Paolo Zanenga at the Chamber of Deputies: the value that financial statements fail to capture

On 7 July 2026, Paolo Zanenga, President of Diotima Society and co-founder of The Transition Institute, addressed the Chamber’s 10th Committee on Productive Activities, Trade and Tourism, during its inquiry into the competitiveness of the Italian economic system and GDP trends between 1992 and 2025.

A decisive part of the value of Italian businesses does not appear in their financial statements. It lies in people’s skills, supply-chain relationships, knowledge accumulated across territories, and the ability to interpret problems and possibilities that cannot easily be translated into procedures. This heritage of tacit knowledge is a source of Italian excellence, yet remains largely invisible to investors and markets.

The document submitted to the Committee highlights a paradox: Italy has a widespread productive fabric, capable of competing in international markets and high-value niches, yet continues to grow more slowly than the European average. One reason is the difficulty of transforming knowledge embedded within companies into an observable, assessable and financeable asset.

Agentic AI, knowledge graphs and human–digital interaction raise the stakes: unrecognized knowledge can be lost through generational change, remain invisible to capital and be excluded from new value-creation processes.

The Enterprise MetaDomain (EMD) addresses this challenge by adding a cognitive environment to operational processes. Here, organizational and ecosystem knowledge can emerge in a connected, quarriable and progressively cumulative form. Companies can recognize existing skills and relationships, anticipate risks, identify opportunities for collaboration and make their generative potential more visible.

Zanenga also proposed public measures: incentives for bringing knowledge to light, pilot projects within industrial districts and strategic supply chains, new ways to represent intangible assets, and programs to preserve knowledge through generational transitions.

His contribution brings a fundamental issue into the debate on competitiveness: to capitalize Italian businesses, we must first learn to see, connect and represent what they know.

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Watch the hearing recording here — Paolo Zanenga’s contribution begins at minute 42:00.