Prof. Piero Formica is an Italian writer and academic, active in the field of knowledge economics. He graduated cum laude, with a mention of scientific aptitude, in 1965, with a thesis on the pure theory of international trade at the University of Messina. Between 1966 and 1968, he studied international economics at the Bologna Centre of Johns Hopkins University.

In the early 1970s, Formica was an economist in the Economic Outlook Division of the OECD and part of the editorial team of Economic Outlook – a six-monthly analysis of the main economic trends and prospects for the next two years.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Piero Formica was involved in academic activities in the United Kingdom (London and Birmingham) while affiliated to Università degli Studi “Gabriele d’Annunzio”, where he inaugurated the Chair of International Economics, and the Alma Mater Studiorum in Bologna, where he was a member of the Board of Directors for four years. During that period, Formica was involved in European programmes to develop incubators and science and technology parks. He collaborated with the European Business Network – a network of about 140 Business and Innovation Centres and other organisations supporting the development and growth of innovative entrepreneurs, start-ups and SMEs – and for more than a decade (1995-2006) he was a member of the Scientific Committee of the International Science Park Association (IASP).

During the 2000s, Piero Formica spent his academic life almost entirely in research at the convergence of the physical, natural, and human sciences, publishing books and articles in international scholarly journals. At the University of Tartu, Estonia, he designed the first master’s degree dedicated to innovative entrepreneurship and taught there, initially through the European Union’s Marie Curie programme, until 2014. In the United Arab Emirates, he inaugurated the Chair of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Abu Dhabi Men’s College in 2003, the first college established by the Higher Colleges of Technology. From 2006 to 2009, he was Professor of the Economics of Knowledge, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Jonköping University in Sweden, where he founded the International Entrepreneurship Academy.

Since 2010, Piero has been a Senior Research Fellow and Thought Leader at the Innovation Value Institute of Maynooth University in Ireland. In December 2025, he received the title of Distinguished International Collaborator of this University.

Piero is a board member of several academic journals, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, of Entovation International (Boston, USA), the Smithsonian Curiosity Council, and Magister Peloritanus ‘for Innovation and Entrepreneurship’ at the Accademia Peloritana dei Pericolanti, founded by the University of Messina in 1729. In 2017, he received the Innovation Luminary Award from the Open Innovation Strategy and Policy Group, under the aegis of the European Union, “for his outstanding work on sustained contributions to entrepreneurial research, development of the Experimental Labs approach and advocating for an Innovation Renaissance”.

His most recent books include One Health: Transformative Enterprises, Wellbeing and Education in the Knowledge Economy (2023), Sciencepreneurship: Science, Entrepreneurship and Sustainable Economic Growth (2023), Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence: Exhibition at the Mind Gallery (2024) and Economic Humanism: An Imperfect Utopia where Homo Solidalis Lands (2025).