Francesca Bria is the President of the Italian National Innovation Fund and a Board Member of the Italian public media company RAI. She is Honorary Professor in the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at UCL in London and she is part of the High-level Roundtable for the New European Bauhaus set up by the EC President Ursula von der Leyen to accelerate the EU Green Deal.
She is the former Chief Digital Technology and Innovation Officer for the City of Barcelona in Spain. In this role, she was leading the smart city Agenda and she was one of the founders of the United Nations Cities Coalition for Digital Rights.
Francesca Bria is leading the EU flagship DECODE project on data sovereignty in Europe, and is a Senior Adviser on the EC programme STARTS (Innovation at the nexus of Science, Technology and the Arts).
Francesca has a PhD in Innovation and Entrepreneurship from Imperial College, London and MSc on Digital Economy from University of London, Birbeck. As Senior Programme Lead at Nesta, the UK Innovation Agency, she has led the EU D-CENT project, the biggest European Project on digital democracy and crypto platforms. She also led the Digital Social Innovation EU project, advising the EU on digital innovation policies and mission-driven innovation. She has been teaching in several universities in the UK and Italy and she has advised Governments, public and private organizations on technology and innovation policy, and its socio-economic, geopolitical and environmental impact.Francesca has been nominated Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. She has been listed in the top 50 Women in Tech by Forbes Magazine. Francesca is also Culture Persons of the Year 2020 according to the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), and is in the World’s top 20 most influential people in digital government by Apolitical.