Volcano is not a name we chose.

The roots

Five roots for a single word.

A name you are given is harder to argue with than one you give yourself, and this one also turned out to be exact. But it is worth taking apart, because underneath that word there is more than one thing and they do not all say the same.

Let us start with the expression. The Italian one has a classical source, and it is one of the most quoted in opera. In The Barber of Seville, Figaro sings «un vulcano la mia mente incomincia a diventar», my mind is beginning to turn into a volcano, faced with the possibility opening in front of him. What erupts there is not greed: it is ingenuity. A man sees an opportunity and his head starts producing solutions non-stop. The quotation is below, in the place where it belongs.

And then there is the geological volcano, which says something else and says it better. A volcano is the visible moment of invisible forces: capability, capital and vision accumulate at depth, under pressure, until they emerge and transform the landscape, creating land where before there was only sea. The name has five roots, and the fifth is the one that describes what we do every day. Territorial: the Canary Islands are land born of volcanic activity, literally emerged from the sea. Operational: like magma, resources accumulate patiently before erupting and creating value where none existed. Cognitive: thought circulates like magma, subterranean and formless; on emerging it solidifies into concrete things, and those things stratify one upon another until they build the island. Symbolic: the volcano has always been a creative force.

And a fifth, which is the one that describes what we do every day. A volcano does not accumulate: it concentrates in order to distribute. The forces converge in a single magma chamber and what comes out of the cone is redistributed all around. It is exactly the movement of Volcano: seven forms of capital converge on a project, each from a different holder, and when the innovation works the value is distributed back towards the points it came from. It enters by seven routes, it leaves by seven routes. It is developed in the extended theory of capital.

The change of state. It is the part of the metaphor that most resembles what actually happens. While it is down below, thought is fluid: it has no form, it mixes with other thought, it changes direction. On coming out it cools, and in cooling it takes shape. What was an idea becomes something you can touch, sell and use: a solution, a product, a company. And it does not stay loose. Each project lays its layer over the previous one, knowledge over knowledge, work over work, and a company grows exactly like that, by stratification: not all at once, but layer by layer, the way an island is built.

And there is one last part, usually forgotten because it comes afterwards. Volcanic soils are the most fertile on the planet: what an eruption leaves behind is not rubble, it is the ground in which everything else later grows. What has solidified here is not only product either. It is soil: skilled employment, knowledge that stays in the territory, other companies born on top of it. Today's rock is tomorrow's ground, and from there come both the return and the impact, which in this model are not two different things. The results are in clients.

The two readings do not compete: they complete each other. Figaro's is the individual version, a mind that lights up. The geological one is the collective version of the same thing: many minds and many assets converging in a single chamber.

The symbol translates the same idea. The layers represent the successive eruptions and phases of development: the same construction, layer by layer, of the cognitive root. The sphere that contains them has three meanings. It is the microcosm of creation: the whole process gathered in a single form. It is control, because a sphere can be held, unlike an open eruption. And it is the crystal ball of foresight, the traditional object of those who look ahead.