Francesca Lecci, Director of the MIMS Master's program, receives the prestigious Outstanding Leadership Award

The Education 2.0 Conference is a three-day international event that brings together innovators, policy makers and researchers in an effort to offer new perspectives and inspiration to the global education community. The event is an important opportunity to stimulate dialogue and introduce new technology, tools and methodologies capable of instigating significant change in the global education sector. In addition, education professionals who have distinguished themselves through their achievements and qualities are recognized and awarded annually.

This year we are proud to announce that the awardees include Francesca Lecci, Director of the Master in Management per la Sanità (MiMS) at SDA Bocconi, who was presented with the prestigious "Outstanding Leadership Award" in Dubai in recognition of her contribution to the field of training and learning. We took the opportunity to have a word with Francesca and ask her to describe her emotions and experience as a result of this prestigious award.

"I am of course very happy and grateful to the School, my colleagues and all the students who over the years have allowed me to work and grow in an environment of excellence and very high levels of innovation," Francesca Lecci emphasizes, "And moreover, the award has given me the opportunity to deal with educational settings that are also very different from the School and to learn new conceptual schemes and educational approaches that are extremely stimulating."

The team in charge of selecting the winners conducts an assessment of the candidates and holds interviews with references to obtain first-hand information with which they define the award recipients. In your case, what particularly struck the jury were the aspects of "creative thinking" and "decisive leadership" that emerge from your work.

"They expressed particular recognition of the constant striving for innovation and the use of action learning tools since the design of the training programs for which I have the honor of being director. In addition, the decision to structurally integrate the alumni network into the training process was highly appreciated, whereby they often play the role of challenging current students. In MiMS, for example, students become a point of reference for subsequent years, thus actively contributing to the learning process. This dynamism, this interaction, enriches and diversifies the MiMS network, creating fertile ground for the development of creative thinking among students."

"My ability to transmit passion to students has also been highly appreciated, and this becomes even more relevant in areas (such as health care, public institutions, and the arts) that have a profound impact on people's lives. Specifically, my commitment to MiMS is to make sure that those working in health care can make real value-added contributions. Choosing to make a big investment in knowledge and benchmarking with international realities, albeit as a director of national programs, has also played an important role. Not in the sense of copycatism, but as a means of stepping out of the comfort zone and questioning one's own visions through exposure to different frameworks. This is the vision with which I am working to integrate a study tour in the next editions of MiMS."

The conference was also a moment for experts from all over the world to engage among their colleagues. What were the topics you most discussed?

"One of the central themes of the discussion was the framing of phenomena, including through the integration of artificial intelligence systems. The field of health care has become increasingly complex in recent years; while our goal in the past was to equip students with fixed keys to interpretation, today this is no longer possible because phenomena change with staggering speeds. Therefore, at MiMS we are committed to training students so that they learn to refine the interpretive tools they have at their disposal and render them capable of reading all the dynamics that can condition decisions, solutions, and impacts."

"We also talked a lot about the concept of action learning, which takes on particular relevance in nonexecutive training programs. It is essential to prepare participants for professional environments where the contours are still undefined. Those in the classroom today will find themselves in professions that do not currently exist, reflecting an ever-changing labor market. That is why at MiMS we have introduced innovative action learning tools to train in students a flexible professionalism that can adapt and the inevitable changes over the years."

SDA Bocconi School of Management