Opinions & Interviews

2026-11-04 Roberto Vona, Fabrizio Di Girolamo

Lessons from tennis: unconventional reflections on corporate distress

Even people who are not tennis fans know that the forehand and backhand are the two basic strokes of the game. At tennis clubs, moreover, one often hears that the preferred stroke - or the one most players execute better - is the forehand, but it is clear that the backhand is no less important, for the obvious reason that without the latter there would be no forehand. The forehand represents what seems more intuitive and, mechanically, more immediate or easier to execute, whereas the backhand, generally more difficult to perform, is often implicitly associated with what is counterintuitive, because, ...

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2026-10-27 Francesco Morace, Marco Zanardi

From ownership to experience: retail that distributes the future

On May 2, 2026, during his lectio magistralis in Parma, Brian Eno—the inventor of ambient music and a leading experimenter in artistic, sound, and light installations—introduced his two projects, SEED and My Light Years, presented in two locations in the city (the Monumental Complex of San Paolo and the Ospedale Vecchio), by explaining: my goal has always been to invent worlds in which people could feel good. If we had to summarize what we have illustrated in these pages, outlining the current state of retail and imagining its role in distributing the future, we could repeat the same idea. ...

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2026-07-28 Laura Colm

The pet economy as a management laboratory

When examining the business practices and managerial approaches of players in the pet economy, beyond the differences among categories, offering models, company size, and market positioning, a number of recurring regularities emerge. The responses developed by firms do not, in fact, appear random or exclusively tied to the contingencies of individual segments; rather, they tend to refer back to three structural characteristics that run deeply through the entire sector and shape its evolution. These are, in particular: (1) the humanization of the pet, (2) the presence of a dual customer journey, ...

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2026-06-04 Angelo Cavallo, Federico Frattini, Tommaso Canonici

Persistent growth: why expanding is no longer enough

A recent scientific study shows that only 15% of the companies that exhibited high growth in 1985 were able to sustain it for at least thirty years. McKinsey reached the same conclusion in a study examining the performance of the world’s 5,000 largest companies. In particular, the study found that the median corporate growth rate was 2.8% (considering the ten years prior to Covid), and that only one company in eight recorded annual growth rates above 10%. The problem of “persistent growth” is rooted not only in contextual and contingent factors, such as the pandemic or geopolitical and economic ...

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2026-04-23 Maria Carmela Ostillio, Antonella Di Lazzaro

Beyond the Festival: Sanremo as cultural infrastructure and brand platform

To observe the Sanremo Festival still means confronting a media object that is difficult to place within the traditional categories of television entertainment. For a few days each year, the Festival suspends the fragmentation of the contemporary media experience and recomposes a rare form of collective attention, one that cuts across age groups, cultural competencies, and consumption practices. Sanremo is not simply an event to watch, but an experience to inhabit: it is commented on, discussed, contested, and shared both in real time and afterwards. The music competition is only one of the layers ...

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2026-03-31 Enrico Della Gatta

Why defence has become a key sector for the markets

For a long time, defence was perceived almost exclusively as a state cost, and in certain cultural circles even as an unproductive expense, a taboo to be confined to the margins of public and economic debate. Yet the defence of the community has always represented a pillar of society: it reflects collective fears and priorities, but above all the ability to organize resources and technologies in the service of common security. In recent years, a change has taken place that has been as sudden as it has been striking, and perhaps could no longer be postponed. The world of finance, faster than politics ...

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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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2026-01-22 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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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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2025-12-09 Yingying Zhang-Zhang

The power of shared ideas: IFSAM’s journey in a book

A living archive of global academic collaboration, a tribute to intellectual kinship, and a call to action for the future of management scholarship. The IFSAM 35th Anniversary Memory Book is far more than a commemorative publication. Edited by Yingying Zhang-Zhang and Nic Beech, the volume gathers approximately 40 reflections from nearly 50 scholars across five continents, each offering a distinctive lens on the evolution, impact, and aspirations of the International Federation of Scholarly Associations of Management (IFSAM). A Federation Rooted in Diversity and Dialogue Founded in 1990 with the ...

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