Danilo Messinese
Post Doctoral fellow in Strategy at IE University, Madrid (Spain)

Danilo's main areas of interest are Decision-making under uncertainty and Entrepreneurial strategy. He looks at these themes with the lens of the Bayesian framework.
Danilo is currently working as Post-Doc in Strategy at IE University in Madrid. He took his Ph.D. (cum laude) in Business Administration and Management at Bocconi University (Milan, Italy). He came to his doctoral program with a master’s degree in Theoretical Physics and a specialization degree in Mathematical Finance (cum laude), both at the University of Bologna, and experience as Management Consultant at Bain & Company, and as risk analyst for a top tier bank.
These experiences helped him during his doctoral studies to develop a research agenda centered around how managers and entrepreneurs can effectively make strategic commitments in the face of uncertainty by adopting different strategies to acquire information.
Specifically, his research tries to help answer two interrelated questions:
(1) what is the most efficient way for strategists to acquire information and reduce uncertainty?
(2) how does this impact firms’ strategy and performance?
Danilo's research adopts formal modelling, large field experiments with entrepreneurs and managers, and simulation games he developed.
In the last years, he has tought - both at graduate and undergraduate level - courses in Management, Data-driven analysis, Decision-making, Computational applications in management, among the others. He is currently teaching Management Tools & Principles at IE University.
Consistent with his research, he is the Director of two pre-acceleration programs: Idea to Startup Lab, organized in collaboration with Indian School of Business and run online in India and InnoVentureLab, organized in collaboration with Polytechnic of Milan and Polytechnic of Turin, Italy, working with more than 1,000 entrepreneurs.
As mentioned, Danilo developed a Simulation game "Startup Legend" (email me if you want to play it!) to replicate and test my research ideas in a simulated reality.
He consults and advices start-ups and companies about data-driven strategy implementation.