Managerial Insights

2026-03-11 Donato Masciandaro

Trump and the Monroe Doctrine 2.0: between political dominance and monetary instability

“The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we've superseded it by a lot, by a real lot. They now call it the Donroe doctrine.” These were Donald Trump’s words, spoken just hours after the Maduro operation in Venezuela. Leaving aside yet another demonstration that modesty is hardly the defining virtue of the current occupant of the White House, what does this mean? In December 1823, President Monroe, in his annual message to Congress, outlined a foreign policy design for the United States whose ultimate outcome – beyond the letter and the initially and formally declared objectives – was ...

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2026-03-04 Andrea Beltratti, Alessia Bezzecchi

AI must not only cut costs. It must create revenues

After a 2025 marked by continuous increases in the prices of stocks most exposed to Artificial Intelligence – an enthusiasm that also lifted the valuation of less exposed companies – 2026 began in a very different way. Within a few days, the share prices of firms producing software for services fell by more than 20%, influenced in part by a report from analysts at Citrini Research and by a blog post from Matt Shumer, CEO and co-founder of Otherside AI. It is easy to be confused by such price movements, especially for those who question investors’ ability to rationally price listed companies ...

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2026-03-03 Bruno Busacca

Marketing, Quo Vadis?

The metaphorical meanings of the expression Quo vadis? are often associated with uncertainty and doubts around the path to take, as well as about one’s role and identity. In short, Quo vadis? is a question that invites deep reflection on direction and purpose. These interpretations aptly capture the ongoing reflections on the future of marketing, particularly in light of the role that big data (Wedel and Kannan, 2016) and generative artificial intelligence are playing in reshaping its tools, approaches, skills, and processes. Such reflections range from enthusiasm for the enormous capacity of ...

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2026-02-24 Elena Coffetti, Alfredo Biffi

Thinking in projects: the strategic lever for companies that want to innovate

Structuring corporate management around the project portfolio means, for management, undertaking a path of transformation—or clarification—of how the company operates through projects. The reasons behind this choice are multiple, foremost among them innovation. Today, the need to generate innovation and channel it into its various forms of expression is felt—albeit with varying intensity—by all companies. Adopting the logic of “thinking in projects” makes it possible to spread sensitivity toward innovation and to organize it at the level of the enterprise as a system. Companies ...

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2026-02-17 Gianmarco Ottaviano

From the “horizontal frontier” to the “vertical frontier”: american geoeconomics goes into orbit

In the European public debate, when space is discussed, the tone often still oscillates between the epic of conquest and the rhetoric of scientific cooperation. In the United States, by contrast, space has become something far more prosaic and, at the same time, far more strategic: a natural extension of industrial policy and national economic security. At the beginning of 2026, the question of whether the American geoeconomic shift is moving upward—toward the “vertical frontier”—has an unequivocal answer: yes. With the Executive Order “Ensuring American Space Superiority,” signed ...

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2026-02-10

From the platform economy to the ecosystem economy: how AI is rewriting global competition

Amazon, Alibaba, Apple and Google are the champions of the platform economy. But a new frontier is emerging: the ecosystem economy. Unlike a platform, which has a clearly defined center and a dominant player that controls the rules of the game, an ecosystem is a networked set of relationships in which multiple companies, organizations and communities collaborate. There is no longer a single infrastructure overseeing every flow, but a fabric of open connections, powered by APIs, microservices and shared standards. McKinsey estimates that by 2030 these open ecosystems will capture around 30% of ...

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2026-02-03 Kirsimarja Blomqvist, Snejina Michailova, Charles C. Snow

Creating value in global knowledge networks. Trust as a strategic lever for collaboration

Introduction Imagine a meeting of fiercely competing Finnish telecom operators, major TV channels, a terminal manufacturer, information and communication technology (ICT) integrators and public-sector officials. They were all sitting together around a table, all deeply engaged in an open discussion about the potential of a new business opportunity. They collaborated intensively to co-create a systemic innovation integrating telecom networks, terminals, applications, and content. None of them alone had the required knowledge and resources, but together they came up with a highly complex system ...

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2026-01-28 Antonio Giannino

The “nervous system” of cybersecurity: data, automation, and response to reduce risk

Today’s companies face a paradox: a greater number of security tools has led to greater complexity, data overload, and critical visibility gaps, effectively increasing the risk of breaches. The average Security Operations Center (SOC) is flooded with more than 10,000 alerts per day, with an estimated 30% not even reviewed due to volume and a high false-positive rate. This phenomenon, known as alert fatigue (“fatigue from alerts”), is one of the main causes of analyst burnout and directly contributes to failure to detect real threats. This chapter will demonstrate how the integrated pair ...

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2026-01-28 Antonio Giannino

Why SMEs are the new front line of cybersecurity

In today’s digital ecosystem, the perception that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are “too small to be a target” is a dangerous and obsolete anachronism. The strategic reality is diametrically opposed: SMEs are not only a primary target, but are often regarded by malicious actors as the “weak point” of the entire economic value chain. Their interconnectedness with large corporations, in their role as suppliers of goods and services, turns them into a privileged attack vector. By compromising an SME with less sophisticated defences, an attacker can gain a foothold from which ...

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2026-01-22 Matteo Cristofaro, Kate Black, Salvatore Moccia

Training managers in the era of AI: why judgement matters more than algorithms

Generative artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming management education in business schools around the world. This is not just about new teaching tools, but about a profound change in how judgment, responsibility, and decision-making are taught—and assessed. It is from this transformation that the Vademecum on Generative AI in Management Education was born, promoted by the Management Education Committee of IFSAM, the international federation of management academies and academic associations. Although addressed to the education sector, the Vademecum delivers a direct message to managers, ...

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