The second Innovation Talk of the autumn cycle will host Ernesto Sirolli, President of the Sirolli Institute for Enterprise Facilitation. The event is organized in collaboration with Philip Morris Italia.
Ernesto Sirolli draws from the African spirit, that has influenced most of his youth, his new way of applying Economy to the territory and the creation of a business where value is driven through human capital. Innovation and Entrepreneurship as a Key to Reduce Inequality, is the title of the Master Lecture that Sirolli will dedicate to the theme of entrepreneurial and social innovation, discussed together with Rosa Grimaldi, Director of the Executive Master in Technology and Innovation Management at BBS and Deputy Rector for Entrepreneurship at the University of Bologna.
Born in Altino, in the province of Chieti, Sirolli spent his childhood between Italy and Libya, where his father worked as a Primary Radiologist. He graduated in Political Science at the Sapienza University of Rome and immediately developed a strong passion for the problems of Economic and Social Development.
In 1977 he moved to South Africa, where he started a PhD at the University of Stellenbosch. Two years later, he obtained a scholarship at the Murdoch University in Perth, where he lived until 1995 and where he developed the first working cooperative in Western Australia, which won the “Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth” Award as the best project of work creation in Australia in 1982.
Sirolli created and directed for four years the “Multicultural Artist Agency” that helps artists and artisans who have just arrived in Australia to find work in their field of art. During his business he traded more than four thousand work contracts and launched the career of artists from over one hundred countries.
Back in Perth, Sirolli was invited to apply his economic development model to an isolated town inhabited by fishermen and farmers, facing a fierce economic collapse. Sirolli’s work in Esperante achieved extraordinary results with 27 new businesses in 9 months. This success has been acknowledged by the Federal Government and the Government of Western Australia, giving him the opportunity to create a new profession by training “Entrepreneurship Facilitators” that the government employed in 20 rural communities.
The results of the Australian experience are documented in television programs, academic texts, government reports, and parliamentary testimonies. In 1989 Sirolli was invited to the United States as Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota where in less than six months he started the first Business Facilitation Project in Lincoln County, on the South Dakota border. Here he writes his first book: “Ripples from the Zambezi“, whose subtitle is “Passion, Entrepreneurship and the Resurgence of the Local Economy”.
Ernesto Sirolli is an important business facilitator, who conveys his experience and knowledge through “The Sirolli Institute – International Entreprise Facilitation“, set up with the purpose of teaching the theories he has developed during his life and career. Over three hundred rural communities, on four continents, have already adopted his methodology by creating about thirty thousand new economic activities.
The event, dedicated to BBS Community will be held in Italian and English language with simultaneous translation. In order to participate it is necessary to register.
The event is organized in collaboration with Istituto Carlo Cattaneo, Giornate sulle disuguaglianze.
