Enhancing the business partnership between Italy and the US

The presence of Ronald Spogli, the US Ambassador to Italy, in Taormina had a great importance. While attending and actively participating to the workshop "Private Equity & Entrepreneurship", Mr. Spogli remarked the importance of building a stable and effective business partnership among the US and Italy. He reminded all the initiatives (Partnership for Growth, BEST, and others) that the US Embassy has promoted over the last past years to enhance the Italian-American cooperation. So, he wishes that more could be done for the future, particularly to facilitate cultural and business exchanges between US and Italian graduate and doctoral students. The same message has been remarked by Paul Corson, from the US Department of Commerce, who briefly recalled all the programs can be soon activated by the Southern firms to work with the US-based companies. Last but not least, even the Counsel General in Naples Patrick Truhn expressed the same auspices. During the conference, the most remarkable evidence that a real cooperation between the US and Italy is possible was the participation, as panelists, of the business angel Allan May and of the academics Laura Resnikoff (Columbia University) and Donna DeCarolis (Drexel University) coming to Taormina directly from their country of origin. Academia is going to play an important role of "knowledge broker" connecting people, facilitating the dissemination of a new financial business culture among firms, sharing new ideas and transferring to firms the results of their research projects.