Francesco Rocciola is an Associate Director at VVA Economics & Policy.
Francesco, currently, coordinates the market research activities in the Brussels office and focuses in international business development activities for public and private clients.
Over the last six years, Francesco has been managing EU-funded projects and framework contracts, having an active role in the full grant cycle management from the proposal to the implementation phase.
Previously, he managed several extramuros contracts under the DG COMM framework contract ‘NovaComm’ related to the digital transformation, revamp and migration of the European Commission websites to Drupal 8 following a user-centric approach. He has been managing end to end contracts with different DGs (i.e. MARE, ECFIN, COMM) for the development and revamp of websites (i.e. InvestEU, Representations, Europa.eu). His role, among others, included the scoping, planning, budgeting, managing, monitoring, and reporting for the specific contracts.
Francesco has been the quality manager of the SSERR service contract promoted by DG RTD, offering exploitation support services to EU funded projects in the field of energy. He managed more than 70 trainings/services that were offered successfully by matching support requests with exploitation experts and trainers, monitoring and assessing the implementation of each service in terms of timing and quality of work, submitting technical and financial reports to the European Commission and presenting the SSERR opportunity in potential clients. He attended several seminars for a closer evaluation of the experts’ performance and worked with them for the improvement of the templates and tools used.
Additionally, he was the project coordinator of the ESIL project offering capacity building services for early stage investors (VCs, business angels, crowdfunding platforms) by organizing study visits, open days, pitch events, and trainings through all H2020 associated countries. 7 entities were the consortium members and 28 more from all over Europe, participated as third parties. His role included the overall coordination of the project, being the point of contact for all partners and the European Commission, the technical and financial reporting for the project, the constant monitoring of risks, the submission of deliverables, the organisation of study visits, trainings and pitch events, managing and tracking the project’s KPIs and making sure that the consortium abides by the H2020 cost eligibility rules.
Francesco has a four-year bachelor degree from AUTH on economics with a specialization on business economics and a master in corporate financial management with a thesis on corporate innovation from the University of Law Business School. His mother tongue is Greek, and he speaks fluently English and Italian.