Since 2018, Francesca has held a non-tenured core faculty position as Professor of Practice at LUISS Business School, with exclusive teaching engagement spanning key areas such as Management, Digital Innovation and Business Transformation, Design Thinking, Digital Mindset, Agile Organisations, UX/UI, Customer Centricity, and the integration of emerging technologies and Artificial Intelligences in education. Her courses span Masters, Executive Masters, MBAs, DBAs, EMBAs and Custom Programs.
She serves as Scientific Co-Director for the Major in Corporate Event Management, PR and Communication (2025–27) and has held the same role for other strategic programmes: the Faculty Empowerment Programme (2024–25), the Digital Teaching for Learning Flex Programme (2020–22) and the Faculty Transformation Programme (2018–20).
In advisory roles, she was Rotating Chair of the Teaching and Learning Innovation Hub (2022–24), a member of the FOME Learning Design Working Group (2021–24), and senior consultant for Learning Strategy Design and Innovation (2018–22).
Her academic involvement also included lecturing at Luiss Guido Carli, where she taught Design Thinking for Product Development at the Summer School and contributed to the Teaching for Learning Programme in 2021.
Before going back to academia, Francesca spent 12 years in international managerial roles at Google. Her first background there is in digital marketing and web analytics. She later held several roles in Google’s Sales and Country Operations, improving the customer experience. She then became Senior Project Manager for EMEA Sales, Strategy & Operations. Her last position at Google was Head of Learning Design and Innovation for the Google Digital Academy in EMEA, based in London. There, she designed learning experiences and educational programmes that helped brands, agencies, and Googlers build digital marketing capabilities, and she powered Squared and Squared Online, the award-winning digital marketing course created to help companies attract, develop, and retain digital talent. Her work included creating and scaling the Demystifying Programmatic format globally to train sales teams, which won a 2016 One EMEA Award, and developing creative, experiential formats that earned the Google Digital Academy Impact Leaders Award. This experience across digital, learning innovation, change management, sales, strategy and operations still shapes how she teaches.
While at Google, she became an ICF Certified Business Coach and applied that expertise both within the company and with private clients, focusing on start-ups, team coaching and women’s leadership. Since 2017, she has been Executive Partner at her own practice, which she founded to challenge leaders and teams to achieve sustainable goals. She works with C-level executives and HR, People Operations, Organisation Development, and Capability teams through one-on-one coaching, executive team coaching, and advisory soundboarding. Her focus areas include psychological safety, leadership cohesion and trust, decision-making, accountability, and the strategic integration of AI and emerging technologies. She draws on Hogan and SHL/OPQ32 assessments and on facilitation methods such as LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®, Design Thinking and Agile. Her practice is built on the belief that people drive innovation and change, and on absolute discretion with the executives she works with.
Francesca holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics and Communication from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano. Her most recent research examines the evolving role of educators in the age of AI, and how they can become facilitators of change who help learners build autonomy and engage critically with AIs and emerging technologies. Recent publications are available on her Google Scholar and ORCID-verified profiles.
