Luca Cacciolatti

Luca is an academic and entrepreneur. And a free thinker. He holds a Phd in Marketing and Entrepreneurship and a tenure at University of Westminster as director of the MSc Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Enterprise Development. In the past four years he and his team have been coaching more than 160 start-ups in a variety of sectors, many of which focus on social entrepreneurship and social innovation.

Luca’s main research interests are in the areas of Marketing, Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Sociological Institutionalism and he publishes original, well execute research articles in journals that are highly regarded in the scientific community. Luca is also the author of a widely used monograph Entrepreneurial Marketing for SMEs, published by Palgrave, and distributed in university libraries worldwide.

Luca in his career has taught a variety of courses, from marketing strategy to international marketing, value chain management to research methods. Most recently he has been teaching to post-graduate students Entrepreneurial Marketing for SMEs, Distribution and Price Management, and Analytics for Small Businesses, where he teaches start-up funders to used qualitative and quantitative techniques of data analysis to support their business decision-making. He is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK), a Member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, a Member of the Marketing Science Institute, and a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.

Luca also acts as an expert of the European Commission on projects related to entrepreneurship, innovation, sustainable and healthy food chains and holds some visiting positions as Programme Professor at the School of Public Affairs at the University of Science and Technology of China and a visiting position at the Research Centre for Technological Innovation, a think tank of the Chinese government hosted at Tsinghua University.

Luca offers coaching for start-ups in the following areas:

Capabilities development

- Marketing capabilities
- Organisational
- Dynamic capabilities
- Entrepreneurial mindset development
- Firm performance benchmarking and enhancement
- Skills’ developmental needs identification

Market research for start-ups

- Market identification and estimation
- Market segmentation, targeting, and positioning
- Evidence-based concepts and models validation

Business models development

- Value propositions development
- Design thinking approaches to innovation
- Marketing strategy
- Foreign market entries strategies

Luca is also available to public organisations for training in the following areas:

- Social innovation and public management
- Entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystems development
- Regional innovation systems development
- An Entrepreneurial State approach to regional development