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ICRIOS – The Invernizzi Center for Research on Innovation, Organization, Strategy and Entrepreneurship

Donor - Fondazione Romeo ed Enrica Invernizzi

Director - Michela Carlana

Michela Carlana is an Associate Professor at Bocconi University. She serves as Director of the INSPIRE Center and LEAP at Bocconi University. Her research focuses on inequality and education, with particular emphasis on gender and immigration. She is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a Faculty Affiliate of J-PAL and IGIER-Bocconi, and a Research Affiliate of IZA, CESifo, and CEPR.

Carlana

 

Team members 

INSPIRE is largely driven by a multi-disciplinary community of young, highly qualified researchers and students who are part of international networks of excellence. This generational dimension helps define a dynamic identity that is open to innovation and future oriented.  

 

Joint Purpose 

INSPIRE (Invernizzi Center for Social Policy Impact Research and Evaluation) has been created in 2026 as a new research center dedicated to the study and evaluation of the impact of social policies, with the aim of strengthening the link between scientific evidence and public decision-making. Established thanks to the generous contribution of the Fondazione Romeo and Enrica Invernizzi, the center serves as a hub for advanced and interdisciplinary research, focused on the generation of knowledge and its practical application. 

INSPIRE produces rigorous, policy-relevant evidence to help governments, institutions, and organizations design and scale interventions that improve people’s lives. By combining causal impact evaluation with big data and artificial intelligence, the Center moves beyond average effects to understand who benefits, under which conditions, and at what scale.  

The center has set several strategic objectives. First, strengthen the engagement with policymakers and stakeholders, by involving them from the design of interventions, to their implementation and dissemination. Second, to develop training programs for policymakers and institutional actors to disseminate skills and tools related to counterfactual evaluation and data use. 

 

Core activities 

INSPIRE’s research activities spans diverse institutional and geographic contexts, with a globally-informed perspective, are organized around three main areas of social policy, which correspond to the three research hubs that come together to form the Center:  

  • Economic development and education, with the LEAP laboratory directed by Michela Carlana;  

  • Crime and social justice, with the CLEAN research unit led by Diogo Gerhard C Britto;  

  • Disability and inclusion, with the ABLE research unit directed by Nicoletta Balbo.  

These are distinct yet interconnected fields in which the Center aims to generate relevant knowledge and contribute to the design of more effective, equitable, and inclusive policies. In addition to these areas, INSPIRE systematically integrates new research technologies. The use of big data and artificial intelligence makes it possible to address one of the main challenges of impact evaluation: moving from valid small-scale results to their generalization to larger populations. These advanced technologies make it possible to analyze the heterogeneity of policy effects and improve the predictive power of interventions. 

 

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