Business risk, measured with models you can check.
STAIRS turns geopolitical, climate and legal exposure into figures a company can act on — and an auditor can defend. Every figure carries its sources, its version and its limits.
Founded in 2023 by the team of Istituto ISR, an independent research institute active since 2005.
Three layers, one method
We do the research, we build the platform that runs it at scale, and we ship the software companies use every day. Each layer stands on the one below it.
Models
Geopolitical and geoclimatic probable maximum loss, country risk indices, regulatory pressure. Written down, versioned, published and open to criticism.
The models →SONAR — the platform
Portfolio-scale analysis for advisors, and a daily observation of public sources: press, official registers, climate and conflict data.
How SONAR works →TRAMA 360 — the product
The business suite that brings the method into the working day of a company: management systems, liability, safety, cyber, climate, geopolitics, ESG.
petrusulyxes.it →Four rules we do not bend
- Sources are declared and dated. Every input carries its origin, its period and the version we used. A missing figure stays missing: it never becomes a zero.
- The metre is fixed. Thresholds and weights are frozen and versioned, so two companies measured by different auditors in different years remain comparable. A new metre opens a new series.
- The arithmetic is deterministic. Language models read documents; they never write a number. Exposure figures come from formulas whose parameters are published.
- A person signs. Nothing reaches a client without a professional who has examined it, corrected it and taken responsibility for it.
From country risk to the exposure of one site
A country index tells you the weather. Our models tell you what the weather does to your plant, your supplier and your process.
GPML — Geopolitical Probable Maximum Loss
A scenario magnitude, not an average annual loss: production value, exposure by country and process area, country pressure, sector coefficient, and the organisational control observed in the audit. Published with Francesco Ravazzolo, ISR Editions, 2026.
GCPML — Geoclimatic Probable Maximum Loss
The same chain, driven by the physical hazard of the site: six hazards, absolute thresholds, coordinates verified one by one, and a transmission matrix that carries the hazard into process areas. Seventeen sites in thirteen countries; results preliminary, paper in preparation.
STAIRS Index
Monthly geopolitical risk by country, built from declared sources and used as an input to GPML — never as an answer on its own.
Disturbance indices and regulatory pressure
Daily measures of how much the observed world moves, and of how much regulatory ground is unstable, country by country. Developed with Istituto ISR and published weekly in its bulletin.
Screens from SONAR 4.5, September 2026. Every panel carries the sources it used, the period it covers and the version of the metre. The models in detail →
SONAR
SONAR is where the models run at scale. On one side a panel of economic operators, each with its own position: geopolitical and geoclimatic exposure, legal responsibility, disturbance, regulatory pressure, supply chain, and the process areas of the audit.
On the other side the observatory: public sources collected every day, indices computed from them, and a weekly bulletin published by Istituto ISR with a DOI and a signature.
The engine reads and proposes. It has no tools, no shell, no network of its own: it runs on the professional's own machine, and client documents never leave it.
For whom
Advisory firms and internal audit teams that follow many companies and need one comparable method across all of them.
What it produces
Comparable figures with their coverage, dated sources, versioned metres, and a record of who decided what.
What we can show
Bulletin of the BSR Observatory
Istituto ISR publishes a weekly bulletin built with our platform: indices, maps, readings and a method sheet. Each issue is signed, deposited on Zenodo with a DOI and accompanied by the fingerprint of its text.
GPML — Geopolitical Probable Maximum Loss
Domenichini and Ravazzolo, ISR Editions. The corporate geopolitical risk model, from theory to case studies on sixteen multinational groups, 2014–2025.
petrus_ulyxes — Intelligence under control
Domenichini and Ravazzolo. The book that describes the engine, the measures, the declared limits and the confidentiality choices behind the whole system.
Quantum ISR Index of Geopolitical Risk for Business
ISR Editions, with a preface by Francesco Ravazzolo: a framework inspired by quantum theory to read geopolitical uncertainty as a multidimensional, dynamic object.
INAIL guidelines on organisational models
The methodology of Istituto ISR was adopted by INAIL for the national guidelines on monitoring and assessing the risk of workplace-safety offences. Our founder is among the authors.
Three founders
Pietro Domenichini
Business lawyer and auditor. In 2005 he founded Istituto ISR, the independent research institute on corporate liability, which he still directs. Heard as an expert by the Chamber of Deputies in 2019; his institute's methodology was adopted in the INAIL guidelines of 2023.
Francesco Ravazzolo
Full Professor of Econometrics at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, where he coordinates the Data Science and Mathematical Methods research area, and Head of the Department of Data Science and Analytics at BI Norwegian Business School.
Valentina Zambonini
Lawyer, specialised in building and running organisational models for legal entities. A member of Istituto ISR since 2005, and a director of technology companies and startups.
Istituto ISR brings together professionals, entrepreneurs and researchers who have worked on business risk since 2005. STAIRS was created by that team in 2023 to develop the models and the software. More about us →
Talk to us
Research collaborations, a portfolio analysis, or a look at the tools: write two lines about what you need and we will answer.