Leonardo Rizzo

Leonardo Rizzo is Assistant Professor of Practice in the Leadership, Human Resources and Digital Technologies Knowledge Group at SDA Bocconi School of Management and Data Scientist of the Network Innovation Lab. He teaches social networks, people management, organization design and artificial intelligence in open and custom executive education programs.

Within the NI Lab, he leads the data science work: collecting, modeling and analyzing the network data behind the lab’s research and its Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) projects, which help companies map and strengthen collaboration, knowledge flows and innovation capacity. He has developed the lab’s online tools for network analysis and built the lab’s website.

His research applies network science and agent-based modeling to organizations, innovation and economic systems. It focuses on how the structure of collaboration networks shapes coordination, performance and innovation within organizations, and on how generative AI is changing the way people work together and build their professional networks. A further line of work develops computational models of innovation as a search process, along with methods to test the robustness of simulation results. His work has been published in Social Networks, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B and Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, among others, and has received wide international press coverage.

As a data scientist, he brings extensive consulting experience in financial analysis, project finance and business analytics, and has built custom AI solutions and pipelines for companies, drawing on their internal knowledge and workflows. His applied work also includes data science for medical research and advisory projects for Ministries of Finance. As a visiting researcher at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, he worked on supply-chain networks and computational models of innovation dynamics.

He holds a BSc in Finance and an MSc in Economic and Social Sciences from Bocconi University, an MRes in Economics from Université catholique de Louvain, and a PhD from the Department of Network and Data Science at Central European University, with a thesis on Network Structures and Innovation Dynamics. He previously worked at the European Commission (DG ECFIN) and at the New York Delegation of the Bank of Italy.