"CompLab" is the blog on competitiveness and growth coordinated by Carlo Altomonte. On the occasion of the launch of SHIELD (Strategic Hub for Integrated Education on Leadership & Defense), we publish a contribution by the Director, Carlo Altomonte, and the Deputy Director, Walter Rauti, on the evolution and articulation of research themes that, starting from defense, influence the economy, finance, industry, and geopolitics on a European scale.
The real revolution in national defense and security is not measured in budgets but in the speed at which innovation can occur. Technological development moves faster than bureaucracy: what emerges in a university laboratory becomes civilian technology within a few months and soon after turns into operational capability in the field. Commercial drones, artificial intelligence, cloud platforms, and cybersecurity systems have already dissolved the traditional boundary between the civilian and military spheres. Today, the future of security hinges on the speed of adaptation, the time separating research from concrete application, and no longer on the decades required by past weapons programs.
Protecting a country does not simply mean maintaining arsenals; it means ensuring the continuity of essential services, the resilience of networks, and social cohesion. It is a paradigm shift: security as reaction gives way to protection as an integrated system of prevention, adaptation, and response. Protection thus becomes a strategy that brings together defense, the economy, and society, grounded in tools typical of contemporary management, such as risk management, business continuity, and the measurement of generated value. Planning scenarios, identifying vulnerabilities, and allocating resources in a flexible and transparent manner is no longer the sole responsibility of companies: it is the necessary condition for building intelligent and sustainable security.
The conflict in Ukraine has shown that the speed of learning and innovation has become a decisive factor. Conventional military strength matters less than the ability to integrate civilian technologies into operational contexts, to learn in real time, and to adjust course promptly. In an ecosystem where the technology cycle is measured in months rather than years, security requires a managerial mindset: agile decision-making processes, flexible procurement, and structured collaboration between the public and private sectors. The goal is no longer to build a vertical apparatus, but a dynamic platform capable of integrating expertise, innovation, and responsibility.
For Italy, this challenge is both industrial and strategic. It is necessary to create a supply chain that does not limit itself to discussing defense or security but embraces the broader concept of protection. This means building a network that connects large industrial groups, innovative small and medium-sized enterprises, and research centers, harnessing the dual-use potential of emerging technologies. Innovations born in the civilian sector—such as sensors, robotics, and artificial intelligence—must be able to flow into the security sphere and, at the same time, return to civilian industry, generating value. Achieving this goal requires managerial tools rooted in performance measurement, risk management, and investment models inspired by public–private partnership logic geared toward innovation.
The transition from security to protection is above all a cultural transformation. The public sector must move beyond an emergency mindset and embrace one of prevention and planning. This entails adopting predictive analysis tools, accountability models, and leadership capable of innovating and making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. It marks the shift from a defense that reacts to a protection that anticipates.
In the twenty-first century, security is no longer an expenditure line but a strategic asset. It is what safeguards the economy, supports competitiveness, and strengthens trust in the nation’s system.
In this context, Italy is not starting from scratch. Alongside institutions and industry, the academic world is also rising to the challenge of security understood as a systemic good rather than a separate sector. SDA Bocconi, with the launch of SHIELD (Strategic Hub for Integrated Education on Leadership & Defense), has chosen to become one of the drivers of this transformation. The goal is to train a new generation of public leaders and industrial managers capable of confronting the hybrid complexity of our time, in which the resilience of a nation is inseparable from that of its businesses and communities.
Originally published in Fortune Italia
