About Marco Iannacone
Marco Iannacone was born in Milan in the year of the Moon landing: a few months before the first version of UNIX, two years before Ray Tomlinson sent the first email, seven years before Steve Wozniak did unreasonable things with a 1 MHz CPU, and fifteen years before the invention of copyleft.
This does not prove anything, obviously. But it does place him suspiciously close to several of the technologies that later shaped his life.
Marco is an Italian technologist, product strategist and independent researcher working across two parallel tracks: enterprise technology and research-driven impact.
His operating system is something many people would probably call neurodivergence. He tends to think of it as a hardware configuration: one that makes shallow interests hard to maintain and deep focus unusually persistent.
That may partly explain how someone who first touched the Internet in 1991 could become Head of Engineering at Vodafone Group in Germany ten years later, without a computer science degree being harmed in the making of this career.
The common thread is simple: applying technology to problems that matter, with rigorous methodology, real-world constraints and measurable outcomes.
The enterprise and cybersecurity track
Marco’s professional career began in the early Internet era, when connecting systems still required understanding what was happening below the surface. Civilization has since replaced much of that with dashboards, which is convenient and occasionally tragic.In the 1990s, he helped build several Italian Internet Service Providers, created one of the first Italian blogworked as Technical Editor for leading Italian technology magazines, contributed to open-source dissemination, maintained the official Italian Linux FAQs from 1996 to 1999, and helped SuSE Linux GmbH localize its distribution for the Italian market.
Within a decade of entering the field, he became Head of Engineering for new products at Vodafone Group in Germany, leading international teams and deploying services used by large-scale enterprise customers. He later served as Group IT Audit Manager at Vodafone Group, leading technology risk assessments and compliance activities across 21 operating companies in Europe, Africa and Asia.
An INSEAD Executive MBA graduate and CISM® certified professional, Marco has worked across internetworking, cybersecurity, governance, enterprise product strategy and AI/LLM applications. Today, he works at Fastweb SpA as Senior Product Manager, focusing on AI product strategy and B2B cybersecurity solutions.
The research and impact track
In 2012, Marco shifted part of his work toward assistive technologies and inclusive education.He co-founded Digitally Different Srl and created EdiTouch (2012–2018), a line of educational tablets designed in Italy to support students with dyslexia, Specific Learning Disorders and Special Educational Needs.
EdiTouch was not conceived as a generic device with educational apps installed on top. It was designed as an integrated learning ecosystem, developed with specialists, teachers, families and students, and validated through a scientific field trial involving the Italian National Health Service, universities, schools and more than 400 students.
The project was named Gartner Cool Vendor in Education, featured by European Schoolnet as an example of innovation in inclusive education, and presented in institutional contexts including the Italian Chamber of Deputies.
Marco also holds international patents in mobile technologies, digital text interaction and inclusive learning systems.
This does not mean he has become a fan of the modern patent system. It only means that, occasionally, one must protect useful ideas from systems that are less romantic than open source.
Bridging technology and cognitive science
Despite how some older online articles describe him, Marco does not hold an engineering degree. His path has been less linear, which is usually inconvenient for HR forms and more interesting for actual work.After years spent designing, auditing and managing complex technological systems, his current research interest has moved toward another difficult system: human cognition.
He is currently a returning university student pursuing a degree in Psychology at UniNettuno University, with a research focus on the cognitive evaluation of reasoning quality in AI-mediated educational dialogue.
His current independent research explores how AI tutoring systems, maieutic dialogue, learning analytics and cognitive assessment can support better learning outcomes, especially in K-12 contexts.
He is currently working on an AI tutoring system designed according to the same inclusive principle that guided EdiTouch: supporting neurotypical students, students with Specific Learning Disorders, students with Special Educational Needs and high-potential learners within a common learning environment.
The tools have changed.
The question has not:
How can technology adapt to human complexity instead of forcing humans to adapt to bad systems?
Connect and explore
Research and publications: ORCID ProfileProfessional network: LinkedIn Profile
Personal Operating System: Enjoy and explore knowledge console
EdiTouch project Discover EdiTouch project