Global Learning Pathways as Regional Infrastructure
What Lombardy’s founders can teach policy makers, ecosystem builders, and investors
Over the past year, in my work at Università di Milano Bicocca within the MUSA project, I have used Lombardy as a laboratory for a question that many regions, VC funds, and public agencies are grappling with but rarely measure systematically:
How do founders’ foreign education pathways shape the structure and potential of a regional entrepreneurial ecosystem?
The result is a new report: “Global Learning Pathways, The Role of Foreign Education in Shaping Lombardy’s Innovative and Productive Entrepreneurial Ecosystem”.
This page introduces the main ideas and signals from the study. The full report, including methods, tables, graphs and policy implications, is available to download below.
What I set out to do
Lombardy is a particularly revealing case. It is one of Europe’s leading regions with a strong manufacturing base and a growing population of funded innovative startups. It is deeply embedded in European and global education and research systems. It also has an active policy conversation about productivity, innovation, and inclusive growth.
Rather than treating “international talent” as a slogan, I constructed a founder-level dataset for funded innovative startups in Lombardy between 2010 and 2024 and asked four concrete questions.
First, how many founders actually hold foreign education, and at which degree levels, Bachelor, Master, MBA, or PhD. Second, how these foreign degrees are distributed across sectors and company activities, from ICT and consultancy to manufacturing and other traditional industries. Third, from which countries and from which core, semi-core, and peripheral groups foreign-educated founders obtain their degrees, and how concentrated these linkages are. Fourth, how the sectoral composition of startups with foreign-educated founders differs from those, whose founders studied only in Italy.
In short, the study follows real learning pathways through specific universities, degree types, and countries, then links them back to the funded part of Lombardy’s startup economy. For policy makers, ecosystem builders, investors and LPs, this offers a way to treat global learning pathways as an observable dimension of regional and portfolio quality rather than as background noise.
What the data tells us about Lombardy
The first finding is that foreign study is the norm in this segment. In the population I studied, 93.6 percent of funded innovative startups in Lombardy have at least one founder who studied abroad. Foreign education is not a nice-to-have; it is a structural feature of this part of the ecosystem.
The second finding is that global learning happens mainly at the postgraduate level. Foreign education among founders is strongly skewed towards Masters, MBAs and PhDs. Seventeen percent obtained their Bachelor degree abroad, 34.2 percent completed a foreign Master, 58.3 percent of founders with an MBA studied at a foreign institution and 27 percent obtained a foreign PhD. Some founders hold several foreign degrees, so these numbers overlap, but the overall message is clear. Founders in this segment tend to plug into global higher education after their first degree, through postgraduate study rather than through Bachelor mobility. For anyone designing scholarships, talent policy or capacity building programmes, this matters.
Third, services absorb most foreign-educated founders, while manufacturing lags behind. Software and IT, scientific research and development and information services concentrate most of the recorded degrees. At the startup level, around 31.1 percent of ICT firms, 29.4 percent of consultancy firms, and 31.6 percent of other traditional service firms have at least one foreign-educated founder. In manufacturing the share is only 12.5 percent. In a region that is rightly proud of its industrial base, this means manufacturing ventures are roughly half as likely to have a foreign-educated founder as ICT ventures. In the report I describe this as a manufacturing learning gap inside an otherwise globally connected founder population. For industrial strategy, the green transition and deep tech policy, this is a non-trivial signal.
Fourth, foreign education is concentrated in a small group of countries. Across 254 foreign degrees held by founders, 86.6 percent are located in core or semi-core higher education systems. Core countries, the United States, the United Kingdom, China and Germany, account for 43.3 percent of all foreign degrees. Semi-core systems, especially Spain, France, Switzerland, and other Western and Northern European countries, also account for 43.3 percent. Four countries alone, the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain and France, host 57.5 percent of all foreign degrees in the sample. When we say that Lombardy is connected to the world through its founders, we are referring to a very specific set of education systems and regions with a strong European and transatlantic profile.
Finally, the report shows that core concentration strengthens with degree level. Master's degrees are the largest foreign group and are slightly more concentrated in semi-core European systems. MBAs and PhDs tilt more strongly towards core countries, with around half of these degrees obtained in core destinations. Bachelor degrees are the most geographically spread and include a larger share in peripheral destinations. The result is a multi-centred global learning portfolio in which Lombardy’s funded founders are anchored both in European systems and in global core hubs, and in which foreign postgraduate education is a particularly important route into these networks.
Why this matters beyond Lombardy
For me, this is not only a descriptive exercise for one Italian region. It is also a template for others who are designing strategies and capital allocation in innovation, entrepreneurship and regional development.
For policymakers, the evidence suggests that foreign-educated founders are part of the region’s innovation infrastructure, not just individual biographies. The region already has dense, measurable learning channels into specific foreign systems that can be activated through alumni programmes, university partnerships, joint calls and missions. At the same time there is a clear gap on the manufacturing side, precisely where digital and green transitions are most intense. The report translates these insights into seven practical directions, including treating founders’ foreign education as regional infrastructure, focusing and deepening partnerships where ties already exist and creating more inclusive access to global learning pathways for founders who are not yet plugged in.
For ecosystem builders such as accelerators, incubators, cluster organisations and university hubs, the study provides a way to see where their founder base is already anchored internationally and a basis for designing targeted programmes around real learning routes rather than generic internationalisation offers. It also offers arguments for securing multi-year support as they build bridges to the specific systems that show up in the data.
For investors and LPs, global learning pathways form part of the quality of an ecosystem and of a pipeline. They indicate which markets and institutional settings founders understand from the inside. They highlight where sectoral exposure to frontier knowledge is thin, for example, manufacturing founders with little foreign education. They point to where targeted non-financial support and partnerships could create disproportionate value, especially for industrial or science-based ventures that are under-connected relative to their potential. In my work, I see this as an opportunity for LPs, DFIs, VC funds and corporate investors to build portfolios and value creation platforms that consciously work with these learning structures rather than ignoring them.
How I work with these insights
In my current work I spend a lot of time with questions that sit between regional policy, ecosystem design and founder data. This study is one attempt to make that link more concrete by showing how something as individual as a degree choice adds up to a structural feature of an ecosystem. I hope that the report is helpful for people who make decisions about innovation policy, ecosystem building or capital allocation, whether in Lombardy or elsewhere. If you recognise some of your own challenges in this story, I would be very happy for you to explore the full report and to hear how these findings resonate in your context.
Download the full report
The full report includes the literature and framework behind the analysis, detailed methodology and operationalisation, all tables and graphs on degree distributions, sectors and geographies, a discussion section that links the evidence back to human capital, knowledge bases and global pipelines, and seven concrete implications for policy makers and ecosystem builders in Lombardy, with lessons that travel beyond the region.
