Team-Izzo-F

What's our secret? Great people.​

Francesco Izzo

PhD, professor of Strategic Management of Innovation. His research activity is focused on innovation management, growth strategy, entrepreneurship.

Strategy & Marketing

Francesco Izzo

Strategy & Marketing

Full Professor of Strategic Management of Innovation at the Department of Economics, University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli.
He served as Dean of Department from 2017 to 2020. He is also member of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ph. D. teaching board. For a long time, he taught also Corporate Strategy, International Marketing, City Marketing at University Vanvitelli and as visiting professor of Innovation Management and Strategic Planning at the University of Naples Federico II.

His research interests include innovation strategy, regional development, academic spin-off, international strategy of SMEs, innovation in creative industry, cultural entrepreneurship. He is author of a large number of scholarly publications on these topics.


Professor Izzo from 2002 to 2006 was Director of the Department of Management at the Faculty of Economics of
University of Naples 2.


Since 2017, he is member of Valuation Committee of University of Naples L’Orientale, in charge for the valuation of strategic planning and quality of department research. He has head of Valuation Committee of the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, a public research organization controlled by the Ministry of Education and Research, from 2010 up to 2016. The Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn of Naples was established in 1872 by the German scientist Anton Dorn and is among the top research institutions in the world in the fields of marine biology and ecology.
He teaches executive programs and leads senior and top management seminars for many Italian companies. He served as a consultant to Ministry of Innovation, collaborating at programs about regional innovation systems, academic spin-off and venture capital, and to Sviluppo Italia, the Italian Development Agency, in charge of scientific coordination for research and executive projects about foreign investment, technological districts, entrepreneurship. He was member of the Steering Committee of Council of Ministers for the program High-Tech per il Mezzogiorno. From 2007 up to 2011 he coordinated the strategic plan for the development of cultural tourism in Bulgaria (EU project in cooperation with Italian government).


He collaborated as columnist with Il Sole 24 Ore, the Italian major financial newspaper, commenting upon issues as regional development, innovation strategy, cooperation between academy and industry, technology and creative clusters.


He holds a degree in Strategy Management and a Ph.D. in Management from University Federico II in Naples. Before joining University of Naples 2 in 1996 as Assistant Professor of Strategic Management, from 1991 to 1996, he was researcher at Stoà, a business school founded by Iri (the public-owned conglomerate, at that time the leading Italian group in the world) in cooperation with Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


He is a co-founder of Epi-C and he is in charge for strategic development and marketing strategy.