Archive

2025-04-14 Gianmario Verona

Digital and sustainable decisions for a changing world

We’re living in the digital age and facing challenges linked to sustainability, so to put it another way, this is the century of digital and sustainable decisions. For some time, digital was fundamentally seen as an object, a tool: a smartphone, a tablet, a smart TV. We recognized the pleasure of the game (as Alessandro Baricco deftly describes it in his novel "The Game"), but governments and businesses didn’t have the foggiest notion of digital’s innovative potential at an economic level, so they didn’t understand its tremendous industrial impact. Suffice to say, apart from the US and ...

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2025-04-09 Donato Masciandaro

Trump, Finance, and Pandora’s Box

Will President Donald Trump go down in history – again – for opening Pandora’s box in finance? There are at least two reasons to think so: cryptocurrencies and structured finance. Let’s start with so-called cryptocurrencies. Since Trump returned to the White House, crypto trading volumes have surged. Even back in August, when he was still a candidate, Trump had loudly declared he wanted to make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the world.” And he didn’t stop at words: since last October, Trump and his three sons – skirting basic conflict-of-interest norms – have lent their name ...

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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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2025-03-31 Bruno Busacca, Giuseppe Bertoli

Leveraging Loyalty to Create Value

Companies need to manage their customer base according to loyalty-based logic, focused on building and maintaining loyal relationships that stand the test of time. This reality has long been underscored by the shift from transactional to relationship marketing. The digital revolution has fueled and accelerated this transition, redefining the structure and competitive mechanisms of many industries and creating new ones, breaking down geographic barriers and activating processes of cross-sector convergence. On the one hand, the exponential increase in available information (on individual preferences, ...

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2025-03-28 Sandro Castaldo

How to Gain Maximum Trust

We are experiencing a period of tremendous economic and social uncertainty, marked by international political tensions and stagnant consumption. Despite a slowdown in inflation, rising consumer prices over the past three years have eroded household purchasing power, already under pressure from high energy costs and rising financing costs. In this unpredictable environment, characterized by instability and limited consumer spending capacity, demand is shifting towards savings. This trend is reflected in the rapid expansion of convenience-oriented retailers. Across Europe, as discount stores continue ...

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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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2025-03-18 Gianmarco Ottaviano

The Oval Office Desk and the Paradoxes of Trump’s Protectionism

In a remake of a film already seen in 2018, President Donald Trump has resumed imposing or threatening to impose tariffs on imports from the United States’ main trading partners. Now, as then, the rationale behind this escalation is twofold. On the one hand, an administration led by a “deal-maker” believes that all trade agreements signed by previous administrations (including his own, as in the case of the 2020 agreement with Canada and Mexico) are, if not disastrous, at least unambitious and therefore need to be renegotiated – preferably through pressure or threats. On the other hand, ...

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2025-03-11 Francesco Perrini

Why Sustainability is Worth It (Even if Showing It Off is No Longer in Vogue)

“You’re good, and they throw stones at you. You’re bad, and they throw stones at you,” sang Gian Pieretti and Antoine at the Sanremo Festival in 1967. Fifty-eight years later, the sentiment described in the Italian song risks silencing the conversation on sustainability. The term 'greenhushing' refers to companies minimizing or completely avoiding communication about their environmental goals and results in order to avoid criticism or negative reactions. The term gained traction in late 2022 when South Pole, a Swiss sustainable finance consulting firm, released a report revealing that ...

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2025-03-06 Salvatore Vicari

Luigi Guatri: The Legacy of a Master

Professor Luigi Guatri's legacy resonates deeply within Bocconi University and throughout the landscape of Italian economic and business thought. A master in the truest sense of the word: a rigorous scholar, an intellectual guide, and a point of reference for generations of academics and students. After teaching at the University of Genoa and the University of Parma, he returned to Bocconi as a full professor in 1969, taking on roles of increasing responsibility: director of various institutes, managing director, rector, and vice president. I met Professor Guatri in 1973 while attending his course ...

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2025-03-03 Andrea Beltratti, Alessia Bezzecchi

Finance for Europe

In his latest report on Europe’s present and future competitiveness, Mario Draghi argues that Europe is in a paradoxical situation: it appears stable but has unknowingly fallen ill. It has set ambitious environmental targets, possibly beyond its reach, while neglecting applied business research and struggling with the ambiguity between national sovereignty and the role of supranational institutions. Rather than treating terminal illnesses, can we still prevent the worst through proactive interventions? And can finance play a role? Europe in the Third MillenniumIt is easy to overlook Europe’s ...

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