Hello, and welcome to this introductory course of data science for business innovation. I am a Professor Marco Brambilla. I am Professor Emanuele Della Valle. We work for Politecnico di Milano in Italy and we did this course, in collaboration with eit Digital. The target of these course are executives, middle managers, and team leaders that want to foster data-driven innovation in their companies. We will provide you with a must-have expertise in data science for leveraging data and bringing innovation in the company and organization. We will not provide you technicalities or programming skills here. Instead, we will empower you to become informed decision makers in data science. You will become project managers, product developers or team leaders that are able to exploit the data and increase the value of the company based on these data. You will also be able to take a buy or make the decisions, pick the right tools or the right approaches based on the problem you need to face. The main motivation behind the course, is to go and fill a gap that we see into current organization that are hiring data scientists. They are able to do data science project. But then, they are not able to bring this innovation to the market. The course is made of four modules and 14 lectures. The very first one is an introductory module. Where we welcome you, this one, and we try to explain to you how data-driven decision making can help data center organization to become successful. Then we cover big data and data science and we bring you to the terminology of foundational modules. We will start from a success story, the one of Netflix. One of the first adopter of big data and data science technology. We will move into an introduction to machine learning and specifically, we want you to understand the difference between machines learning and programming. The third module of the course is about data science methods you can apply in your business. We will cover supervised and unsupervised methods coming from machine learning and we will help you understand the intuition behind this methods. We will not again cover programming or implementation details. Instead, all the methods will be presented starting from a typical business use case. We will cover the methods in an intuitive way, and we will help you understand the foundational aspects through a guided tour over the behavior of the methods on the data. We will show you animated explanations and interactive drawings so that you can learn how the approach works on practical and simple examples. In the fourth and last module, we will conclude with challenges that are risking data driven business, and we will help you understand the trade-offs in using data and data analysis techniques in innovation. Finally, we will conclude with final remarks and outlook in the next step in your educational paths. The introductory course, is part of a broader educational initiative featuring a blended course that helps you learn and understand the concepts about big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence, data science, data valorization, communications, and visualization. The purpose again, is to help you in fostering business innovation and not learning the technicalities. We will provide you with additional online modules in a full course and we will invite you to come to face-to-face sessions, where we will use clip that are classics and lot of networking, for you to share expectation and experiences in business innovation funded on data.