Democratic capitalism works best when its institutions operate at their highest purpose: when markets are well-informed, governance is grounded in real knowledge, and the space between business, academia, government, and media is actively maintained, not left unattended. These are the voices that shape the conditions for long-term value creation.
That is the context in which the IRG CEO Monitor at SDA Bocconi School of Management is being conceived: to give those voices a home, a method, and continuity — and to anchor them into a new architecture of informed dialogue, rigorous evidence, and institutional cooperation.
A structural gap, measured for the first time
Across 352 global companies representing $59.2 trillion in market capitalization, an AI-driven semantic analysis of 2.17 million public documents — including news coverage, regulatory filings, policy papers, and media content — reveals a striking pattern: not one company crosses the threshold at which its embedded value begins to be fully recognized by markets and its operational knowledge meaningfully reaches the broader institutional conversation. The global average is 13.74 out of 30.
The analysis comes from the Influence, Relevance, Growth framework — IRG — the AI-driven semantic intelligence system designed to measure how visible and legible a company’s knowledge becomes across markets, institutions, and media ecosystems.
Of the ten dimensions assessed by the framework, the weakest are Industry Power, Media Power, and Thought Leadership — precisely the dimensions that distinguish leadership from execution. This is not a communication problem. It is a structural one.
The double cost of knowledge that stays inside
The business leaders possess valuable knowledge, but too much of it never leaves the company.
When that happens, markets underprice what they cannot fully see. Policymakers regulate with incomplete information. Public debate evolves without the contribution of the people who understand industrial reality best.
The first cost is financial. IRG data shows a statistically significant relationship between a company’s score and its price-to-earnings multiple: each additional IRG point corresponds to roughly a 6% P/E premium.
The second cost is systemic. Many of the leaders best positioned to explain technological change, industrial transition, and long-term investment have retreated almost entirely into execution. At the same time, academia is struggling to maintain its role as the institution that connects knowledge to practice and gives it permanence across generations of leaders. The vacuum is increasingly filled by polarization, reactive policymaking, and short-term narratives. These two costs are connected. The same conditions that improve market recognition also improve the quality of the environment in which markets operate. This is the strategic case for engagement both as a matter of corporate citizenship and as a matter of economic logic.
What CEOs are actually required to do
Since explaining industrial reality to investors, institutions, and society is a fundamental part of leadership, CEOs should contribute industry expertise to institutional and public debate in a disciplined, evidence-based, and non-partisan way. This does not mean getting involved in politics.
The IRG data suggests something many executives intuitively understand but rarely articulate: the same behaviors that improve market recognition can also improve the quality of regulation and public discourse. These are not competing objectives.
The IRG Intelligence engine
The IRG Intelligence framework processes publicly available signals through semantic AI to produce a ten-pillar diagnostic score ranging from 0 to 30. The pillars include dimensions such as Thought Leadership, Media Power, Policy Influence, Governance Transparency, CEO Creativity, and Stakeholder Trust. The framework draws on five established research traditions — investor relations and visibility valuation, narrative economics, CEO media visibility, intangible asset pricing, and capital markets microstructure — integrating them into the first diagnostic that acts on all five simultaneously. The score is designed to be actionable. It identifies where a company stands and where targeted improvement produces the greatest return. Its output is a structured diagnosis and a prioritized roadmap — the starting point for any organization that wishes to close the distance between the value it creates and the value the world can see.
The IRG CEO Monitor
The gap between what companies know and what markets, institutions, and societies understand has become too large to ignore. The IRG CEO Monitor, housed at SDA Bocconi School of Management, was created to help reduce it.
Closing this gap requires four forms of capability working together within a single architecture. Business leaders generate industrial knowledge. Media organizations distribute and amplify it. Academia, bound by its mission of rigor, independence, and generational transmission, codifies, validates, and shapes that knowledge into forms that inform policy and endure across leadership cycles. Leadership organizations provide the cross-border and cross-sector convening power that gives the system scale. These actors shape markets and institutions every day, yet they rarely operate within a common framework designed to connect industrial expertise, market recognition, and institutional understanding.
Far from being a networking forum, it is a structured initiative built around a measurable problem, an empirical methodology, and a long-term view of leadership in modern capitalism. This is a practicum, not a discussion. A laboratory, not a lecture hall.
The IRG CEO Monitor will convene a highly selective cohort of international CEOs, conduct confidential cross-border strategic dialogues, produce curated analytical briefings, share research findings, host an annual engagement, and publish a flagship annual report on the evolving role of business across markets and institutions.
In cooperation with the Aspen Institute, and with CNBC and Class CNBC as media partners, SDA Bocconi and IRG have been steadily incubating and nurturing this leadership project through the IRG Conferences held in New York in 2023 and in Milan in 2024 and 2025 in a dialogue with world’s thought-leaders.
We intend to consolidate and deepen these alliances, as the engagement of leading institutions and distinguished media platforms is essential to shaping, sustaining, and directing meaningful change. On this basis, we now set out on a more robust and visionary course, worthy of the responsibilities that leadership in modern capitalism demands.
