2024
The LISA Project (Learning, Inclusion, Salary, Ageing) aims to study the local effects of the interaction between four dimensions of inequality – continuous learning, labour market inclusion, wage gap, and workforce ageing – on business competitiveness and the labour market in the Italian part of Insubria. The project’s goal is to produce policy recommendations and management practices to enhance the competitiveness of businesses and improve their ability to attract, strengthen, and retain human capital in the Italian Insubria region, supporting local development.
Project leader: Emanuela Foglia
Duration: 2024 – 2027
Keywords: validation, adaptation, model, multidimensional, transcultural, rehabilitation, cognitive
Description:
Among NCD-related disabilities, cognitive impairment significantly burdens patients and their caregivers with specific long-term rehabilitation needs. Technology-enabled continuity of care may scale up the healthcare services to a broader target of people, that could benefit from telerehabilitation interventions able to deliver care at home.
New digital solutions implementation is often validated and regulated within the local or regional contexts, becoming viable, effective healthcare systems, without a large-scale global impact.
The knowledge to design sustainable and accessible healthcare services remains locally confined, not transferable to different contexts needing a reorganization of the healthcare system, a procedures/processes contextualization, an adaptation of professional figures involved, and a local definition of the reimbursement tariffs of reference.
A local adaptation could not be sufficient: the rehabilitation programs contents should also reflect the beliefs, attitudes, life background, typical of different geographical settings and therefore can be different from area to area. Moreover, the rehabilitation contents should be updated and diversified according to the transcultural characteristics of patients and the transnational features (such as attitudes, habits, life-styles, etc…).
The “MI RICORDO Project” aims to purpose a multidimensional model that, starting from the MAST (Model for Assessment of Telemedicine) approach, could support the effective validation and adaptation of telemedicine digital solutions in the different countries, considering safety, clinical effectiveness, patient perspectives, economic aspects, organizational domains, socio-cultural, legal, ethical aspects, finally acceptability, and reimbursement concerns.
This goal will be achieved by studying and redesigning an innovative digital healthcare solution, able to offer continuity of care for people with cognitive impairment, already developed in the Italian context, for its transferability and adaptation in 3 different transnational contexts (Italy, Portugal and France).
Partners will be firstly engaged in the translation, contents and transcultural adaptation of the innovative RICORDO (Rehabilitation Intervention of COgnitive Resources Domain-Oriented) rehabilitation care pathway.
RICORDO is based on a technology-enabled digital solution for the cognitive rehabilitation of people currently experiencing (such as acquired brain injury) or likely to experience cognitive disability (such as early neurodegenerative conditions).
This solution could be delivered through a telerehabilitation platform (web-based) or as a digital therapeutic (app-based), with an adaptable level of cognitive activities’ incremental difficulty.
The cognitive rehabilitation content covers most of the DSM-5 neurocognitive domains and can be organized into different rehabilitation program templates to meet tailored rehabilitation needs.
The RICORDO telerehabilitation path model has been previously pilot-tested (Rossetto et al., 2023) in a group of people with neurodegenerative disease (Mild Cognitive Impairment) in Italy.
The cognitive rehabilitation program was a specific intervention delivered with telerehabilitation platform (patients’ homes), intensive frequency (five days per week, 30-40 min per day) and limited duration (6 weeks) to promote cognitive abilities.
The clinical partners will test the acceptability and feasibility of this care pathway model. The solution efficacy could be tested in three pilot settings (such as hospital, nursing home, and home care setting), in different transnational contexts (Italy, Portugal and France). Two feasibility study and one randomized controlled trial will be designed and implemented for validating the digital solution effectiveness.
Digital solution and care pathway will be validated also through the MAST model, with a multidimensional approach.
2023
Project leader: Andrea Urbinati
Duration: 2023 – 2025
Keywords: breakthrough innovation; learning by failure; medical devices industry; search strategies; R&D collaborations; product recalls
Description:
“It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” ― Bill Gates While an entrepreneur like Bill Gates recognizes the need to scrutinize the reasons for failure and learn from them, scholars have paid less attention to studying how failures affect a firm’s processes and how the whole organization might learn from its errors. The need to unravel how firms react and learn by failure is particularly salient in innovative processes, which are more likely to fail because of their uncertainty, risk, and complexity. Any firm that could reap the benefits of learning from failing innovation projects might improve its innovative performance. This aspect is compelling when looking at the development of a particular type of innovation: breakthroughs. Innovative processes finalized to such impactful innovations are characterized by more novelty and possibly more likelihood to fail. While searching for breakthrough innovations might lead to more failures, firms might still enhance their innovation capacity and breakthrough development through an efficient and effective process of learning by failure. The present project aims to contribute to solving a relevant issue for society, i.e. the development of safer breakthrough medical devices, by analyzing how firms’ capabilities to develop breakthrough innovations may be affected by learning by failure. A better understanding of how breakthroughs in the health industry may support European firms in dealing with the complexity, uncertainty, risks, quality, and security requirements that characterize this process. The definition of more effective approaches for developing breakthrough innovations may enhance the firms’ innovativeness and competitiveness as well as the health outcomes achieved by citizens, healthcare providers, and national and regional health systems. The project aims to achieve two main objectives. First, a quantitative assessment of the relationships between the firm’s capability to develop breakthrough innovations and the emergence of innovation failures, with a specific focus on the two most relevant approaches that firms use to cope with uncertainty: search strategies (i.e. the balance between exploration and exploitation) and R&D collaborations. This will allow for defining a novel, systematic framework, enriching the existing literature by clarifying under which conditions innovation failure may favor or hamper breakthrough innovations. This novel framework is then exploited to pursue the second objective, aiming at developing a set of best practices, i.e. managerial tools and procedures, that firms can implement to better exploit learning by failure in their future innovative efforts. These best practices result from multiple case studies in which the insights provided by the quantitative framework are further analyzed and aligned with the internal innovation processes carried out by firms operating in the medical devices industry.
Partner:
Project leader: Andrea Urbinati
Duration: 2023 – 2025
Keywords: management engineering; decision making; environmental and ecological economics; circular economy; circular transition
Description:
To support transition to CE, firms are called to develop and implement effective CE initiatives. To this aim, they need proper decision-making tools, supporting them in identifying and carrying out the best suitable set of these initiatives and in evaluating the obtained results. Even though in these years there has been a growing amount of research on CE, very few studies have addressed this issue from a strategic point of view (Bocken et al., 2016). Most of them have proposed taxonomies of CE business models (Pieroni et al., 2019), with little theoretical argumentation for what CE strategies to be adopted in specific contexts and circumstances. Our aim is to address this need by developing an integrated decision-making tool for CE supporting three key phases: 1) the strategic phase, suggesting firms the most effective CE strategies to be adopted, 2) the planning phase, identifying the managerial practices to be implemented for putting into practice the selected CE strategies, and 3) the control phase, proposing specific indicators to monitor the progress and the overall results achieved (Figure 1).
To pursue this aim, we adopt a capability-based theory approach. We argue that the production capabilities (such as infrastructure or technology) enable firms to effectively adopt the CE strategies. To identify the proper fit between CE strategies and the production capabilities, we drawn on recent economic complexity tools used to capture the country’s green production capabilities (Higaldo et al., 2007; Fraccascia et al., 2018; Mealy and Teytelboym, 2020). We will purposively develop a “proximity” index capturing this fit. The higher the proximity, the more the firms in a given economic sector have the proper production capabilities to effectively implement that specific CE strategy. Furthermore, we argue that the appropriate set of managerial practices that allow the implementation of CE strategies will be based on a wider set of specific firms’ capabilities. These managerial practices can involve strategic, organizational, and technological factors, affecting the successful implementation of CE strategy within the firm (Urbinati et al, 2017; Ünal et al., 2019a). Our aim is to define a tool that assists the planning phase by supporting the selection of a specific set of managerial practices, fitting the firms’ capabilities and the CE strategy selected. In order to guarantee that the CE practices are effectively implemented, it is important that the implementation process is monitored by means of proper CE indicators. A high number of performance measurements have been developed, differing in purpose, scope, methodology, and scale (Fraccascia and Giannoccaro, 2020). Despite this, clear guidelines to design and select CE performance indicators are still lacking. Accordingly, we classify CE indicators and develop a tool that assists the design and choice of CE performance indicators matching the selected CE practices.
Partner:
Project leader: Chiara Gigliarano
Duration: 2023 – 2025
Keywords: New poor; New inequality; Mutldimensional and fuzzy approaches; Small area estimation; Social policies; Microsimulation models
Description:
The war in Ukraine, the energy crisis, and rising inflation pose different challenges as they risk exacerbating the effect of the recent Covid-19 pandemic, increasing inequalities and changing poverty scenarios worldwide. The importance of these themes calls for ascertain what the best policies and approaches are to effectively face up to the consequences of these events. MYPEOPLE aims to address the consequences of this crisis on people well-being, social inclusion, lifestyles and behaviours in order to monitor the worsening living conditions of people already vulnerable to poverty and discover new people asking for social and financial help, especially among the middle classes. Furthermore, the rise in the prices of certain essential foodstuffs has a crucial effect on people’s lifestyles and habits. While it is known that the pandemic has affected job prospects, economic possibilities, sociality, sports, food consumption behaviours and healthy eating habits/behaviours, the synergistic effect and its differences among local areas or specific population groups are completely unexplored. Accordingly, MYPEOPLE’s research strategy is characterised by the following four basic objectives: 1) Analyse the current welfare systems of the three regions under study (Lombardia, Toscana, and Campania). The regions involved in MYPEOPLE project represent three important areas of the North, Centre and South of Italy where the quality and conditions of life are considerably different. 2) Carry out probability-based surveys in the three regions and build a dataset with updated information on household living conditions, with a special focus on health and food safety. Indeed, the substitution effect of food products due to the impoverishment of families following the energy crisis and the unavailability of certain raw materials will be added to that of the pandemic, with local peculiarities that depend on the presence in the territory of associations with a charitable vocation, on the environmental conditions, on the presence of products more or less healthy and on the policies implemented by local governments. 3) Use the survey results to provide a collection of indicators at a local area level and estimate statistical models for measuring the effects of the recent crises on household living conditions from a multidimensional perspective. 4) Evaluate welfare public policies through the analysis of survey results and formulate policy recommendations for local welfare system improvement. The project is characterised by specific territorial dimensions to be able to propose intervention strategies that take into account the territorial heterogeneity of the investigated areas and the specific needs of the different categories of people and/or families.
Partner:
Project leader: Raffaella Manzini
Duration: 2023 – 2025
Keywords: agent-based modelling; innovation; inequality mitigation; sustainable development; macroeconomic policies; complex systems
Description:
Sustainable development and inequality mitigation are two main challenges that government and policy regulator have to address in general and even more after global crises. These challenges ask for innovative solutions that must consider economic and innovation systems as complex systems characterised by non-linear relations among their constitutive elements and by dynamic continuous evolutions. Following this premise, the present project is aimed at developing an agent-based model platform to perform ex-ante evaluations of innovative policy measures in a virtual laboratory, to identify policy guidelines fostering innovation as driver of sustainable development and inequality mitigation of countries and regions. The general objective of the project is to enrich the EURACE model, that includes many different kinds of economic agents and policy makers (e.g., the government and the central bank, responsible for fiscal and monetary policy, respectively) with the processes and networks of innovations. In particular, the capital good producers, which produce investment goods (i.e., machineries), and consumption goods producers will be connected by innovation networks and these will help to implement business innovation faster and more efficiently. Both the technological and process innovations will be considered. In the project, the reference unit of analysis will be Italy and different territorial articulations (i.e., Italian Regions) will be included in the analysis in order to evaluate diverse territorial levels and their heterogeneity in terms of innovation performances and development paths. The enriched version of EURACE will allow us to simulate with a bottom-up approach the effects of a mix of fiscal, monetary and social policies. The project will have a scientific and technological impact improving the state-of-the-art of methodologies and techniques used to develop tools for supporting big challenges such as the sustainable development and inequality mitigation, and, in general, the policy making process. By its nature, the project will cross-fertilize and advance current technologies in the fields of agent-based modelling and simulation. The project will have also a social and economic impact by improving knowledge and tools for supporting countries, regions, and industrial organizations. Indeed, non-conventional coordination among fiscal and monetary policies, regulatory measures of markets and sectors, expectations of economic agents able to manage the complexity of the economic system (by properly taking into account the heterogeneity, the bounded rationality and the interacting networks) will help policy maker in avoiding the major negative impacts of global crises and in improving the citizen welfare.
Partner:
Project leader: Rossella Pozzi
Duration: 2023 – 2025
Keywords: Teaching Factories (TF); Learning Spaces and Activities; Circular Economy; Sustainable and circular manufacturing; Servitization; Industry 4.0
Description:
The last decades have clearly shown the relevance of manufacturing in our Society, at the global and national levels. Manufacturing generates value for global trade, accounts for most of the jobs, and contributes to global economic value. Italy is among the top players in manufacturing, and manufacturing is the main sector contributing to the national economy. Unfortunately, manufacturing – when not properly managed and developed – has also some deep impacts on our Society: global warming, pollution, and resource depletion to name a few. This is no more acceptable. For the next generations, a new sustainable model is needed, and new Sustainable and Circular Manufacturing is needed too. Europe – rooted in manufacturing since the first industrial revolution – is leading this discussion globally, with its Sustainable Development Strategy. Sustainable Manufacturing calls for many transformations, from customers’ habits to production facilities, from open chains to closed and circular processes. Among these transformations, technological evolution is acting – as usual – in a push way. Technological progress could provide suitable solutions for greener, more reliable, resilient, and sustainable manufacturing under the umbrella of the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0). Such industrial evolution is becoming a key concern for many organizations due to the challenges brought forward. Higher Educational Institutions are expected to arm graduates with the knowledge and competencies required to support organizations to remain competitive in an Industry 4.0 context, but the rapid advances in technology raise doubts about whether this can be achieved with standard educational models. Meeting this and future challenges requires transformational changes in the way engineering students are educated, reshaping the understanding of what are the contents (knowledge, skills, and competencies) engineers should possess, how Learning Activities (LA) should be developed to allow competencies learning and assessment, how it should be taught, and how Learning Spaces (LS) should be designed. The TechFact project aims to support the education of engineering and technical students, giving them the needed skills and tools to afford such challenging times. The project wants to define guidelines for designing new LS and LA to be used in the modern manufacturing education field, for supporting an effective and adequate learning experience. The project is based on a list of empirical research activities, to be run in the Teaching Factories available among the project partners and in their international networks. The research outcomes are meant to inform the design of LS and LA that consider the crucial matter of sustainability, circularity, and digitalization and to contribute to the current developments toward a new paradigm in industrial engineering education. The results will have several implications for future research involving LS and LA in manufacturing education.
