Anna Gatti: a new challenge for life sciences

Anna Gatti has been appointed Associate Professor of Practice in Strategy and Entrepreneurshipat at SDA Bocconi School of Management just a few weeks ago. Her curriculum is impressive. After graduating in Economics at Bocconi, she got two PhDs in Business Administration and Criminology, and a post-doc in Organizational Behavior at Stanford. An expert in operations, corporate governance and new technologies, she has been a member of the board in five public and four private companies. Anna Gatti’s profile marries strong Italian roots with an international-class competence developed from her multidimensional (rather than multidisciplinary and multicultural) expertise.

From Digital Sales and Operation Executive to angel in Digital Businesses and Artificial Intelligence, sitting in several boards: is there a leitmotiv connecting your journey, which has certainly been professional, but also cultural and personal?  

My mantra is the curiosity and interest in helping people make their everyday life simpler and possibly better, by exploiting the data and technologies at hand. This isn’t actually far from the curiosity driving researchers in collecting, analyzing and giving meaning to data. We should never forget it is culture that guides technology, not vice versa, and the measure of culture is respect of human dignity.

From Italy to the United States (specifically California) via Switzerland: you have given and taken along the trip. What are the three things you consider to be the most important in your journey? 

Being self-confident, especially when you are outside your comfort zone; the value of persistence, in your professional and personal life; being clear about your core values, where there is no room for compromise.

Life sciences are your next challenge. Why now and why here? 

Just like the past decade has been marked by AI innovations, the present one is going to experiment a lot around discoveries in life sciences and their reverberation in our daily life. I have cooperated for over a year with those Stanford University professors who are working at scaling precision medicine models. Awareness is increasing everywhere about the impact life-science innovations are going to have from a social and economic point of view, as well as for business models and organizations. SDA Bocconi’s DEVO Lab has already developed a long and robust experience in analyzing digital innovation trends and in evaluating their impact on businesses; CERGAS, on the other hand, is an internationally renowned Lab for its contributions to the health sector. That is why this environment is especially apt at broadening knowledge and experiences in a fast-growing area, namely the assessment of the business and organizational impacts of innovation in life sciences.

SDA Bocconi School of Management