Opinions & Interviews

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 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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2025-12-09 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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2025-11-24 Partha Dasgupta

Managing nature’s portfolio: why natural capital really matters

Whether as farmers or fishers, foresters or miners, households or companies, governments or communities, we manage the assets to which we have access, in line with our motivations as best as we can. But the best each of us can achieve with our individual portfolios may nevertheless result in a massive collective failure to manage the global portfolio of all our assets. We are like a crowd of people, each of us trying to keep balance on a hanging bridge, only to bring it crashing down. How would you know whether you are managing your portfolio of assets well? What rule would you follow? For simplicity, ...

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2025-10-16 Franco Gabrielli, Elisabetta Trinchero

Public leadership and the culture of safety: beyond emergency management

The world around us is, by definition, more complex than any model we use to make sense of it. […] In this systemic context, public leadership is called to radical transformation. It is no longer enough to be skilled administrators or efficient decision-makers. What is needed is the ability to interpret and steer change, to be architects of meaning, weavers of trust and relationships. This is a form of leadership that not only reacts to events but anticipates them, turning them into opportunities for learning and institutional innovation. Sensemaking and meaning making succinctly capture this ...

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2025-07-07 E&M Plus

Doing business in a changing world: how Italian managers can lead the future of export

Director Battocchi, the global landscape is entering a new cycle of tensions and instability. Amid regional conflicts, trade restrictions, and the renewed focus on economic security, how are Italian companies coping with these shifts in their international operations? The Italian economy is highly diversified across sectors. We rank among the world’s top three exporters in roughly 1,000 out of 5,000 product categories. Italian companies have also diversified geographically: about half of our exports go outside the European Union. These factors provide Italy with a solid degree of flexibility ...

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2025-06-10 Davide Reina

A disassembly line for the dustainable transition

Everyone knows that a circular economy is essential for reducing CO2 emissions. According to calculations by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, about 30 percent of all the decarbonization needed by 2050 to meet globally agreed targets depends on the circular economy. Few people, however, realize that the circular economy is also indispensable if we want to avoid running out of raw materials. The reason is simple: demographics. The world population has grown from 2.5 to 8 billion people in less than eighty years—an exponential and unprecedented increase in history. In the span of what is roughly ...

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2025-04-03 Roberto Vona

“Deep Blue”: Exploring the Depths of Space and Oceans at the Festival of Management

The second edition of the Festival of Management by SIMA – the Italian Society of Management – solidified the innovative initiative launched in February 2023 to elevate management culture within Italian universities. With over a thousand in-person attendees at Bocconi University, in Milan, the event underscored the need to reestablish human connections after years spent in "non-places" devoid of relational intelligence. The goal was to create a physical, welcoming, and empathetic gathering – free and open to all – where participants could not only shake hands but also exchange values of ...

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2025-03-25 Bruno Busacca, Maria Carmela Ostillio

Brand and Artificial Intelligence: Two Key Questions to Explore New Frontiers

The continuous development of AI opens up ever-new strategic and managerial horizons for businesses, revealing extraordinary opportunities in terms of efficiency (a goal that seems to be prevalent today) and effectiveness (an area that offers unexplored avenues for analysis and thus requires further investigation). These opportunities are inevitably linked to various risks, stemming not only from the inherent uncertainty of radical innovations. Among these, from the perspective of brand management, the risks arising from the following should not be underestimated: a) errors in the data used to ...

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