RESCUED: REdesign Supply Chains to speed Up Excellence through Digitalization
Project leader: Baglio Martina
Duration: 2022 – 2023
The research RESCUED (Redesign the Supply Chain to speed Up Excellence through Digitalization) aims to help firms understand how supply chains evolved in a complex context where transformative drivers such as digital technologies and disruptions (e.g. pandemics and climate change) have changed the competitive scenario – and how they can tackle transformations leveraging digitalization. This research studies and maps future trends and new possible supply chain configurations taking two perspectives: shippers and logistics service providers
PODCAST – Positioning and Sizing of Community Homes: an ABM for Territorial Health
Project leader: Foglia Emanuela
Duration: 2022 – 2023
The National Recovery and Resilience Plan provides a precious opportunity to enhance and empower the territorial and primary services, but the Healthcare Service at Regional and National level has to radically review processes, spaces, resources, with new organizational and delivery models: could the creation of Community Homes (i.e. a proximity medical structure of territorial reference, with a multi-professional group of clinicians)represent an answer of this topic?
The PODCAST project aims to develop an agent based model, useful for defining the optimal characteristics of a structure in terms of positioning and sizing in relation with the territorial context and related dimension (being coherent with organizational and citizens’ needs).
Innovazione e Sostenibilità: qual è il legame nell’ambito del riciclo dei rifiuti?
Project leader: Puliga Gloria
Duration: 2022 – 2023
Understanding the connection between innovation capacity and sustainability is an area of significant theoretical and practical relevance. On a territorial level, it is necessary to identify the drivers that improve sustainability performance, with waste management playing a particularly crucial role. This project aims to study how specific innovative capacities within a region impact waste management and recycling, using multiple methodologies.
Regulating misinformation and disinformation: empirical evidences
Project leader: Falletti Elena
Duration: 2022 – 2023
In recent years, the theme of disinformation and misinformation has become increasingly important. The fast spreading of fake news on social media, together with the progress of technologies such as deep fake, which can be particularly deceptive, has become a threat for democracy. In this scenario, it is crucial to understand how institutions may act to stem the spreading of fake news or at least to reduce the negative impact on society. This project is aimed at finding empirical evidences to sustain recommendations for a change in legislation.
B corp e società benefit: determinanti della sostenibilità e best practices
Project leader: Sciascia Salvatore
Duration: 2022 – 2023
Research Unit 1 (Salvatore Sciascia): “The Rise of B Corps: Determinants of Best Sustainability Practices and Their Impact on Economic-Financial Performance.”
Sustainability serves as a strategic tool for corporate change. The exponential growth of B Corps and benefit corporations globally has garnered significant interest within management and legal disciplines. However, many research questions in business economics remain unexplored. This study uses quantitative analysis to identify the determinants of best sustainability practices and their impact on economic-financial performance.
Research Unit 2 (Patrizia Tettamanzi): “Benefit Corporations and B Corps: Regulatory Innovations and the UN 2030 Agenda.”
The introduction of Benefit Corporations through the 2016 Stability Law is part of a global movement promoting an evolved, integrated business paradigm. While these entities are “for profit,” they aim to achieve sustainable performance for all stakeholders. Given the early adoption stage in Italy and overlaps with other models (e.g., B Corp certification), it is urgent to explore their actual usefulness and impact on businesses.
La disclosure ESG nella prospettiva degli investitori istituzionali sul mercato AIM Italia
Project leader: Cortesi Alessandro
Duration: 2022 – 2023
This project aims to study the gap between ESG disclosure offered by SMEs listed on AIM Italia and the demand from institutional investors. Specifically, through a survey, the research will: (i) identify the need for ESG information among institutional investors in the AIM market; (ii) examine their involvement in the ESG disclosure process of companies; (iii) identify factors that encourage or limit the use of ESG information in investment decisions; (iv) identify future trends.
Monetary Policy, inequality and income distribution: a comprehensive assessment
Project leader: Venegoni Andrea
Duration: 2022
Monetary policy and income inequality are key elements in today’s economic landscape and are interconnected. Monetary policy can impact income inequalities, and the intensity of these inequalities can, in turn, affect the effectiveness of central bank actions. Empirical literature on these topics remains underdeveloped due to methodological challenges. This research aims to overcome these challenges by developing an innovative quantitative framework.
The future of green innovation in Italian clusters
Project leader: Alberti Fernando
Duration: 2022 – 2023
In the last few years, within the debate on clusters and innovation-related knowledge exchanges, the topic of “green innovation” has gained great momentum. The aim of this project is to map, explore and visualize, for the first time in Italy, the green innovation specialization trajectories followed by Italian clusters over the last two decades. It will represent a new and strategic project to keep disseminating the “Italia Compete” project of the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Competitiveness as the “go-to-place” for Italian competitiveness.
On the predictability of stress tests results: evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic adverse scenario
Project leader: Lazzari Valter
Duration: 2022 – 2023
The effectiveness of stress tests in restoring market confidence and providing relevant information to reduce informational asymmetries is a widely debated topic. This project analyses market reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic and the publication of the 2021 European stress test results. It evaluates whether market participants can independently identify fragile banks or whether stress tests play a crucial role in reducing the information gap.
Standardisation and Versatility of the Research Evaluation System
Project leader: Minelli Eliana Alessandra
Duration: 2022 – 2023
The current systems of evaluation of research quality aim to satisfy both the need for accountability for the use of resources and the researchers’ requests for a fairer assessment of the quality of their work. The gold standard of peer-review is juxtaposed to numerous bibliometric indicators, including Altmetric, unable to cover the dimensions of quality when used alone. Building on the institutional logics perspective, this study aims to investigate the mechanisms through which research is evaluated in the process of manuscript review. The comprehension of the drivers behind the editorial decisions enables a more profound insight into the intrinsic and extrinsic criteria of evaluation. The project investigates and reconceptualizes the relationship between academic research, quality and its impact on society. Its final scope is to propose an integrative framework of evaluation of research that takes into consideration the differences across disciplines, incorporating the rigid metric-measurements of activity and practice with the nuanced and subjective, framework-embedded notions of performance and excellence. The project is carried out together with Oxford University.
PINPHA – Physical INternet for the post-covid PHArma supply chain
Project leader: Dallari Fabrizio
Duration: 2021 – 2023
This research investigates how Physical Internet, Blockchain and Logistics 4.0 technologies (e.g. IoT and Autonomous Vehicles) can address post-Covid pharma supply chains issues. Through a combination of qualitative, quantitative, architectural design and simulation methodologies, a Physical Internet framework will be developed focusing on the last-mile delivery of pharma supplies pre, during, and post emergencies.
SATUration of beds and lawsuits: stochastic predictive models in the COVID-19 era – SATUR-DAI PROJECT
Project leader: Foglia Emanuela
Duration: 2021 – 2022
Research Activity Description
COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented disruption for the global health and development community, with significant impacts, not only from a healthcare perspective, but also from a social, legal and economic point of view.
Focusing on hospitals, COVID-19 has imposed huge investments for the proper management of hospitalized individuals. On the one hand, healthcare organizations worldwide, are fighting to provide appropriate healthcare services to patients and are requiring substantial resources to continuously improve their delivery processes and outcomes (Gilmartin & D’Aunno, 2007), by revisiting their internal organizations, processes, and procedures. On the other hand, healthcare organizations are facing relevant pressures, to implement effective and efficient management tools and frameworks, since the current decrease of healthcare budgets, generates serious hurdles on their daily operations (Grigoroudis & Siskos, 2002).
According to the above, the complexity occurred in the management of large number of hospitalized patients (both in medical and in intensive care units) is not a temporary factor related to the pandemic era but is becoming a core element to be considered since COVID-19 has modified the overall health needs. In fact, the COVID-19 pandemic limited the number of patients that could be promptly and adequately taken in charge, including all those patients requiring clinical procedure, medical examination, or hospital therapies. Thus, the overall slowdown in hospital activities that could lead, over the time, to a continuous delay of healthcare interventions, as well as to a worsening of non-COVID outcomes and disease outbreaks (Barack et al., 2020; Chen & McNamara, 2020).
Moving on from these premises, the SATURDAI project aims at prediction, through the creation of specific predictive and forecasting models, to project the number and the potential impact of healthcare emergencies, considering not only patients affected by COVID-19, but also other severe viral diseases, including untreated chronic and frail patients. In particular a modelling approach supported by swarm intelligence will be designed to forecast the occupancy of ICU beds using COVID-19 time-series and supporting the prompt prediction of litigations and potential lawsuits, so that hospital managements could perform a cost-benefits analysis to decide whether to invest resources to increase critical care surge capacity.
Open innovation: what did it lead? A ten-year experience of collaborations in European manufacturing firms.
Project leader: Valentina Lazzarotti
Duration: 2021 – 2023
Despite the huge interest in Open Innovation (OI) among both practitioners and researchers in the past decades, a deep understanding of its impact on a firm’s performance has not been achieved yet. Large-scale studies (i.e. surveys) on a comprehensive model, including determinants, OI choices, performance variables, possible moderators and mediators are recommended to provide firms with useful suggestions to get the expected innovative and financial performance. Through a longitudinal study addressed to a sample of Swedish and Italian firms, investigated for the first time in 2012 and then 10 years later, our project aims to achieve such an understanding by identifying a set of causal relationships that clarify the interplay of the variables involved in successful OI implementations. COVID influence has also been considered as additional explanatory factor of performance.
Investigating the fit between Circular Economy managerial practices and performance indicators
Project leader: Andrea Urbinati
Duration: 2021 – 2023
To support transition to Circular Economy (CE), firms are called to develop and implement effective CE managerial practices, such as Design for Reuse or Remanufacturing, Energy Efficiency interventions, Take-back and Product-Service Systems. To this aim, we need proper performance indicators, supporting the identification, implementation, end evaluation of such practices. Current research still struggles to investigate the fit between CE practices and performance indicators. Accordingly, our aim is to address this research gap by developing a comprehensive set of indicators suggesting firms the most effective CE practices to be acted for putting into practice the principles of CE, and monitoring the progress of the CE implementation process.
Robust and set-optimization in games and mathematics
Project leader: Giovanni Paolo Crespi
Duration: 2021 – 2023
A robust game is a distribution-free model to handle ambiguity generated by a bounded set of possible realizations of the values of players’ payoff functions. The players are worst-case optimizers and a solution, called robust-optimization equilibrium, is guaranteed by standard regularity conditions. The research aims to investigate the sensitivity to the level of uncertainty of this equilibrium focusing on robust games with no private information. Side results on mathematical methods involved will also be investigated.
A multidimensional approach to nowcast economic attractiveness of territories
Project leader: Fausto Pacicco
Duration: 2021 – 2022
Measures of territorial attractiveness usually have two peculiar features: a national/regional level of analysis and an annual update frequency. However, as demonstrated by the recent COVID-19 pandemic, both of these are somewhat inadequate with regard to the demands of entrepreneurs and policy-makers, which need more granular information on both the territorial detail and time frequency for their analyses. By resorting to “state-of-the-art” quantitative tools, we propose a new econometric approach capable of responding to these needs, thus being able to nowcast territorial attractiveness, from the provincial to the continental level of detail.
Cultural Capital and Pro-environmental Behavioural Changes
Project leader: Filippo Pavesi
Duration: 2021 – 2023
We aim to study the impact of individual cultural consumption on pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs). The objective is to construct a field experiment in which we incentivize treated subjects to purchase cultural goods or services. Subjects will be treated over an extended period of time. If prolonged incentives succeed in increasing cultural consumption, we then analyze the impact that these newly induced behaviors have on PEBs, with the goal of implementing AI algorithms to nudge cultural consumption in the desired direction.
HR Practices e Performance Aziendali nelle PMI della Regione Insubrica
Project leader: Antonio Sebastiano
Duration: 2021 – 2022
This research investigates the prevalence and formalisation of key HR practices (e.g., recruitment and selection, training, evaluation) in SMEs in the Italian provinces of the Insubria Region. By combining quantitative and qualitative research methods, the study links HR practices to various business performance indicators to assess their impact on profitability, financial results, and organisational outcomes.
Digitalization, Pandemic and Sustainability: the Challenges of Accounting in the “New” Normal
Project leader: Patrizia Tettamanzi
Duration: 2021 – 2023
The current emergency context has made it essential to anticipate changes affecting the accounting field, including in academia. New and diverse skills, particularly digital ones, will be required by the job market for future accountants. Moreover, the escalating environmental challenges facing our planet may drive a shift from measuring profit to measuring “sustainable success.” Accounting educators must adapt their teaching methods to equip students with the skills needed to effectively address the challenges of the new millennium.
Il fattore di rischio ESG nei rendimenti azionari e obbligazionari
Project leader: Luigi Vena
Duration: 2021 – 2023
ESG risk factors have become increasingly significant in recent years, influencing financial instrument prices and returns. This study examines how the asset management industry responds to these themes. Using a variable-parameter model, the research analyses fund management styles concerning ESG risk factors, their evolution over time, and the impact on fund managers’ ability to create value.
HR e VUCAD World: cosa dovrà cambiare nel “new normal”
Project leader: Vittorio D’Amato
Duration: 2021 – 2023
Over the past decade, every company has faced a revolution driven by technological innovations and the arrival of new generations in the workplace. These factors define the VUCAD world (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and digital). This new socio-economic context significantly impacts the HR function, requiring it to update or reinvent its mission, competencies, and systems. This research aims to contribute to the ongoing academic and managerial debate, offering practical guidance on how HR should adapt to the new “new normal”.
Does too much choice confuse consumers? Consumer confusion in front of national brands and their copycats
Project leader: Chiara Mauri
Duration: 2021 – 2022
This project involves two experiments to investigate consumer confusion. This confusion stems from a) the large number of products on supermarket shelves, causing information overload, and b) the presence of copycat products that imitate leading brands. The first experiment uses a tachistoscope to display images/videos at varying time intervals. By showing a video of a product and its copycats for different durations, the study measures recognition errors regarding the product type (e.g., ice cream) and the brand name (e.g., Algida). The second experiment sets up a shop with varying numbers of product assortments and of copycats that resemble more or less the products they are imitating. It assesses purchasing errors as the number of products and of copycat presences increases.
