On Earth Day 2021, Meet The B-School Sustainability Graduates

Name: Daniele Pes

Hometown: Milan, Italy

Fun Fact About Yourself: I’ve got a thing for prog rock and especially for Pink Floyd and have been involving my children with it since they were born.

Business School Degree Program: Executive MBA at MIP Business School, Milan

1. What do you do? And how do you impact sustainability through is? 

I’m a serial entrepreneur with companies involved in renewable energy (San Jose, California, US), special materials (London, UK), clever (Artificial Intelligence based) waste management (Milan, Italy). I generate new Intellectual property, co-develop prototypes, collect funds, manage the companies.

2. What does World Earth Day mean to you?

An opportunity to collect attention on humans’ role in the ecocystem and concretely focus on shortening the distance between talking about it and actually doing something effective to make things happen.

3. What is your top tip for living a more sustainable life?

Responsibly looking for balance in relationships, with yourself, with other people, with the environment.

4. Has climate change affected your life? If so, how?

In 2016, with my partners and friends, I started to learn about spectrometry and the possibility to use it to automatically recognize materials and radically change the concept of waste management. it all started as a personal interest, then it became a passion, then we created a company named Grycle in 2017. Since then we’ve generated three great patents, realized four prototypes, collected capitals. I left my role as  director in a global company. At the beginning of 2021 we won the best global MBA startup of the year prize.

5. How has your business school experience helped your career in in this area? 

It provided me with the possibility to capitalize my twofold competence, that is that of understanding the technicalities and that of managing the financial aspects of projects. With a strong focus on valuing people.

6. What is the biggest/most important lesson you have learned during your studies? 

I have understood that what makes me feel well, as a professional, is to see projects horizontally, managing the aggregated comprexities, instead of vertically. I have learned that I can contribute the most when I can translate the language of problems into that of solutions, through a global sight of oll the nodes in value chains.

7. Where do you see yourself in five years?

Geographically I would prefer to keep the answer as open as possible; so many the opportunities to create new business globally. Probably I will keep on moving between EU, USA and Asia.

8. Finally, what are your hopes for the future? 

At a high level, I really hope to contribute improving people’s quality of life. On a more local basis, my hope is that I will be capable of responding to my children when they ask me what my job is 🙂