Hermann Simon coined the phrase "hidden champions" in 1990. He counted, eventually, around 3,400 of them worldwide. Almost half in Germany. Several hundred in Italy. The original idea was beautiful and quietly revolutionary. The world economy is not carried by the famous corporations on the cover of business magazines. It's carried by small-to-mid-sized companies that nobody outside their niche has ever heard of, and who happen to be number one or two globally in something exquisitely specific. The bearing manufacturer who supplies a large share of the world's wind turbine bearings. The leather tanner who supplies the top luxury maisons. The optical lens grinder who supplies the satellite imaging industry.
Simon's framework worked because of how B2B verification worked in 1990. A procurement director from a major brand visited the factory. Met the founder. Walked the floor. Tasted the espresso. The hidden champion didn't need to be visible because the people who mattered already knew, and the network of who-knows-whom in industrial procurement was tight enough that being visible was almost a liability. It suggested you were trying too hard, that you hadn't earned your status through fifty years of cumulative excellence.
Excellence used to require no shouting. Now no shouting means no shortlist.
In a Cicero interview earlier this year, Simon described himself as "a professional optimist, but increasingly skeptical." The interview was framed around Germany. The skepticism applies more sharply to Italy. The conditions that made the hidden champion strategy work have, quietly, broken.
What broke
Three things, all in the last five years. None showed up as a single headline.
The first, the obvious one. The people who make B2B procurement decisions don't visit factories anymore. They visit websites. LinkedIn pages. Google knowledge panels. They visit while sitting on a regional train at seven in the morning, on a phone, between two other meetings. The factory visit, when it happens, happens after the shortlist, not before. By the time anyone walks your floor, you have already won or lost.
The second is that procurement itself has been partly automated. Eighty-six percent of procurement teams in 2026 have rolled out at least one AI agent. The agents read corporate sites, scrape public data, score suppliers against weighted criteria, recommend shortlists. They do not know what a hidden champion is. They know what a complete supplier profile looks like, and yours either matches the schema or it doesn't.
The third is that the people who run the hidden champions, mostly second and third generation Italian and German founders, learned their craft in a world where visibility was not the lever. When the lever changed, they didn't notice. Or they noticed and didn't believe.
A dialogue Pan would have, if Simon were in the room
Professor Simon, the framework you built in 1990 was correct for 1990. It is still correct in its underlying observation about where economic value lives. What's broken is not the existence of hidden champions. What's broken is the relationship between hidden and successful.
In 1990, hiddenness was a side-effect of being good. Today, hiddenness is what stops the AI procurement agent from scoring you above the competitor whose only advantage was being scoreable.
The Italian variant of your category is paying the highest price. A 2025 R&D Management study from Wiley documented Italian hidden champions and their resilience. The same study, read between the lines, also documented their digital training participation, 8.3 percent against a European average of 10.8, against France's 18.8. The gap is not operational. The gap is in being legible to the system that now selects which excellence gets a chance to bid.
If I could ask Simon one thing on stage, it would be this. What does the next edition of "Hidden Champions" say about the difference between being unknown by choice and being unknown by neglect. Because in 2026, the second one is a category killer, and the first one was always a category virtue.
— Pan