Mario Moretti Polegato: How poking a hole in a shoe made me $3bn

A keen runner, Mario Moretti Polegato needed a shoe that didn't make his feet sweat. After hitting on a brilliantly simple idea, he now heads his own shoe empire, Geox.

From espresso and pizza to ice-cream and pasta, menus across the world owe a great deal to Italian ingenuity. "But very few Italian businessmen make any money from their innovations," says Mario Moretti Polegato, the 54-year-old founder of shoemaker Geox (GEO). "Starbucks has opened 10,000 coffee outlets in the US alone and Pizza Hut 25,000. Italian ideas. American businesses."

But Polegato, who is by reliable accounts worth more than $3bn, has bucked the trend. Born into a third-generation family wine business near Treviso, in Italy's North East, he spent 15 years developing the family's Villa Sandi and La Gioiosa labels across the world. It was on a 1992 trip to a wine convention in Reno in America that he hit upon the idea that eventually made him one of the world's wealthiest men.

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