Bocconi: Knowledge that Matters

Political science research is increasingly used by policy makers, organizations and institutions to direct and support their choices. To explain this in this issue of Via Sarfatti 25 is Lanny Martin, an American political scientist who has been with Bocconi since last September. This is important for the academic field itself and for all those students who choose this line of study, where Bocconi is actively involved: after launching the Bachelor in International Politics and Government, next September we will start up the Master of Science in Politics and Policy Analysis. Political science research is also important for the overall impact of knowledge on the whole university system, especially for graduates and research output.

With a graduate employment rate of 94.8% and with our alumni present at the head of companies and institutions (among those most recently moved into top positions, I want to congratulate in particular Mario Nava, new president of Consob, Simone Rossi, CEO Edf Energy, and Silvia Candiani, Managing Director of Microsoft Italy), it is easy to understand the impact that studying at Bocconi has on society.

It is more difficult for non-professionals to evaluate the impact of research. Yet the research work done in Bocconi is increasingly reflected in the real world. Whether we consider the studies on probabilistic population forecasts of the Dondena Center (the paper is by Billari, Melilli and Graziani) adopted by ISTAT to replace the deterministic method, or those of the European project, financed with grants from the ERC, Decide (The impact of DEmographic Changes on Infectious DisEases transmission and control in middle and low income countries), or the algorithms developed by Riccardo Zecchina, Vodafone Chair in Data Science and Machine Learning, the impact of what our researchers are studying is increasingly evident.

Recently, Bocconi joined the World Economic Forum's Global University Leaders Forum (GULF), a community composed of the presidents of 27 of the best universities in the world. The research produced by the universities belonging to GULF, according to a study of the Times Higher education presented in Davos, is equal to 7% of the research produced in the world: if GULF were a nation it would thus rank in third place after the United States and China.

Using Bocconi's new payoff, Knowledge that matters, the world of knowledge is destined to become increasingly key to the evolution of society. Therefore investing in knowledge is a must.