Nothing below is enough to rebuild the Tower of Babel. 

Sound of laptop opening. It's 6am and Emanuele Musa, called Manu by his parents, woke up not long ago. Still a bit sleepy, he is flipping through the latest information on the web about social business, collaborative business, all the things that are interesting for Babele, his project. He likes to start the day reading about new ideas. They are almost like fruits he can pick up and eat. This way he is charged with things that activate his brain, instead of starting with the stress of the previous day.

He puts on his coat and gets out into the 13 Septembrie street chaos, among the many cars, flower shops and restless buses. Buna dimineata, he greets a neighbor, who months after Manu moved to the neighborhood is still amazed that this young Italian guy speaks Romanian. Why would anyone want to learn this language, his eyes seem to be asking.

At 9 am there are already people gathered at the Hub Bucharest, an open work space in Bucharest. Even if the Hub is located only a few km away from Manu's neighborhood, it seems a different world, a bubble. “I live more in the Hub world, but I guess it’s natural that we create bubbles everywhere.”

Babele, the project Emanuele manages together with his girlfriend Ruxandra Creosteanu, who he met in Paris, is a collective intelligence platform, where the idea is helping people structuring their ideas and then finding the relevant feedback and validation from a community.

“The collective intelligence concept is based on the idea that the knowledge a community can have is greater than no matter what consulting company. It's about people donating competences and skills according to what they are doing and it’s up to the person that is creating a project to create its community of people.”

No, the name Babele is not connected to the Romanian word babele (old women) or to the area on the Bucegi Mountains plateau, but to the Torre di Babele, the Tower of Babel. “You know the story, humankind trying to reach God, failing to do it and the languages being created. So the idea of the Tower of Babel is the idea of recreating one unique language. But in our case it's based on collaboration. It’s the language of collaboration that can unite all people.”

Ruxandra and Emanuele met as he was trying to do this project by himself somehow in parallel to his work as a consultant for IBM in Paris. “Ruxandra, who was then working as a consultant for Deloitte, wanted to meet me because she was totally interested about sustainability and wanted to know more about the project. I did her a power point presentation. She was interested, so we said let’s start working together on this. We were pretty much together since the first day we met.”

It was Ruxandra who realized that the project needed more than afternoons and weekends dedication. “And at the end of a presentation in front of investors, Ruxandra said: listen, either we continue working on this seriously, or we quit and we continue doing tango.”

The project was everything for Emanuele and he couldn't afford to lose it. He quit his job and somehow explained his parents that he was leaving France to go create his own thing in Romania. “For my parents it was like, are you crazy? But it's ok, parents are conservative in general. Your parents are not going to say: just gooooooooooooo! I think it’s normal for them to be conservative. They just want their kids to have a good life and not stress much.”

Emanuele got the idea of such a project while he was in Paris. “I was trying to help a politician in Sardinia, one politician that was doing something good. I said, wow, that’s a miracle. So I said, let’s try to help this guy and get all the feedback of all the people that come from Sardinia but live abroad. Is there something nice that these people saw abroad and we could simply apply it to Sardinia? The whole idea of this started from the observation that there are so many good ideas in the world, it’s interesting first of all to know about them, it’s interesting to try to reapply them and it’s interesting involving all the stakeholders. And at a certain point I said, why it has to be only for Sardinia?”

It's almost 1pm and at the Hub it's time for the Sexy Italian Monday to start. Emanuele is cooking every Monday for those working there. When he was in London, he learned cooking in a French restaurant. It was a good way to put some money aside when his sister was starting with university. “After that I kept cooking for all my friends, because it’s something that brings people together and somehow it’s very related to my culture.”

Emanuele is moving freely at the Hub and in his relatively young life in Bucharest. He has changed his home so often that he can't even precisely recall the order of the cities where he has lived. “The important thing when you’re traveling is that you’re leaving your comfort zone, and you’re leaving your whole world behind. You are walking on uncertainty to find out how your life is going to turn out. I think that if you manage to face uncertainty what changes in you is that you can also face believing in something big and you can take the risk to start creating it. Imagine you take all the youngsters from one generation and you oblige them to spend one year abroad, what would be the impact?”

It's about 7 pm and when looking outside you can see the crowds swirling to the metro, heading to drink something. The city lights framed by the window look like a huge painting hung on one of walls at the Hub. Emanuele is still there. Doesn't it get boring focusing all your energy on one project, day and night?

“You just have the impression that you would love to go just much faster and it’s crazy because when you are creating something yours the speed you could give to something is huge in comparison to everything else that you have experienced in the past. Imagine how long it takes to just figure out a process in a company. Right now you are just going at 300 km per hour.”
Babele- Emanuele Musa

By Diana Mesesan, features writer, diana.mesesan@romania-insider.com