Managerial Insights

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 judgment 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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2026-01-15 E&M Plus

More trust, more future

The word chosen by Treccani[1] as the “Word of the Year 2025” is “trust”: one of the most searched terms on the platform and the one showing the highest percentage increase compared to the previous year. Given that trust is a fundamental concept in both social and personal life, it is hardly surprising that it has moved to the centre of attention in a period of extreme uncertainty, and that it may also be linked to another word beginning with the letter F: “future”. Our Scientific Director, Sandro Castaldo – who has devoted decades of academic research and managerial dissemination ...

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2025-12-23 Fabrizio Zerbini

The drivers of change in urban mobility

Urban mobility is not a concept that necessarily conjures positive associations. Transportation systems are often at the center of criticism in discussions around the green transition – and with good reason. According to the European Environment Agency (2022), the transport sector is the only segment in the broader energy system that where CO₂ emissions have increased since the end of the twentieth century. Moreover, urban traffic has progressively become an objective constraint on individual freedom. To travel just ten kilometers in the city, it takes a London resident an average of 36 minutes, ...

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2025-12-22 Ronnie Rith

CSR as a strategic lever in professional football clubs

The agenda of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been gaining momentum in the industries of professional team sports, including the football industry. Professional football clubs have been engaging more intentionally and extensively in a plethora of CSR activities. In practice, CSR engagement activities, in the forms of community-oriented programmes, socio-cultural activities, and environmental initiatives, have been well endeavoured by European football clubs in the top-tier leagues of England’s Premier League, France’s Ligue 1, Germany’s Bundesliga, Italy’s Serie A, Spain’s ...

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2025-12-19 Alberto Grando

The glass half full of Italian innovation

One of the key recommendations highlighted in the Report on the Future of European Competitiveness (Draghi, 2024) stresses the need to “bridge the innovation gap,” particularly with respect to the United States. The report notes that “in Europe, innovative digital firms are unable to scale or attract financing, resulting in a significant gap in later-stage investment between the EU and the United States.” Among the various obstacles hindering innovation, the document also points out that Europe lacks a sufficient number of academic institutions capable of achieving top levels of excellence, ...

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