Unpredictable weather, unstable sea conditions, and unintelligible wind behavior: risk and uncertainty reign over the oceans in which companies are sailing. Everybody can see that the violent hurricane started in 2008 will radically and permanently change the purchase and user behavior of both consumers and organizations, as well as the business models that can be adopted in an increasingly turbulent market, especially in the international arena.
Such a Copernican revolution requires a radical re-thinking also of the traditional management consulting practices.
ConCrea was born in 2008 with the purpose of deeply renewing the consulting approach in the strategic and international marketing areas, based on the twenty-year experience of its founders (Massimo Manzoni and Giorgio Gandellini), gained from a multitude of industry sectors and business assignments.
ConCrea introduces and applies the co-management concept to its professional activity.
This consists in a new approach, which allows the transformation of the traditional consulting methods into results-oriented “turnkey” projects, in which the involved parties proceed jointly and synergistically, thanks to the integration of their mutual knowledge (KI-cycle®) and trigger chain reactions which produce continuous innovation and value.
Furthermore, both parties make together the most important decisions and, if appropriate and feasible, share the entrepreneurial risk of the initiatives, in accordance with their respective roles.
In order to make co-management really applicable and feasible, ConCrea designs and develops exclusive personalized managerial models (of which WEAL®, the engine of the organization’s wealth, is an example) that support the maximum customization of the assignments with high-performance interactions between the project stakeholders.
These tailored managerial models reconstruct, simulate and measure the market scenario, the competitive context, and the interactions between the firms and the external environment, in order to markedly improve the effectiveness of the most complex and risky entrepreneurial decisions.
Thanks to a proprietary methodological know-how, related both to a “quantitative” interpretation of the market-oriented strategic planning process and to the use of exclusive risk-sharing solutions, ConCrea aims at greatly increasing the long-lasting competitiveness (in terms of sales and profitability) of the most innovation-oriented companies.
Our know-how and expertise are particularly strong in the areas of internationalization, startups, business networks and market revitalization of declining companies.
Massimo Manzoni
Massimo earned, with distinction, the three-year Master Degree in International Marketing and Sales, accredited by the University of Wales (UK), in 2002. He is a researcher, educator, and consultant with various institutions and business schools, including Cofimp (Unindustria) in Bologna, the Italian Institute for Foreign Trade (ICE), and the University of Macerata.
Founder and Managing Director of ConCrea, an innovative co-management company in the areas of strategic marketing and internationalization, he made numerous experiences in the field, successfully managing consulting assignments for various companies in B2C and B2B industry and service sectors. Over the last few years, interested in improving the quality of the interactions between companies and external consultants, he conceived and designed new ways of implementing the risk-sharing concept in the strategic marketing area, developing new and proprietary co-management methods, focused on a full integration of the partial knowledge acquired by the parties involved in the strategic planning processes.
Thanks to the quantitative background developed during his university studies in physics, he designed and developed many managerial models, personalized depending on the peculiarities of the various assignments, and able to support complex decision making processes, in view of a practical application of the above mentioned co-management solutions. He has been working for many years with Giorgio Gandellini on research projects about the impact of e-learning on managerial competencies.
Before entering the consulting industry, he gained a ten-year entrepreneurial experience as a President of a privately-owned company in the sheet-offset printing sector, developing an in-depth knowledge of the business systems and competitive dynamics.
Fluent in Italian and English, in his early professional years, he worked with Amnesty International and Nelson Mandela’s staff for the realization of a magazine on the protection of human rights. He co-authored “Perfectum” (Franco Angeli, Milano, 2007), a collection of short summaries of the most relevant management concepts.
Giorgio Gandellini
Teacher, consultant, and researcher in International Marketing and Strategic Management, after several years of managerial and entrepreneurial experiences in Italy and abroad, he has been working in more than 30 countries for more than 30 years. In addition to various assignments in Western Europe and the United States, he designed, planned and/or managed various “capacity building” projects on behalf of the European Commission, the Italian Institute for Foreign Trade (ICE), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Unioncamere (the Italian National Association of Chambers of Commerce), IFOA (a management education branch of the Chambers of Commerce network), in Central and Western Europe, Middle and far East, Central Asia, North and South Africa, South America.
He consults or consulted with major private companies, profit and non-profit organizations, in various industry and service sectors, from B2C to B2B.
After many years of teaching assignments in the United States (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY, and Monterey Institute of International Studies, CA) and France (Institut de Formation Internationale in Rouen and Ecole Supérieure de Commerce in Grenoble), he was for seven years the Academic Dean of the Distance Learning Master Degree in International Marketing and Sales for owners and managers of SMEs, accredited by the University of Wales and delivered by IFOA. He currently teaches Strategic Management and International Marketing in various Italian academic institutions, including the Universities of Roma Tre and Macerata, where he was also, for two years, Adjunct Professor of International Economics.
After a Law degree in Milano, he earned a Certificate in Business Economics at the Sorbonne University in Paris, and an MBA at the Columbia Business School in New York.
Senior Partner of ConCrea, he is also Research Associate in the area of information technologies for SMEs at the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce in Grenoble.
Fluent in Italian, English, French and Spanish, he authored or co-authored various management books, decision support systems, and business games, including Strategy for Action, Springer, 2012, Il Nuovo Marketing Strategico (The New Strategic Marketing), Franco Angeli, Milano (1992-2005), an e-book on Il management dell’Internazionalizzazione (Managing Internationalization), API Ravenna, 2008, various multimedia and e-learning tools, including Global Branding Strategies (a business simulation, Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 2011), YouTool (a web-based self-assessment system on internationalization, ICE and Confartigianato, 2011), “ex4ex” (Export for Experts, business game on export strategies, ICE, 2005), Export Game (interactive promotional tool on export services, ICE, 2004) and various spreadsheet-based decision support systems on International Marketing, IFOA and ICE, 1989-2007. He published articles and papers in various academic and management journals, including Mettiamo un po’ d’ordine nell’approccio Blue Ocean? (Let’s rearrange the Blue Ocean approach), Harvard Business Review Italia, 2012.
