Throwing one's heart over the barrier

"I am very grateful to Bocconi because I arrived here as a young man in the right place at the right time, in an institution that had a great history but above all a huge potential for growth". Stefano Caselli, Full Professor at the Department of Finance and freshly-appointed Dean of SDA Bocconi School of Management, arrived at Bocconi in 1994 directly from Genoa, where he had graduated and where as a child had decided that being a university professor would be his job. Or maybe his mission. "I arrived as an assistant professor and at the same time I enrolled in the doctorate at Siena, because the PhD had not yet been launched at Bocconi. And, almost immediately, I was also involved in SDA. Very hard but exciting and creative years".

Caselli, who held the role of Dear for International Affairs at Bocconi for 10 years, acknowledges he has two souls converging in a single direction, the institutional mind and the entrepreneurial mind: "I love the University very much and, to use a football metaphor, I can say that I'm married to the jersey. At the same time, however, I am constantly looking for new challenges, I need to always feel at the center of the fray". In his previous role, Professor Caselli traveled everywhere, collecting "so many frequent flyer points that I had to give them away because I could never manage to take advantage of them", he jokes. "One day, a few years from now, I'll start counting all the planes that I've taken". But above all he has brought the Bocconi name everywhere around the globe, helping to make it a truly international university. "Internationalization is a very diverse set of things", he says, "It means the foreign students who come to Bocconi and those of Bocconi who go abroad, it means faculty and employees coming from all over the world. And also the big academic networks, such as CEMS and Civica. But above all it is about the research that is produced here and that has an impact everywhere. And also the Bocconi Summer School, an initiative that has brought great results".

The greatest resource that universities have at their disposal remains human capital: "It is here that the talents of tomorrow are formed, it is very important to always push the frontier of knowledge forward. And finance, as I understand it, is the topic that links economics, management of financial institutions, market regulation and the social dimension". A few weeks ago, as part of his new remit, Stefano Caselli was given the task of taking SDA Bocconi higher and higher: "We need to throw our hearts over the barrier even farther," he says, recalling the dictum of SDA founder Claudio Demattè. "SDA Bocconi has made huge strides. Now its campus will have to increasingly become a point of attraction for students and executives from all over the world. But, above all, we'll have to learn how to navigate uncharted waters to continue our growth".