Global MBA in Design, Fashion and Luxury Goods: skills and an international career with Bologna Business School
11 May 2026Interview with Elizaveta Ponomarenko, Luxury Hospitality & Heritage Strategy
From enhancing cultural heritage to the BBS Global MBA: building a professional journey dedicated to luxury
Heritage, craftsmanship, and cultural storytelling now drive the world’s leading global luxury brands. Made in Italy is engaging with a new vision of tradition linked to quiet luxury.
We interviewed Elizaveta Ponomarenko to hear, through her experience, how attending the Global MBA, Design, Fashion and Luxury Goods track at Bologna Business School influenced her career.
Why choose the Global MBA in Design, Fashion and Luxury Goods at Bologna Business School?
Elizaveta, prima di tornare a studiare col Global MBA di BBS, ha lavorato per una quindicina d’anni nell’intersezione tra cultura, hospitality e grandi eventi internazionali. Con una laurea in Museologia e Interpretazione del Patrimonio Culturale, ha iniziato la propria carriera nell’ambito degli scambi culturali e turistici internazionali.
Before returning to study with the BBS Global MBA, Elizaveta had worked for around fifteen years at the intersection of culture, hospitality, and major international events. With a degree in Museology and Cultural Heritage Interpretation, she began her career in international cultural and tourism exchange.
That work grew into leading cultural and hospitality programming for some of the world’s most complex international platforms – including engagements connected to the APEC, G20 and BRICS summits – in partnership with world-class cultural institutions such as the Hermitage Museum, the Mariinsky and the Bolshoi. I had always worked around luxury – with luxury clients, luxury brands as partners, luxury expectations – but I wanted to understand the industry from the inside, with the same rigor I had brought to cultural heritage. That’s what led me to Bologna.
What motivated you to choose the Global MBA at Bologna Business School over other programs?
Two things decided it for me. First, the track itself: Design, Fashion and Luxury Goods is one of the very few MBA specializations in the world that treats luxury as a discipline of its own – grounded in heritage, craftsmanship, and cultural storytelling – rather than as a subcategory of marketing.
Second, Italy. If you want to understand the DNA of luxury, you have to study it where it was built: in the maisons, the ateliers, and the institutions that still shape it today.
Bologna offered Elizaveta both: the academic rigor of the University of Bologna and the opportunity to experience firsthand the ecosystem of Italian luxury and local manufacturing, sold on the global market.
Which skills or mindset developed during the MBA do you use most today?
Turning intuition into structure: intense work, often under pressure, gave Elizaveta a strong intuition — almost an instinct guiding her decisions.
But the MBA gave me the commercial vocabulary and the analytical tools to defend those instincts in a boardroom. In my most recent role as Senior Manager, Travel Product & Experiences for the On Location (Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Games Official hospitality provider), I was constantly moving between two registers: the emotional language of premium experiences and the numerical language of revenue, pacing, and liability. The MBA is what made that bilingualism feel natural.
Poi, la capacità di definire un mindset orientato al problem solving e all’evoluzione dei progetti anche negli scenari più complessi: restare orientati alla soluzione anche in condizioni imperfette, proteggendo il business ma permettendo al team commerciale di continuare ad avanzare. È diventato un principio personale di lavoro, e BBS è stato il luogo in cui ho imparato per la prima volta a dargli una definizione.
She also developed a mindset focused on problem-solving and evolving projects even in highly complex scenarios: staying solutions-oriented under imperfect conditions, protecting the business while keeping the commercial team moving forward. It’s become a personal operating principle, and BBS is where I first learned to put words around it.
How did the track help you understand the dynamics of global luxury brands?
The track taught me to read a luxury brand the way a curator reads a collection – as a living system of heritage, narrative, and cultural authority, not just a product portfolio. We studied brand architecture, storytelling, design-driven innovation, and the economics of scarcity side by side, which is rare.
That integrated view is exactly what global maisons are working through today: how to scale without diluting; how to activate heritage for a new generation of UHNW clients, especially in Asia and the Middle East; how to balance commercial performance with cultural credibility. These are no longer abstract case studies for me – they are daily questions in my work with premium hospitality portfolios and international partners.
What competitive advantage did you gain from attending the BBS Global MBA in Bologna?
A very specific one: I came out of Bologna with a rare combination that is hard to replicate – a museology background, a luxury MBA, and a decade and a half of commercial execution across European and Asia Pacific markets. Few professionals in the luxury industry sit at that exact intersection, and that is precisely where the most interesting roles are today: Heritage Directors, Cultural Strategy leads, UHNW experience designers, premium hospitality directors.
Beyond credentials, the Bologna network itself has been a competitive advantage. The alumni community is genuinely international, genuinely senior, and genuinely generous – and I have found that a Bologna connection still opens doors across the Italian and European luxury landscape.
What advice would you give to someone considering a Global MBA today?
Be honest about why you want it. An MBA is not a label – it is a year and a half of rethinking how you work, whom you work with, and what you want next.
Use the program as a space to test your ambitions: s If you already have deep experience, choose a track and a city that will stretch that experience in a new direction – for me that was luxury and Italy.
Two pieces of practical advice on top of that. First: if your goal is to build a career in Italy after the program, learn Italian seriously and from day one. The fluency opens an entirely different layer of the country – the people, the maisons, the conversations that never happen in English.
Second: invest in the network as seriously as you invest in the coursework. The classmates, the alumni, the faculty – those relationships will still be opening doors for you ten years after graduation
According to Elizaveta, the Global MBA at Bologna Business School is worth more than a degree: it is a long conversation you become part of for life.
