Nothing stands still for Ilaria. As the daughter of a globetrotter, changes were her ‘normal’ as she’d regularly move countries with her family and have to adapt quickly. Spending her first years in the US with her Italian father and German-Canadian mother, her childhood was awash with different languages. “My dad spoke Italian but my mum secretly spoke English to all of us when my dad wasn’t around,” she says with a smile.
Being multilingual was going to be an important part of her skill set. At just three years old, her family uprooted to Egypt’s capital, Cairo, before moving to a French-speaking school in Italy three years later. When she turned 13, she moved to Helsinki, Finland, where she took on her German Baccalaureate.
Some people may have been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of change, but not Ilaria, who decades later is still able to see how the experience inspired her. “I can spot very fast if somebody doesn’t feel included because I know exactly how it is when you do not feel like part of the team,” she says. “I think I have some kind of sixth sense for intercultural communication.”
Embracing change professionally
It can be easy to say we embrace change and hunt for diversity and difference — but actually applying this sentiment to our lives can be harder to do. However, throughout Ilaria’s professional life, she has gone beyond words and wholeheartedly continued on an adventurous path.
Armed with an economics degree, she started her career at Siemens in Italy before relocating to Germany where she joined the two-year Siemens Graduate Program (SGP), which has kickstarted the careers of several Future Makers. A valuable opportunity to meet people from all over the company, Ilaria worked first in product line management and then in global account management, thanks to a connection she had made through the SGP network. “I’ve been with Siemens for 20 years and even now I attend alumni conferences — the next one as a speaker on intrapreneurship.”
Adapting to personal change
Knowing Ilaria’s background, which was founded on regular change, it’s perhaps no surprise that, when she found out her first baby was on the way, she was ready to adapt. “I knew I wasn’t going to be able to have a 50- or 60-hour-a-week job with a baby. That was clear to me even before I was pregnant,” she says. So she took a year out and did the same when she went on to have two more children. And, seeing the value in her own upbringing, she speaks to them in German, English, and Italian.
The experience taught her the importance of work-life balance, something she strives to get right to this day. “When I came back, I looked for another job and my idea was that it had to be international because this is what I love doing. It had to be communicative but I can’t travel so much. My dream was a creative job in connection with students and universities,” she says. And that is what she does today. She hooked up once again with her SGP connections and joined the company’s university relations department, where she is responsible for open innovation.
Sparking change among others
Sharing her skills is something Ilaria does every day at work because part of her job is to help facilitate collaboration between students and the company in order to answer the burning questions of tomorrow. This could be through organizing workshops, leading hackathons, or setting other online challenges. With Siemens’ backing, it’s a space for students’ ideas to rise above the university walls and enter the ‘real world’ before they’ve even graduated. She’s nurtured young adults in areas including coding, IT security, and edge computing. “The topics are technical and, as you can imagine, very relevant for Siemens today,” she says.
For Ilaria, nurturing a culture of collaboration is the only way to keep up with today’s rapidly changing business landscape. “When it comes to the digital revolution, we need speed and we need to get input from the world outside. There are so many new opportunities.”
And part of preparing for tomorrow means sharing wisdom and passing on skills to a new generation — something Ilaria is strongly involved in. “I believe open innovation is getting larger and stronger, and we’re driving it with more and more colleagues. We really believe in it, it’s nice being part of this movement of culture change,” she says.
A mentor for change
Ilaria believes open innovation can be fuelled by combining the start-up world with the corporate world. She is responsible for a strategic partnership with the tech incubator ZOLLHOF, which is a new home for digital innovators in Germany. As part of this work, she ensures Siemens teams up with local students in design-thinking projects, AR and VR hackathons, student ideation camps, and start-up pitching nights.
She also drives the Intrapreneurs Bootcamp, where her role is to mentor participants to become strong and resilient innovators and intrapreneurs. It’s her job to bring an agile and entrepreneurial mindset to the initiative.
Ilaria’s ability to drive change is not just limited to Siemens. For the past 10 years, she has devoted some of her spare time to giving lectures at several Bavarian universities on the topic of intercultural communication. “This is a topic that has been with me since childhood,” she says. A clear talent for teaching, she has been ranked as a top speaker and regularly receives positive feedback from students. “My passion is to teach students empathy and an understanding for each other’s cultural imprint, and develop their intercultural competence,” she says.
She is currently working with the Technical University of Berlin to arrange a strategic partnership and workshop with Oxford University and Siemens on the topic of Digital Grid. And, in any time she has left, Ilaria also enjoys coaching female colleagues via the Siemens-based GROW2GLOW program, which aims to help women identify and apply their own strengths.
Her path really proves that she has come full circle, using experience gathered throughout her career to impact future generations. Her message is: “Stay open and embrace change!”
Ilaria Carrara Cagni joined Siemens in 1998 as a Purchasing and Sales Trainee in Italy. During her time at Siemens, she’s worked in nine different roles and now works for the company in Munich, Germany. She lives with her husband, who she met at Siemens, and their three children. Learn more about working at Siemens.
Photography: Ilaria Carrara Cagni; Getty (2)
Illustraion & Animation: John Hitchcox
