Christos Pitelis, a Professor of Strategy and International Business at the University of Southampton and Life Fellow at Queens' College, Cambridge, traces his intellectual roots to Greece, where he studied social and political sciences before pursuing graduate work in economics at Newcastle and then a doctorate at Warwick under Professor Keith Cowling. Cowling, a foundational figure in UK industrial organization, encouraged Pitelis to synthesize neoclassical economics with classical political economy and even Marxian thought — a synthesis aimed at understanding not just market efficiency, but value creation and the public good.

Edith Penrose A memorable portion of the interview is devoted to Pitelis's personal relationship with Edith Penrose, whose complete works he now holds as literary executor. He describes her as a sharp, no-nonsense, and socially warm thinker who synthesized Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall, and Schumpeter into a unified theory of endogenous firm growth. He regards this as among the most important intellectual contributions of the second half of the 20th century, and is currently organizing a journal issue marking 70 years since her seminal work.

Global Sustainable Value Creation Pitelis explains the concept of "global sustainable value creation" — a welfare criterion he and McGahan have written about together — as an alternative to the narrower Pareto efficiency standard used in mainstream economics. Whereas Pareto efficiency ignores distributional effects (e.g., a billionaire getting richer without others getting poorer counts as an efficiency gain), global sustainable value creation incorporates environmental, social, and economic sustainability as conditions of legitimacy. He illustrates this with the example of Japan's post-war industrial strategy: strategic trade policy that helped build globally competitive firms like Sony increased value for everyone, whereas similar protectionism by already-developed nations would not pass the same test.

Praxis Theory of Value and Industrial Strategy Pitelis introduces his "praxis theory of value," rooted in the philosophical tradition from Aristotle onward, which holds that the deepest source of value is socially embedded, purposeful human action. He argues that while strategy focuses on proximate drivers like innovation, scale, and distinctive resources, the ultimate engine is organized human agency — i.e., entrepreneurship broadly conceived. Crucially, he distinguishes between value-creating and non-value-creating advantages (such as monopolistic rent-seeking), and argues that society's role is to shape incentives so that value capture is tied to genuine value creation.

His most recent work applies these ideas to industrial strategy, drawing on orchestration theory to argue that governments, like leading firms, should focus on enabling general purpose technologies and ecosystems rather than trying to do everything — avoiding both the pitfall of over-reliance on markets and the trap of overextended public intervention.

Closing Reflections When asked what keeps him optimistic, Pitelis — self-described as naturally pessimistic — expresses cautious hope that people and institutions can learn to recognize that a smaller share of a much larger, co-created pie is better than a larger share of a small one. The key challenge, he concludes, is sustainability: the structural incentives toward short-termism and rent-seeking remain formidable.