Paolo Magrassi’s professional CV

A member of the Analyst Syndicate and consultant to the European Commission, Paolo Magrassi has decades of international experience in high-tech industries, innovation management, strategic consulting, technology transfer, applied research in information technology.

His work has inspired some major national and supranational endeavours, such as the Virtual Australia project [1] a State of Texas strategic plan [2], the modernization of Florida’s financial management practices [3] and the PONTIFEX European project [4]. He co-authored the AlphaIC methodology for assessing technology investments [5].

Dozens of scientific papers, patents and high-tech projects are based at least in part on Paolo’s work –as can be seen here– in domains such as the internet of things and augmented reality (which he helped shape and introduce in 2000-2002), open content, tech investment evaluation, complex information technology architectures, knowledge-based systems and intellectual property.

In The caricature of a revolution (2011), Paolo was first to bring to the forefront of complexity studies in life and social sciences the notion of non-linearity, a concept until then neglected. In 2010 he showed how commons-based peer production’s theory could be reformed by importing a more in-depth and mature understanding of the software development process -a crucial metaphor.

A partner and/or board member of knowledge-intensive companies worldwide, he consulted and still consults at the executive level for organizations like Accenture, Aventis, Cisco, Generali, IBM, Microsoft, Nestlé, Novartis, Oracle, Royal Dutch Shell, SAP. He is a successful speaker and has authored over 200 publications in three languages.

An invited member in the Committees for the European Commission’s Framework Programmes for R&D, since 1991 he is an Independent Expert of the European Commission for advanced information technology research and applications. He also was a contract Project Officer in 1992-1993.

Paolo is a referee for several scientific journals, a contract professor in postgraduate courses in Italy and the US, and member of the Auto-ID Center Academic Alliance at the MIT, of the American Physical Society, of the ACM, the IEEE, the New York Academy of Sciences.

From 1991 to 2002 he was Research Vice President with GartnerGroup (Stamford, Connecticut), as an industry analyst covering software and digital technologies. He ranked consistently among the Top10% Gartner analysts worldwide, and among other things introduced nanoRFID and electronic tagging (smart objects) to the enterprise world.

From 1987 to 1991, for Siemens in Munich and Milan, he managed the PONTIFEX project with KLM, Swissair, Alitalia, CNR: artificial intelligence applied to aircraft fleet scheduling (the system is still in use today).

From 1982 to 1986 he worked as a Project Manager with General Electric in New York, Chicago, Dallas, Amsterdam, London, Milan, managing multinational, multi-ethnic teams of software experts and developing Industrial applications for Renault, Mitsubishi, Sears, GM, ENI, BPD.

In 1981 Paolo was System Computer Programmer at Siemens, and trained in Computer science and Information technology at Siemens’ post-graduate school, for which he was selected along with nine other fellows out of 600 applicants.  

In 1980 he served in the Italian Military as part of a readily deployable NATO unit.

Paolo obtained his undergraduate degree in humanities at the Liceo Ginnasio Severino Grattoni of Voghera, Italy, in 1973 and the Laurea degree in physics at the University of Pavia, Italy, in 1979 with a dissertation on the Wiener-Khintchine theorem based on laboratory work with lock-in amplifiers. His two minor theses—as was customary at the time—addressed the origins of non-Euclidean geometry and the McCulloch/Pitts’ neural network (1943).

[1] B.Thompson, et al., “Know, Think, Communicate – Key Elements of Virtual Australia”, Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information, Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment, Victoria (Australia), December, 2005.

[2] State of Texas, Agency Strategic Plan 1997-2003, Department of Information Resources, Austin, TX, USA, June 2002.

[3] State of Florida, “Modernization of State Government Financial Management Business Practices Study”, Final Report, July 1999.

[4] M.Cini, P.Magrassi, “Results and progress of project 2111 Pontifex”, European Strategic Programme for Research and development in Information Technology, European Commission DGXIII, Brussels, Belgium, November 1989 .

[5] P.Magrassi, “The AlphaIC Method: Assessing the Business Impact of IT in the Knowledge Economy”, Proceedings 12th European Conference on Information Technology Evaluation, Turku, Finland, 29-30 September, 2005.