One year of Global MBA: becoming a class, stepping inside companies, changing perspectives
2 August 2026In September 2025, professionals from different countries, industries, and backgrounds arrived in Bologna. Each brought their own experience, expectations, and personal reasons for beginning this journey.
Over the following months, they shared classes, projects, company visits, conversations, and decisions. They worked alongside people who approached the same problems from different perspectives, learning to explain their ideas, reconsider them, and sometimes leave them behind to build better ones together.
This is how initially separate paths began to form the story of the 2025/2026 Global MBA class at Bologna Business School.
The Global MBA is a twelve-month, full-time program taught entirely in English. It includes Orientation Modules, General Management courses, track-specific classes, Clinics, Capstone Projects, and a final phase dedicated to an internship or company project work.
First, becoming a class
The Kick-Off Week marked the first step in the journey.
Before the courses, tracks, and Capstone Projects, there was still a community to build. Business games, meetings with Alumni and Industry Leaders, shared activities, and opportunities to discover Bologna allowed students to begin getting to know one another beyond formal introductions.
For those arriving from abroad, exploring the city meant beginning to understand the place where they would live for a year: a city where the University, culture, and everyday life continue to come together.
The visit to Davines was one of the class’s first encounters with the business world. At Davines Village, students observed how sustainability, corporate identity, organizational culture, and the design of physical spaces can all be part of the same idea of business.
During those first days, the objective was not yet to find every answer. It was to learn names, recognize differences, and begin trusting the people with whom they would share months of intensive study and work.
Five tracks, one common foundation
Following their shared management education, students continued their studies across five specializations:
- AI and Manufacturing;
- Design, Fashion and Luxury Goods;
- Food and Wine;
- Sustainability and Innovation;
- Supercars, Superbikes and Motorsports.
Each track opened a different perspective on business. The journey was connected by a series of common questions: how can decisions be made when circumstances are changing rapidly? How can an organization be led while continuing to focus on people? How can technical knowledge be transformed into a managerial decision? How can innovation and responsibility move in the same direction?
Students explored these questions through classes, business cases, group projects, Clinics, and conversations with professors, managers, and professionals.
Answers also emerged through disagreement. In an international class, working together requires people to question their habits, language, and ways of relating to others. It means understanding that the same situation can be interpreted in different ways and that finding a shared direction does not require eliminating those differences.
Stepping inside companies
Throughout the year, company visits brought students into the places where strategies and organizational models become part of everyday operations.
For participants in the Sustainability and Innovation and AI and Manufacturing tracks, the visit to Loccioni revealed an industrial ecosystem in which technology, sustainability, care for people, and connections with the local area are part of the same strategy.
Students explored the company’s history, its relationship with the local community, and the departments where tailored technological solutions are developed. They encountered an approach to innovation that brings together applied research, collaboration, and the ability to think in the long term.
The visit to Visa Cash App RB opened the doors to the operational heart of a Formula 1 team.
Stepping inside the organization meant seeing everything that remains outside the frame during a race: coordination among different functions, the role of data, cost management, the speed of decision-making, and the need to maintain precision under pressure. Behind the two racing cars is a complex system in which marketing, operations, finance, engineering, and talent management must move in the same direction.
Over the following months, the different tracks also encountered other examples of Italian productive and creative excellence. Visits to Barilla, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Gellify, Fondazione Achille Castiglioni, ADI Design Museum, and Triennale Milano allowed students to observe very different environments: from the food industry to design, from advanced manufacturing to mobility and innovation ecosystems.
Each experience added a new perspective. Not a model to reproduce, but an organization to understand through its decisions, processes, constraints, and the people who make its results possible.
Meeting leaders, questioning decisions
During the year, the New Campus hosted Leadership Talks with Emanuele Orsini, Andrea Pontremoli, Mariarosaria Taddeo, Mauricio Macri, and Gary P. Hamel.
The conversations explored the future of industry, innovation, the relationship with failure, the ethical implications of artificial intelligence, the ability of organizations to evolve, and the responsibilities of those who lead them.
The conversation with Mauricio Macri directly involved students from the Global MBA and the Professional Master in Business Management. At the center of the meeting was leadership exercised when information is incomplete, pressure is rising, and every decision has consequences.
The role of ego, the relationship between what is right and what is convenient, the strength of a team, and the ability to take responsibility became questions for those who will be called upon to lead people and organizations in their future careers.
Alongside the Leadership Talks, Career Talks brought experiences from different companies and industries into the classroom. Meetings with professionals from Dinova, Maserati, Accenture, Baker Hughes, Liu Jo, Penske, FAAC, Gruppo Montenegro, Macron, and Granarolo allowed students to learn about roles, career paths, and organizational cultures, moving beyond the formal description of a professional position.
Meeting people who work in companies every day also meant engaging with less linear experiences: changes in direction, expertise developed over time, opportunities recognized, and decisions made without knowing in advance where they would lead.
From the program to professional futures
The BBS Career and Orientation Day 2026 brought students and companies together at the New Campus for a day of meetings, interviews, and conversations about professional opportunities.
Boston Scientific, Buccellati, Cerved, CRIF, Datalogic, Davines, EDAG, FAAC, Fabbri 1905, MotorK, Orbico Sportstyle, Prometeia, Revlon, Siemens, Technogym, Unipol, Visa Cash App Racing Bulls, and Vertiv took part in the initiative, giving students the opportunity to speak directly with recruiters and professionals.
After months spent observing companies through classes, business cases, and company visits, the Career Day shifted the perspective: students were no longer only seeking to understand an organization from the outside, but beginning to imagine the contribution they could make from within.
What happens between classes
An important part of an MBA takes place in the spaces that do not appear on the official program.
In groups trying to find a balance. In conversations that continue after class. In feedback that is difficult to give and even more difficult to receive. In the moments when an individual idea improves because it is challenged, reconsidered, or completed by others.
These are the moments in which a class truly learns how to work together.
During the year, the BBS MBA Community also met outside the classroom. At the MBA Football Cup 2026, the BBS Oranges represented the School in a competition that brought together MBA students and Alumni from different Italian Business Schools.
On the pitch, some of the same dynamics experienced during project work returned: assigning roles, trusting one another, reacting to unexpected events, and recognizing themselves as part of a team.
Changing perspectives
As the academic year enters its final phase, the journey continues through internships, project work, and the professional decisions that will follow.
The people who arrived in Bologna in September 2025 have acquired new tools and expertise. They have learned to work with people who think differently, to recognize complexity while remaining able to make decisions, to reconsider their own positions, and to make room for the contributions of others.
When the class once again spreads across different countries, companies, and industries, what will remain are the organizations they entered, the words they heard, the projects they built together, and the relationships developed along the way.
They will also remember the most demanding days, when finding a shared solution required time, patience, and a willingness to change their minds.
Perhaps this is the deepest mark left by one year of Global MBA: a different way of looking at organizations, people, and decisions. A change that each participant will bring into their own professional environment, together with the awareness that, for at least part of the journey, they built it with others.
