30 December 2024 – 2025 will not be an ordinary year for those who have chosen to devote their lives to studying, researching, acting on and raising awareness of sustainability and social impact.
For many years now, the final day of the year has brought with it a reckoning with increasingly severe crises linked to climate change, new geopolitical instability and threats, unresolved social conflicts, growing inequalities, and forms of exclusion that invariably affect the same people. In 2025, all this is compounded by a troubling sense of backlash: a renewed and self-satisfied cynicism and growing disillusionment with sustainability and impact. As though the difficulty—and sometimes the impossibility—of improving the state of our planet and society could justify giving up and abandoning hope.
This can certainly be explained by the structural cycle of emotions, in which periods of great enthusiasm are invariably followed by periods of disillusionment; by the political cycle, which today rewards conservative populism fuelled by scepticism and simplistic shortcuts; by the hollow and opportunistic interpretation of ESG issues adopted by many players in the economic system; but also by major political failures, with policymakers culpably choosing to ignore those in society and the business community who had repeatedly and forcefully signalled that they felt excluded from the green transition.
To address this, sustainability in 2025 will need to be defined by two words: integrity and balance. Integrity in what we do, why we do it, and how we measure what we do; balance in taking into account the genuine concerns coming from the real economy, the business community, and those who legitimately feel that the social dividend of the green transition is not being distributed fairly.
For this reason, we believe it is important to close 2024 by looking back at what we have done and ahead to what we can do.
2024 marks the conclusion of the tenth anniversary year of Tiresia, the research centre at the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano, where we study how innovation, finance and business models can contribute to generating a positive impact on society and the planet.
2024 also marks the end of Triadi’s third year. Triadi, a spin-off company of Politecnico di Milano, translates the knowledge generated by Tiresia into innovative products and services, supporting companies and financial organisations in developing generative and transformative approaches to sustainability and in creating positive social and environmental impacts.
We enter 2025 proud of what we have achieved over the past five years, a period in which we have undoubtedly grown and improved considerably. In 2020, Tiresia had 12 researchers; today, we are 23, and over the five-year period more than thirty researchers have worked with us. Moreover, Tiresia is a multidisciplinary ecosystem involving more than 40 people, including researchers from other Departments and professionals.
We have published more than thirty papers in international scientific journals and presented 75 papers at academic conferences around the world. We have helped more than 3,000 students develop a new culture of management, with the aim of enabling them to put their future professional skills and knowledge at the service of a fairer society and a planet on which we can live better and longer. We have done so by taking responsibility for four institutional courses at Politecnico di Milano, one of which is delivered in cooperation with Bocconi University, as well as six Executive Courses for the Graduate School of Management of Politecnico di Milano.
Over these five years, Tiresia has attracted €5 million in funding to Politecnico di Milano through more than 100 projects funded by the European Commission and other public and private clients.
It is also a source of great satisfaction to note that Triadi, Tiresia’s market-facing arm, has seen its revenues grow steadily since its foundation in 2022, at an aggregate growth rate of 61%, reaching close to €1 million in 2024—a figure that is expected to be comfortably exceeded in 2025.
Even more importantly, thanks to the work of the ten young professionals and applied researchers who now work at Triadi, 65 consulting projects for more than 40 clients have profoundly changed the way sustainability and social impact are understood by banks, investment funds, companies, international organisations, public administrations and third-sector organisations.
This is the contribution we believe we have made: generating new knowledge and innovation; transferring expertise; fostering new perspectives and interpretative frameworks among our students; and changing practices and reference models in management.
This is also what we intend to continue doing in 2025, with renewed passion, knowing that we will need a great deal of it to overcome the sense of resignation and discouragement that we have felt growing as this year draws to a close.
Photo credit: Fabio Magnasciutti