Italia Innovation
I co-founded Italia Innovation as an independent research studio dedicated to understanding and supporting the future of the Italian economy and its civic fabric. What began as a student experiment has grown into a platform where research, fieldwork, and institutional practice intersect — bringing together companies, scholars, and emerging leaders to study how organizations shape the regions and communities around them.
Over the years, our work has been joined by businesses that share a commitment to excellence in high-quality and sustainable production. Some are global leaders — Patagonia, Zegna, Barilla, the illy Group, Ornellaia. Others are emblematic mid-sized innovators — Pasta Mancini, Bonotto Textiles, Dandelion Chocolate, Verve Coffee Roasters. Their participation reflects a common conviction: that long-term value is built not only through products, but through the institutional ecosystems that sustain them.
On the scholarly side, we have selected more than 200 undergraduate and graduate students from leading universities across the world — Harvard, MIT, Yale, UC Berkeley, Stanford, HKUST, NUS, LSE, Sciences Po, Bocconi, Oxford. These students have joined us in factories, archives, and regional communities, engaging directly with entrepreneurs, artisans, and civic actors. The goal has always been the same: to understand how economic and institutional life evolves through practice, not only through theory.
Our program conversations have benefited from the insight of academic and professional leaders who have helped refine our inquiries. John Bruce, Director of the Transdisciplinary Design Program at Parsons; Robert J. Jackson Jr., former SEC Commissioner and Director of the Program on Corporate Law and Policy at NYU; Bill Emmott, former Editor-in-Chief of The Economist; and Riccardo Illy, President of Polo del Gusto and former Governor of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, have all contributed their perspectives. Riccardo Illy also served as academic director of a series of thematic programs that led to the publication of The Art of Excellent Products, released by HarperCollins in the United States and La Nave di Teseo in Italy in 2022.
Italia Innovation itself began from a simple instinct. As a 23-year-old student at the University of Padova Law School, seated on benches steeped in centuries of institutional memory, I felt a growing desire to connect my academic experience to the realities of the surrounding economic and social landscape. I wanted to understand how institutions actually work in practice, and to build relationships with peers from around the world who shared similar questions.
Between 2013 and 2014, this impulse led me to assemble the first coalition of scholars, practitioners, and businesses — a small team that produced a prototypical version of what would eventually become the Italia Innovation Program. That early edition was modest, improvised in parts, but anchored in a conviction that learning and institutional understanding deepen when theory meets real contexts.
A decade later, the program has held more than ten editions, welcomed over 250 alumni, and built a network of academic and business partners who continue to collaborate on research and applied projects. Italia Innovation today operates as a research studio, a learning platform, and a field laboratory — a place where ideas about corporate statecraft, institutional change, and regional development are tested not only intellectually, but in direct conversation with the people and organizations shaping Italy’s economic future.