The commitment of the Fondazione Ermanno Casoli to fostering an active dialogue between art and industry continues with a new training programme that involves thirty members of staff of the company MSD Italia – the Italian subsidiary of the American pharmaceutical company Merck – and three artists of international standing: Tomaso De Luca, Margherita Moscardini and Alberto Tadiello.
For the first time, in fact, the foundation is working with the pharmaceutical multinational Merck on E-STRAORDINARIO, the project that uses contemporary art as a means of corporate training and development, an approach already successfully tried out with other companies. The initiative, entitled E-STRAORDINARIO x MSD Italia, is organized by Marcello Smarrelli, art director of the Fondazione Ermanno Casoli, and is conducted with the collaboration of Giovanni Boano, a specialist in managerial training at the Hic et Nunc company.
It will entail three days of workshops that will be held between January and April 2012 at the headquarters of MSD Italia in Rome and will involve, on each of the days, one of the three artists and ten members of the company’s staff, holding a wide range of positions, both of a managerial nature (human resources, accountancy, finance, marketing, customer services, etc.) and a scientific one (medical administration, drug information).
“The MSD Italia training programme is a process whose objective is to develop a capacity, that is to say a more efficient way of acting to attain a given result”, declares Giorgio Cavalleri, Sr. HRBP & Learning & Development Mgr. in MSD Italia and head of the project. “For this reason, it is important to understand the goal that has been set and to act personally. In this connection, it is the participants who are expected to assess their own training needs, with the help and support of their manager and the Training department. Thanks to the collaboration with Hic et Nunc and the Fondazione Ermanno Casoli we are able to offer an absorbing and enjoyable educational experience, and one that is easy to put into practice.”
The artists invited take part in the project by the Fondazione Ermanno Casoli come from different professional backgrounds but share a bent for experimentation, a willingness to make use of a wide range of languages and media and a capacity to interact with people, getting them to participate in their work.
“The project”, explains Giovanni Boano, “lasting a year in total, involves artists and members of staff in a highly innovative process, which for the first time adopts the contents and methodologies of art as concrete instruments for use in a training process aimed at the acquisition of a set of specific operational skills, essential to the growth of the company and of the people who work in it”.
