GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY FORUM. FROM VISION TO ACTION

Marco Formento is a senior executive with over 30 years of experience in leadership and digital transformation at an international level. He served as Global Innovation & ESG Director at Dolce & Gabbana, where between 2021 and 2026 he founded the innovation unit and developed the Group’s first integrated AI-based platform for sustainability.

His career is marked by a strong ability to anticipate technological trends, as demonstrated during his decade as Chief Digital Officer at Condé Nast Italy, where he led the digital reboot of iconic brands such as Vogue and Vanity Fair, tripling the share of digital revenue.

Previously, he held senior roles at De Agostini Publishing, Il Secolo XIX, and Viviance New Education, working across Milan, London, Tokyo, and San Francisco. An expert in omnichannel strategy and customer-centricity, he combines a strong business vision with a humanities-based educational background.

EVP, Chief Legal Officer & General Counsel
CEO & Board Advisor

Cristina De Dona is currently a member of the Advisory Board of Sanford Royce, where she also serves as a Strategic Advisor.

Since January 2022, she has held the position of Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel of the Prada Group. In this role, she has led the global legal function and overseen all legal activities of the Group worldwide, acting as a strategic advisor to senior management and the Board of Directors.
A qualified lawyer in Italy and the United States, she has 24 years of international and multidisciplinary experience in corporate law, regulatory law, antitrust, company law, intellectual property, artificial intelligence, and institutional affairs. Before joining Prada, she served as Chief Legal Counsel, International at The Hershey Company, supporting the company’s global legal operations. Prior to that, she spent nine years at Ferrero as Deputy General Counsel, with global responsibility for marketing and sales, corporate affairs, M&A transactions, antitrust, tax, regulatory matters, and institutional relations.
She has also held governmental roles, working at the Presidency of the Council of Ministers and, in particular, at the Office of the Minister of Justice.
She is a Visiting Professor at the United Nations University for Peace (UNUPEACE), where she teaches International Law, and at the University of Economics of Turin, where she teaches MBA courses on Artificial Intelligence and Ethics. Cristina De Dona holds a degree in International Law from the University of Turin, a PhD in International Law from the University of Trier in Germany, a postgraduate diploma in International Law from King’s College London, and an MBA from London Business School. She is fluent in Italian, English, German, French, and Spanish.

Marco Tolentino, born in Turin in 1974, is a multifaceted manager with over 20 years of experience in the fields of marketing, communication and sales, obtained by holding important positions in leading international organizations operating in various competitive sectors: Fiat, Pininfarina, Juventus, Italia Independent and adidas are some of the prestigious brands with which he has collaborated throughout his career.
He is Adjunct Professor at Faculty of Economics of the University of Turin, where he teaches Branding and Marketing Strategies. Author of the book “Listen: boringfree conversations about branding and consumer obsession”.
As an executive advisor specialized in brand management, he’s currently supporting companies active in different fields, from beauty to design, from fashion to automotive and FMCG, including international sport federations, leagues and global events committees. Different sectors, challenges and goals; the same philosophy: build up winning strategies for brand empowerment, always putting consumers, products and compelling stories first.

Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, London Business School
BA (Yale) MA PhD (Harvard)

Prof. Ioannou is a leading strategy scholar whose research focuses on Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). More specifically, he seeks to understand whether, how, and the extent to which the modern business organization contributes towards building a sustainable future. His award-winning academic work evolves around two main themes: a) understanding how the broader investment community perceives, evaluates and reacts to corporate engagement with, and integration of, environmental and social issues into strategy and b) understanding the multiple and multilevel factors that may affect the corporate decision to adopt environmentally and socially responsible strategies.

Prof. Ioannou regularly publishes in top-tier peer-reviewed academic journals including some of the most prestigious academic journals such as the Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Management Science, Organization Science, The Accounting Review and the Journal of International Business Studies. To date, his work is widely cited, he is the most cited scholar of his graduating cohort and he consistently ranks in the top 100 authors on the social science research network (SSRN). He is currently serving as an Associate Editor of the Strategic Management Journal – the top academic journal in Strategy – and in 2015 and 2019 received an Outstanding Editorial Board Member Award for his service. He also served a Senior Editor for Organization & Environment (2016-2020)

Moreover, Prof. Ioannou is deeply engaged with the world of practice. He is the co-Chair of the Sustainability Advisory Panel of Merck KGaA, a member of the ESG Advisory Board of the DWS Group, one of the world’s leading asset managers with about $900 billion of assets under management, a member of the Advisory Board of the Sustainable Risk Assessment Framework (SRAF), the Board of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability (ARCS) and serves as an Advisor to TreeApp. He is also a member of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Expert Network with expertise in the area of Sustainable Development and a member of the experts’ network of KKS Advisors, a leading sustainability advisory firm. Recently, Prof. Ioannou served on the Stakeholder Working Group of the UK Treasury’s Asset Management Taskforce.

Prof. Ioannou has presented his research at many academic conferences, and universities around the world and also, he is very often invited to deliver keynote speeches on issues of responsible management and sustainability at numerous high-profile events and conferences globally. Recent keynotes include Redburn/Rothschild ESG Conference (Sept 2020), Aptar Dialogue Summit (2020), Moody’s Annual EMEA convention (2020), the inaugural Malta Sustainability Forum (2019), 2019 Strategica Conference (Romania), BlackRock Goldman Sachs Factor Symposium (2019), the Global Islamic Finance Forum (2018), and UBS Quantitative Investment Conference (2017), among others. He is also very active on social media and a frequent contributor to articles in the popular and managerial press including outlets such as the Financial Times, Bloomberg, The Guardian, BBC, Le Monde, CNBC and Forbes. In further recognition of his impactful work, Prof. Ioannou has been recognized by various rankings as one of the top social media influencers around the world for issues of responsible business and sustainability.

Prof. Ioannou graduated magna cum laude from Yale University, majoring in Economics and Mathematics and holds a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University and the Harvard Business School. He joined LBS in 2009 as an Assistant Professor and he is currently an Associate Professor with tenure. For the academic year 2021/22, Prof. Ioannou is a Visiting Associate Professor of Management at Miami Herbert Business School, at the University of Miami. He has taught on the MBA and EMBA Core Strategy courses at LBS, and several other degree programs such as the Masters in Finance degree, the Emerging Leaders Program and other senior executive programs, including the Senior Executive Programme (SEP). He is a regular contributor to multiple LBS executive education programmes including modules on Responsible Business and Sustainability. Ioannis’ 6-week online course on Sustainability Leadership and Corporate Responsibility has enrolled to date more than 500 senior leaders and Board members from around the world. It has empowered them to become transformational change agents and has enabled them to reconceptualize critical global challenges as sustainable growth opportunities and in so doing, to achieve positive social impact.

In 2016, Prof. Ioannou was awarded the 2016 ARCS Emerging Sustainability Scholar Award; an award that recognises a scholar in the area of corporate sustainability who is likely to make significant contributions to the advancement of corporate sustainability scholarship. At the same event, Prof. Ioannou’s work with R. Durand and O. Hawn received the 2016 ARCS Outstanding Paper Award.

A key contribution of his work is to theorize about and provide rigorous empirical evidence for the emergence of the “responsible organization” (in a recent study published in Management Science, with G. Serafeim and B. Eccles). In this piece of work, Ioannou and co-authors provide evidence regarding significant long-term outperformance of this type of organization compared to the traditional corporate form, both in terms of operating as well as stock market performance. For a brief presentation of this work.

Relatedly, Prof. Ioannou has studied how companies tackle the inevitable trade-offs that arise due to a genuine sustainability commitment. In a recent paper, with R. Durand and O. Hawn, they have developed a model of organisational decision-making with regards to ESG issues, that explains why different companies respond differently when faced with the same ESG pressure and why some of them do not even respond at all. This study, published in Academy of Management Review, has also inspired a simulation titled “The Trade-Off: Can you balance Purpose and Profit?” by the Financial Times.

In a more recent study with C. Flammer, Prof. Ioannou explores the impact of the Great Recession on long-term corporate strategies, revealing the critical role of investments in innovation and stakeholder relations during times of crisis. Specifically, the findings show that during the Great Recession, companies significantly reduced their workforce and capital expenditures. Yet, they maintained the same level of investments in R&D and CSR in an attempt to remain competitive during (and after) turbulent times. For a recent webinar linking these findings to the current pandemic.

His work on CSR and Access to Finance, with G. Serafeim and B. Cheng, has received the Best Paper Award at the Annual Academic Conference of the United Nations’ Principles for Responsible Investment as well as the Emerald Citations of Excellence 2017 Award. His work with O. Hawn received the Best Paper Award from the Social Issues in Management division of the Academy of Management and was published in the Best Paper Proceedings of the 2012 Academy of Management (AOM) meeting. Recently, his paper with O. Hawn and R. Durand presenting a general model of corporate responses to normative pressures as they relate to socio-environmental issues was published in the 2016 AOM Best Paper Proceedings. The same paper inspired an FT simulation on the trade-offs that arise when companies try to integrate sustainability into their core business (Previously Prof. Ioannou had two more papers published in the AOM Best Paper Proceedings: his dissertation work on the impact of spinoffs on their parent companies in the US automobile industry (2009), and a paper with G. Serafeim on the Impact of CSR on Investment Recommendations (2010).

Executive Director,
Water Revolution Foundation

Leah Werner joined Water Revolution Foundation as Executive Director following a career as a biological oceanographer, leading complex, high-risk environmental remediation and water infrastructure projects throughout the US. She brings over a decade of leadership experience at the intersection of environmental science, strategy, and implementation. As Executive Director, Leah is responsible for the Foundation’s operations, with a particular focus on partner engagement, cross-sector collaboration, and the delivery and scaling of core programmes. Her ability to translate complex scientific concepts into actionable, industry-relevant solutions supports the Foundation’s mission to align the sector around measurable, credible environmental impact.

Chief Commercial Officer di Cuki Cofresco

Carlo Bertolino serves as Chief Commercial Officer of Cuki Cofresco, where he oversees the Group’s Marketing, Sales, and Innovation functions. He brings extensive managerial experience in the FMCG sector, gained within leading international organizations such as Ferrero and Bacardi-Martini. Throughout his career, he has successfully led strategic turnaround initiatives, contributing to the repositioning of brands including Cuki and Domopak, combining commercial growth with a strong
focus on environmental responsibility.
In collaboration with Banco Alimentare, he promoted the “Cuki Save the Food” project, an initiative that has enabled the recovery and redistribution of over 25 million meals to charitable organizations across Italy. The project has also contributed to raising consumer awareness on food waste through educational tools such as Cukipedia and a dedicated app for smart freezer management.

General Manager at TBWA Italy, driving growth strategy and business development with a strong focus on client value creation and innovation.
I combine full P&L accountability with a passion for designing future-oriented offerings and scaling strategic partnerships.
With 20+ years of experience across sport, automotive, entertainment, and telco, I’ve worked with leading brands including Vodafone, Peugeot, Sky, Lamborghini, and Decathlon, among others. In the Italian market, with creativity at the core, we have pioneered new communication products and services across robotics, startup ecosystems, luxury, and education. Track record includes +20% year-on-year new business growth and +30% organic revenue increase. My objective is to build meaningful partnerships with brands that create real impact on their business and the communities they serve. Entrepreneurial and team-driven, I’m passionate about connecting strategy, innovation, and culture.
Open to conversations with fellow leaders shaping the future of their industries.

Chief Innovation, Sustainability & Institutional Relations Officer
Lavazza Group

After earning a degree in Mechanical Engineering, Pietro began his professional career in the automotive sector at Fiat Gra.de., part of the Fiat Group. He then embarked on an international and cross-functional career path, first in Switzerland with Iveco in St. Gallen, and subsequently in Paris with CNH.

In 2002, he joined Alfa Romeo in Turin as Brand Manager, a role he held until 2005, when he moved back to France to take on the position of Business Manager at Renault in Paris. In 2007, he returned to the Fiat Group within the Product Marketing division as Head of Small Cars.

In 2012, he embraced a new professional challenge in the Food & Beverage sector, joining Nespresso in Lausanne as Product Marketing Manager, where he led several development projects for coffee machines.

In 2015, he joined the Lavazza Group as Head of Single Serve Marketing. Over the following years, he held roles of increasing responsibility, including Global Head of Marketing for Roast & Ground and Single Serve, and more recently General Manager UK and Regional Director UK & Nordics.

In 2023, he was appointed General Manager of Carte Noire and Lavazza France, based in Paris, as well as Regional Director for France and Benelux.

Since September 2025, he has been serving as Chief Innovation, Sustainability & Institutional Relations Officer of the Lavazza Group.

Global CEO Alliance / CIFAL – UNITAR

James Michael Donovan is Co-Founder and CEO of ADEC Innovations, a global business services enterprise operating across 24 countries and six continents, with more than 4,000 professionals worldwide.

A recognized leader in sustainable business transformation, James brings nearly three decades of experience helping organizations redesign global supply chains to be more transparent, resilient, and aligned with long-term value creation. His work focuses on integrating responsible sourcing, digital enablement, and diversified operating models into core business strategy.

He serves as Chairman of ADEC Innovations NV, an environmental and sustainability solutions company listed on Euronext Brussels, and as Chairman of the Global CEO Alliance, where he collaborates with business and government leaders to advance more sustainable and inclusive global systems.

An internationally sought-after speaker, James challenges organizations to rethink supply chains not merely as operational functions, but as strategic platforms for resilience, sustainability, and responsible growth in an increasingly complex global economy.

Technology Leader for Asset Lifecycle Management at IBM Italia

Maurizio Decollanz serves as the Technology Leader for Asset Lifecycle Management at IBM Italia. In this role, he leads strategic initiatives that leverage Artificial Intelligence and data-driven insights to turn industrial resilience into a sustainable future. With a career spanning nearly three decades, Maurizio has a distinguished background in strategic communications and brand governance, having previously led IBM’s marketing and reputation strategies in Italy. Recognized by Forbes Italy as one of the Top Marketing Leaders in 2025, he combines a high-level journalistic perspective with deep technological expertise, advising organizations on how to navigate the intersection of digital transformation, sustainability, and global leadership.

Piera Domenica Gallo is Vice President Marketing Office for Stellantis’ Italian Brands, with a career spanning automotive and food industries.
She works on brand storytelling and cultural relevance, focusing on how iconic Italian brands with strong heritage can translate vision into action across different sectors. Her work explores storytelling as a strategic driver of sustainability, innovation, and long‑term value creation.

Serena Bagnasco, born in 1992, grew up in a family deeply connected to the world of food and wine. In 2007, her father, Piero, acquired Agricola Brandini, then a small and little-known estate—an opportunity that would gradually shape Serena and her sister Giovanna’s path.

At the time, both were still students and free to pursue different careers. Yet, what began as helping in the cellar during the summer soon evolved into a genuine passion, leading them to take full responsibility for the winery.

Piero’s early decision to convert the estate to organic farming deeply influenced Serena’s vision. In a territory as unique as the Langhe, she believes sustainability is not an option, but a responsibility — towards the land, the community, and those who experience it through its wines.

For Serena, every bottle is a commitment to preserving this heritage for future generations.

Azienda Agricola Matteo Correggia

Giovanni Correggia leads his family‑run winery in the Roero area, founded by his father Matteo, a key figure in the promotion and valorization of the territory. After studying Oenology in Alba, he broadened his professional experience with the 2014 harvest in the Barossa Valley, Australia, where he engaged with international production models.

Today, he manages the winery with an approach that combines tradition and innovation, placing sustainability at the core of production choices. The winery has been certified organic since 2014, not as an end point but as the foundation of a broader journey focused on soil protection, environmental responsibility, and long-term continuity.

Poderi e Cantine Oddero

Chief Executive Officer, Il Boscareto Resort & Spa

Valentina Dogliani was born in Turin, where she completed her secondary education at a scientific high school and later earned a degree in Political Science with an international focus, writing a thesis on global wine trade. Immediately after graduating, she worked on several projects within her brother’s company, Mondial Wine, before moving to the administrative office of Sipal, a family-owned company operating in the fields of engineering and logistics support.

In 2004, together with her family, she began planning the creation of Il Boscareto Resort & Spa, based on a clear vision: to develop a five-star luxury resort capable of welcoming an international clientele in an area renowned worldwide for its wine and gastronomy. As part of the preparation for this project, she spent one year abroad studying some of the most exclusive luxury hospitality realities, and in 2005 she attended a hotel management course in Turin. Upon completion of the course, she undertook an internship at the Hotel Sitea in Turin.

What was initially intended as a two-month experience proved extremely positive and evolved into a one‑year stay, coinciding with the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics, ending in August when construction work on Il Boscareto Resort & Spa began. Over the following three years, she personally oversaw every aspect of the resort’s construction, traveling throughout Italy to select materials, furnishings, and every individual element that would contribute to the resort’s distinctive identity.

In October 2009, she inaugurated Il Boscareto Resort & Spa, the first—and to date only—five-star luxury resort in the Langhe. Since then, in her role as Chief Executive Officer, she has been responsible for the resort’s day‑to‑day management and overall development.