Ownership Culture and the Italian Employee Ownership Experience

By Alex Moss & Matt Hancock

Alex Moss recently interviewed colleague Matt Hancock about Matt’s experience working in the Italian employee-ownership sector. Moss, a Principal with the Praxis Consulting Group, is a long-time member and past chair of the Ownership Culture Committee.

Q: You received your masters in “cooperative economics” from the University of Bologna. Why did you pursue your MBA in Italy?

A: I wanted to see, up close, how an economy built around employee- and cooperative-ownership worked, and to see what we in the United States could learn. In Emilia-Romagna, the area where I lived and studied, there are just over 1,000 employee-owned cooperatives for a population of just over 4 million. So, this is one of the highest concentrations of employee-ownership per capita in the world, and these firms have developed into sophisticated, multinational companies that have helped to make Emilia-Romagna one of the most innovative and wealthy economies in Europe.

Originally Published In:
ESOP Report, The ESOP Association, January 2016