POLIMI Graduate School of Management: now in the Navigli District

Today, Politecnico di Milano’s business school has inaugurated its Campus in Ripa 77, Milan, where it will train managers and professionals from all over the world. 

Students and managers from every corner of the world have a new point of reference for their education. POLIMI Graduate School of Management has today inaugurated its new Campus Navigli in Ripa di Porta Ticinese 77, Milano, expanding the places where it provides education from its traditional base in Bovisa.

The investment in the new campus was driven by the School’s need to welcome growing numbers of students, managers and professionals, who see POLIMI Graduate School of Management as a touchstone in advanced management education, backed up by the excellence of its portfolio with 40+ Master’s programmes, including 7 MBAs and Executive MBAs, plus 200 open programmes for executives and many training courses made to measure for companies.

Even the choice of location has a powerful strategic value. POLIMI Graduate School of Management pinned down the Navigli district as the place where its students could enjoy a full social life and all the opportunities that a dynamic city like Milan can offer. Life on the new campus slots into a district where the spirit of old Milan meets a vibrant medley of cultural events and green urban spaces.

At the inauguration today, the President of POLIMI Graduate School of Management, Vittorio Chiesa, and the School’s Dean, Federico Frattini, showed representatives from its partner companies around the internal and external areas of the new campus. The guests attended a demonstration of immersive learning, an innovation in teaching set to become a defining feature of courses at POLIMI GSoM, with several new Masters due to start in November.

“This momentous milestone is framed within a process of change that started several years ago”, said the President of POLIMI Graduate School of Management, Vittorio Chiesa. “Over the past two years, we have been on a path that has caused us to launch a new strategic plan, and think deeply about our purpose and our values. Our vision and our ambition were the spark behind the idea of a new campus. Every day, we work hard to become the Business School seen throughout the world as the most innovative and most committed to building a responsible society”.

“The physical space of our new campus is where we wanted to identify, express and let people experience the purpose, values and culture of our School”, added the Dean, Federico Frattini. “Alongside Bovisa, today we can welcome our students to a new site that was especially planned to encourage networking, creativity and experimentation. In just over a year, we have built an iconic building where everyone with the far-sightedness to invest in continuous learning can put themselves into play to contribute towards creating a better future for all. We started out from Bovisa, which remains the heart of our School and the emblem of our close links with Politecnico, and today we land at the Navigli, in the city centre, a stone’s throw from the design district, which symbolises the international quality of the city we are proud to call ours.”

The innovative digital component of Campus Navigli, designed with the support of Microsoft Italia, means that students can attend lessons in person and online, and have access to a stimulating, engaging and highly interactive learning environment. Lecture rooms are designed in a perspective of flexibility, space, technology and functionality, meaning that POLIMI Graduate School of Management will offer students a truly unique learning experience, geared towards abolishing distance and encouraging “connections” between students, in a blended learning experience where physical and digital spaces come seamlessly together.

“We are very proud to be part of the development of POLIMI School of Management’s new Campus Navigli. We have been working with the School for many years to innovate teaching and offer students the best tools to learn and get ready for their future challenges. New solutions – from Azure, with its artificial intelligence and evolved cognitive services, to Microsoft 365, Teams, Dynamics and Surface Hub devices – mean that students experience high value learning and collaborative interaction in presence and remotely, whilst being productive and fully enjoying what these premises offer, always in a perspective of sustainability and energy saving. Campus Navigli is the first university facility in Italy to be a Microsoft Smart Building. It was designed with an approach to training that blends physical space with a digital teaching and learning environment. Microsoft has supported POLIMI Graduate School of Management in planning a physical space for smart learning and working, with its integrated digital technology designed to improve the students’ productivity, mobility and safety”, stated Elvira Carzaniga, Director of the Education Division at Microsoft Italia.

The new campus occupies a site of roughly 2,000 square metres. The architecture of the three-storey building is both innovative and highly versatile. The building’s interior spaces were designed by Il Prisma, an international architecture and design firm with solid Italian roots. The idea was to create places that encourage people to meet and exchange ideas, to bring a sense of collectiveness and propose solutions that change with the changing needs of all those on campus, a community of over 300 students, teachers and staff.

Planning the new POLIMI Graduate School of Management campus for us meant working through a participatory approach, and thus translating the identity of the Business School into a space where new technology and the human dimension merge to create the best possible experience in innovative and inclusive teaching. This building, with its lecture rooms designed so that the spaces, technology and functions are fully flexible, is a new landmark in digital transformation. The campus is also an example of how activity-based working can be applied to the world of education and vice versa, because we are convinced that learning is evermore important today for tomorrow’s workspace”, said Giuseppe Carone, Partner at Il Prisma.

Another interesting aspect is that the green side of the campus was taken very seriously. The building has a sustainable management system based on elaborating and analysing usage data, so that the environmental impact of everything happening inside is monitored and controlled constantly.