Francesco Lapenta, Founding Director of the Institute of Future and Innovation Studies at John Cabot University, participated in the 2026 edition of Industry Digital Evolution (IDE) held in Brindisi, Italy from September 8-11. IDE is a forum bringing together senior representatives from Italian and international public institutions, universities, research institutions, industry, and defense organizations to discuss the technological and systemic transformations reshaping economies, infrastructures, and societies.
The conference’s theme was the erosion of clean boundaries between civilian and defense sectors, a thread running from cybersecurity to aerospace to naval and border security. Speakers repeatedly returned to the tension between the pace of technological change and the slower cadence of regulatory and institutional adaptation. In the discussions, international cooperation was featured as both an aspiration and an open question, with several interventions noting how geopolitical instability complicates shared governance frameworks. Artificial intelligence and autonomous systems surfaced across nearly every session, treated less as a single technology than as an infrastructure reshaping how other sectors operate.
Lapenta contributed to the conference’s session on aerospace, bringing a new perspective to a discussion involving representatives from aviation authorities, defense, research, and industry. His presentation, “Aerospace 2036: What Future Today’s Transformations Are Building,” examined how the transformations already underway across aviation, space, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and critical infrastructures may combine over the coming decade to produce a qualitatively different systemic environment.
His intervention approached these developments through the lens of complexity theory and long-term futures. Lapenta distinguished between systems that are extraordinarily complicated — such as aircraft, launch vehicles, satellites or air-traffic-management systems and the qualitatively different complexity that emerges when these systems become interconnected with artificial intelligence, autonomous agents, communications networks, defense infrastructures, and other critical terrestrial systems.
The central argument of Lapenta’s presentation was that the coming decade may produce not simply better individual technologies, but a different systemic architecture, one in which properties such as safety, security and sovereignty can no longer be located in any single system but emerge instead from the relations between systems. Aviation, space systems, AI-enabled autonomous technologies, digital networks, and critical infrastructures are becoming increasingly interdependent, and the resulting functional ambiguity, the blurring of civilian and defense, public and private, human and autonomous roles, was treated as a structural feature, not a side effect to be regulated away.
Lapenta described this emerging environment as an “agentsphere”: a future system in which human institutions, autonomous technological agents, and interconnected infrastructures increasingly interact with and adapt to one another. Within it, sovereignty itself becomes relational and emergent, what he termed systemic sovereignty, rather than something a state or system holds outright. From this perspective, the governance challenge is no longer one of regulating individual technologies or sectors, but of governing emergent behavior across institutional and technological boundaries.
Among the forum’s participants were:
Luca Tagliaretti, Executive Director of the European Cybersecurity Competence Centre
Pierluigi Di Palma, President of ENAC
Amm. Isp. Capo Cristiano Nervi, Director of Naval Armaments
Maria Antonietta Aiello, Rector of the University of Salento
Gen. Antonio Caruso, Commander for Network Operations
Mirko Tondi, Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Fabio Maggiore, Chief Information Security Officer - United Nations International Computing Centre
Luigi Rinella, Director for Scientific Police and Cybersecurity
Giovanni Di Antonio, Director of Technological Innovation at ENAC
Dario Avallone, European Data Innovation Board/FIWARE
Gen. B. Armando Franza, Guardia di Finanza
Col. Paolo Vincenzoni, ROS Carabinieri
Andrea Lopreiato, NATO
Bernardo Palazzi, Italian National Cybersecurity Agency
Amm. Giulio Cappelletti, Italian Navy
Paolo Casalino, Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy
Fabrizio Maronta, Limes
Sergio Terzi, Politecnico di Milano.
Lapenta’s contribution to IDE reflects the broader work of the Institute of Future and Innovation Studies, which combines complexity analysis, futures thinking, and multi-stakeholder dialogue to examine emerging transformations while their institutional and societal trajectories remain open to collective choice.
