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Francesco Grillo (Naples, 1965) is an Italian economist.

After having graduated in in economics from LUISS, he obtained an MBA from Boston University. In 1993 he became an associate at McKinsey. The book "McKinsey Mind" cites him as a positive example of the application of tools typically used in multinationals within other contexts, such as the evaluation of public policies.

Having left McKinsey, Grillo founded consultancy firm Vision & Value and think tank Vision. Both companies focus research efforts on the effects of the post-Internet industrial revolution on businesses, cities, and governments.

In 2012, Grillo obtained a PhD in "Political Economy" at London School of Economics and Political Science with a thesis on factors that enable growth in different regions in the new millenium. Grillo’s thesis contests the conventional hypothesis that greater R&D expenditure necessarily generates a more rapid growth of GDP. While at Oxford Internet Institute and St Antony’s College at Oxford and at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna di Pisa, Grillo continued this line of research, which he has also popularized as a columnist for The Guardian, Corriere della Sera, and Linkiesta. In Italy, he has appeared on RaiNews24, La7, and SkyTG24.

In 2016 and 2019 Palgrave published Grillo’s books “Innovation and Efficiency: Exploring the Innovation Puzzle within the EU’S Regional Development Policies” and “Democracy and Growth in the Twenty-first Century”.

Theoretical contributions
Grillo’s research focuses on the so-called “innovation paradox", first observed by Robert Solow  in 1987 . Observing data available at the time, Solow observed how the rates of growth of GDP had decreased despite the exponential increase of the quantity of information accessible at any given moment. Grillo identifies the cause of the paradox in what he terms the “technological obsolescence” of liberal democracies . To illustrate the reasons of the crisis, the economist traces a historical parallel between Internet and the invention of the press by Johannes Gutenberg: both media disintermediated the monopolistic reproduction of information. Since a redistribution of power tends to follow a reallocation of information, 21st Century liberal democracies are in crisis: they no longer possess the tools to govern Internet-triggered societal changes.

In comparing Western countries to China, Grillo notes that the Communist country has been more able to govern a technological revolution begun in the West. Meanwhile, Western countries have become more risk-adverse, thus widening the gap in terms of societal impact of technologies with China. While similar in some regards to Mariana Mazzucato’s work on the Entrepreneurial State, Grillo reflects more on the impact of the Internet on the form of the State. Through this comparison with China and Asia, Grillo proposes ways to give back to Western democracies the capacity to use information and efficiency.

Published works

 * Lezioni Cinesi, Solferino Libri, Milan, 2019
 * Democracy and Growth in the Twenty-first Century, Springer Nature, London, 2019
 * Public Investments in R&D as a Tool for Regional Economic Development (PhD thesis)
 * Merits, Problems and Paradoxes of Regional Innovation Policies, Local Economy Volume 26, Paragraphs 6-7, pp. 544–561