with the desperate need of a different, more sustainable, type of leadership.
The common denominator in all of this is creating systems where not only we learn “life-long”, but we also acquire a new way of learning, “life-based”. Beyond augmented reality and virtual reality: we can learn through Reality.
 

Why is it important for all players in the EdTech ecosystem to continuously connect, network and learn from each other?

Diversity is the key that Mother Nature uses to foster evolution. Nothing improves unless you mix diverse perspectives and systems unless you explore new combinations and allow room for big and small mistakes. We have to keep on learning from each other, as the path for education is to lead, not to follow, the human evolution.
 

What should the rest of the world learn about EdTech innovation in your country?

One of the biggest challenges tech development presents refers to our capacity to remember where we come from and what we have learnt from our past. Italy has a great cultural history and I think that we can foster and enrich the human side of EdTech.

 

When you think about joining London EdTech Week and EdTechXEurope Summit this year, what are you looking forward to?

I want to know more about is the status of this industry: I believe we can (and have to) infiltrate adult education with pedagogical knowledge, and vice-versa. I am eager to see contamination cases and to learn from the imagination and the experiences of the other companies that are building this sector.

Who would you like to meet at the event?

I am keen to meet people who believe that education is key for human development, and human development deserves at least as much attention and investment as tech development. The best technologies are useless if people don’t have the education to manage them and use them for the right purposes. The common objective is not to increase every day the amount of data we produce, process and pay for, but to live better lives and make this opportunity available to everybody, no one excluded.

Find out more about the upcoming EdTechX Summit here >>