After a childhood, spent playing with spare parts in her dad's garage and dreaming of student Michael Schumacher's Formula One Ferrari.For the past 10 years, Bianca has been playing rocket science across Berlin and London and contributing to the delivery of multiple science and commercial telecoms missions sponsored by NASA ES AJ LR uh U UK SS A&E U including the landing on NAS A GP L inside Mars mission. She's TEM consultant, space communicator youth mentor, public speaker. She's actively pursuing her mission to inspire and empower the next generation of fierce female leaders on earth and beyond. She was also one of our keynote speakers. Three global conference. Hi, Bianca, welcome.

Thank you very

much. Thank you and um good morning, good evening, good afternoon, everyone. It's, it's an honor for me to be here in this very, very special day, especially something happens, especially when we are talking about women Tech Awards. So um what I want to share with you today as, as Anna shared part of my uh biography. So I work in the space industry and um I've been working in the space industry for the past 10 years in different ways. So coming from Italy, moving to Germany, moving to London now working in the States. And uh my, my main um uh work in the industry, it's been about innovation. However, as we are all women here, and uh we are talking about women in tech. We know that when we talk about innovation, uh especially when we talk about innovation made by women and possibly for women and for the humanity as a whole, we are talking about a territory which is really interesting and also difficult because innovation these days is especially when we talk about disruptive innovation.

It's not just technological innovation. We are not just talking about designing something which is going to change an instrument or a system per se. We are talking about innovation that is going to change and is going to drive humanity evolution on earth and especially in space because this is what I do and when we are talking about the subject, so um seemingly complex as this one, we have to understand that as women especially and also as women who don't, who are innovators and don't really fit into a category of a woman in tech.

Uh what's really important is to understand how we have to stand our own ground from a social and cultural perspective. And um I will, I will give you some, some, some, let's say a couple of anecdotes from my own experience and my own life since I was a child. So um what basically brought me into, into the space industry and especially rocket science. Uh wasn't um something that I had really uh envisioned before. So, coming from the South of Italy, coming from a culture where uh we are exposed to a way of seeing beauty, seeing women, seeing the contribution to technology in a very standardized way, especially when I started studying aerospace engineering. Uh My idea of becoming a rocket scientist was very far fetched and this is still applies to many of us and how it can be broken down. So I remember that when I, when I was a child, uh my mom always loved art and uh she was hanging new posters, screens around the house.

So I remember that she had just hanged um poster of a print of a Picasso painting just in front of our bathroom. So when I was, I was very small and I would used to go to the bathroom, then I get out of the bathroom and I would look at these prints in this belief. So one day I asked my mom, mom, why, why did you decide to, to attach this, this, that hang this thing to our wall which is so ugly? And my mom sat down with me and she asked me, why do you think it's ugly? And I said, because first of all, I don't understand it. And second, it's scary because I've never seen it before. So as you can imagine when we talk about women in innovation, what do you most hear about? We've never seen it before and it's kind of threatening because we don't understand it. This applies to us as new figures in the, in the industry and it applies to our ideas. So what basically we have to do as an entirety as a community of women first and then as humanity, we have to break down these walls of unknown, which makes things scary and also seeing things from a different perspective.

So when I told my mom that it was ugly because I've never seen it before. And it was scary because I couldn't understand it. She said, OK, so every day that you go to the bathroom trying just to spend a couple of minutes looking at it and tell me what you see. So this is what I did every day I was spending a couple of minutes looking more at what that weird for me. It was weird. Painting was trying to say and the more I was looking at it, the more I was understanding that it was extremely beautiful and it was extremely beautiful because no, it wasn't scary because it was different. It was beautiful and it was new because it was different. And the more I look at it, the more I could understand the emotions and what Picasso was trying to portray the boundaries and the stereotypes that for that kind of art, he was trying to break down uh putting eyes and hands and colors in ways that I never seen before. Because I was again exposed to a culture and aesthetics that goes more for Miche Andro more classical way of seeing beauty and art. For me, that kind of the kind of piece of poster became emblematic of an entire way of living and breathing innovation.

So I, since a very young age, I started seeing beauty in weirdness. If you think about beauty in what is provocative and what it doesn't seem like it fits anywhere. And this is what I've done my entire career. So anytime I was the youngest, only woman in a boardroom, people would look at me like I was an alien or the elephant in the room. But that's because they weren't usually exposed to somebody like me breaking into rocket science and being at the boardroom where generally not a woman like me will be there any time I've done something or I've expressed or I I've been pitching ideas, business ideas or um innovative ideas to internal stakeholders or um space agencies.

And even now in money role where we are basically working with a very advanced nanomaterial which has never been done before in the space industry. Anytime I speak about that, I have to make it's, it's people look at it with a skepticism because it's new, it's different. So what is caring people? It's not our presence, our personality per se, but it is what they have always been used to see and do their entire life. For instance, there are multiple marketing adverts. I shared this one this morning on my linkedin where in the 60 in the 68 and even in 2017, the woman is still portrayed like she's meant to clean the house. She's meant to be the housewife or she's meant to be the gold digger, the young woman, which who is basically marrying the older wealthy guy, she's just this pretty object. So if you think about this exposure that has been happening for the past centuries into our own humanity, this is what people have been used to see. So when each one of us is working on an innovation is get, getting into a boardroom, is getting that promotion, that new job that new is becoming the new entrepreneur of the year is getting on the press as 40 under 40 fortune or 30 under 30 Forbes or all of these.

It is threatening because it's something that I've never seen before. But this doesn't mean that it's an attack to our own personality, it's not to ourselves. So when we are scared to enter into a boardroom, when we feel anxious or we feel like impostor to be in a place because we are looked at like we don't belong there, that's not against us individual that's against an entire system that has been built in a wrong way. So my my message here today is, is especially this one, any time we are standing our ground and we are talking about innovation in engineering, in tech, in whatever things we are doing. Any time, we don't feel like we want to speak up or we wanna share that innovative idea because it feels weird and it feels different. That's exactly the moment when we have to do it because if we don't do that, if each and every one of us doesn't do that, we are not gonna break the these stereotypes. We are not going to break this generational heritage of image and visuals that people are used to see and we will just perpetrate for more centuries what has been done to us.

So any time we feel that we don't belong to a place, it's not really our own personal feeling. We are carrying a baggage of heritage that doesn't really belong to us. It wasn't ours. It was never ours. It was there because it was prefabricated, it was preconstructed. So the first thing that I would say is that we have to definitely enter into any boardroom as a provocation and not as a provocation because we are not capable of. I've been told many times, oh, she's, you know, just a pretty face. She's just here because it's different. She's no, we have to get there because then once we put our foot in the door and we are actually creating something solving the problem from an angle that was never considered before. This is where we are actually changing the entire curse of the technology. And at the same time of an entire social and cultural construct. And uh um this is exactly what then helped me uh going through my different roles and my different ways of advancing technology in this space. And uh because whilst I was reading the book called Psychology of Creativity and Innovation, this is what exactly I was seeing. And the more we embrace our own weirdness, diversity and whatever other unique quality we have, the more we have a chance to create something and to build something that has never been done before and that will change humanity entirely.

And uh this is what I've done, this is what I still do. And this is what I enjoy doing every day. When we talk about space technology again, it seems a lot far away or something that is not really understood. But we play all of us space scientists on a daily basis using Wi Fi posting pictures on Instagram, using the broadcast, using TV, using Netflix, using the GPS. This is what we do on a daily basis. And if we, if we can't see this from a different perspective, we will never be able to apply our own different perspective to things that we can change. And when we look at space engineering or spacecraft or interplanetary missions, and we think about innovations. So there is a way of being a good painter, a good engineer, a good uh analyst. And there is a way of being an outstanding innovator and inventor. And that is when going back to the psychology of creativity and innovation. This book that is amazing, is it the same approach that everybody can take a good picture? But not everybody can be an amazing photographer. At the same way everybody can do the daily routine job in any kind of industry. Not everybody is able to be that absolute amazing entrepreneur innovator or anything. And this is because that requires first of all to accept our own personality, our own difference, our own way of thinking of behaving of, speaking of acting differently from everybody else. That's the first step.

And the second one is exactly to look at things from a different perspective. Just don't think about what has always been done so far. But how can I look at this problem from a different angle? For example, when I was working in innovation on telecommunications spacecraft on the platform, generally, you would think OK, uh spacecraft is, is always being built like that. It's a massive cube with different systems on. They are always the same, there are cameras, there are optic up heads, there is the antenna, what else do you want to innovate? But if you look at that saying, well, the innovation doesn't, doesn't necessarily come from how I see this from the outside but I can change the inside, looking at the tiniest material that has been advanced and this has been never used on a spacecraft. This is something, for example, that is absolutely innovative. It's scary. It's never been done before, but it totally, that one thing that will make any project and any kind of innovators stand out because it's a way of looking at problems from a different perspective. So I'm conscious that I'm quite close to uh to my, to my speech. So uh my, my, my takeaways from today are that first when we are entering into a boardroom and we don't feel like we belong there. That's not our own problem.

It's a heritage of humanity that has been put, there has been constructed. So don't take it personally. Second, you can look at this from a different perspective and say um these people have never seen this before, which means if I want to change this, I have to be here. I have to be here for myself from my daughters, from my friends, from my mother, from my grandmother, from a whole generation of ancestors that couldn't or didn't have the chance to break that those boundaries. And third, once you own your own difference, your own unique points, your own amazingness. However, you want to portray it in a way you speak in a way you, you, you, you express yourself. This is when the major creativity kicks in because you won't be afraid of sharing your opinions or your ideas because you won't think they are crazy. And even if you think they are crazy, this is when you have to share them because all we need nowadays as women and all we do best is the surprise effect.

When you surprise people, you surprise an entire plethora of generations which have been afraid and scared and threatened of the novelty. But that's how novelty comes and that's how you will then be able to say I've done this not only for myself but for the evolution of an entire generation of women and men that tomorrow will look at what I've done and say I can do that too. Thank you.