R&D Personnel Career Routes: An Exploratory Study

This study, aiming at investigate the alternative modes of career development for personnel belonging to R&D staff, addresses the extent to which career anchors are applicable to R&D staff and to examine the relationship among career anchors, gender and age, with the final purpose to add elements of discussion to the long-lasting debate about this matter. With this purpose in mind, we developed a questionnaire survey among 309 R&D personnel employed at firms belonging to the food machinery industry in a Northern Italy district. The results obtained from the statistical analysis indicate that the R&D personnel's career orientations is a predictor of their career routes preferences, confirming three possible career routes in R&D labs that were highlighted in previous studies

La gestione dell'innovazione nelle imprese industriali: il caso empirico dell'impiantistica alimentare

La capacità di innovare è una condizione necessaria per rimanere competitivi, indipendentemente dal settore di appartenenza. Nell’attuale sistema economico i prodotti, i processi, i mercati, le relazioni si trasformano costantemente e sistematicamente. All’interno di un’arena competitiva in cui è necessario avere delle capacità distintive che consentano una competizione non solo di prezzo, le opportunità risultano continuamente crescenti. L’innovazione è una fonte notevole di vantaggio competitivo e ciò non soltanto da un punto di vista interno, visto che le innovazioni determinano spesso un vantaggio in termini di produttività, ma anche nel senso che è alla base di vantaggi competitivi esterni, di estensioni di marche esistenti, se non addirittura nella creazione di nuove marche. La presente tesi di dottorato si propone di indagere il tema dell'innovazione,con particolare riferimento all'innovazione tecnologica. Gli scopi dello studio sono stati principalmente tre: 1. valutare il grado di diffusione dell’innovazione tecnologica nelle imprese del campione selezionato; 2. comprendere quali fattori maggiormente influenzano l’output innovativo delle aziende del campione; 3. esaminare l’impatto dell’attività innovativa sulle performance aziendali

Enabling technologies, application areas and impact of industry 4.0: a bibliographic analysis

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Evaluating Performance of University Spin-Off Companies: Lessons from Italy

Academic spin-offs are very special start-up companies that are founded by an academic inventor with the aim to exploit technological knowledge that originated within a University setting in order to develop products or services. During the last two decades, academic spin-offs have received increasing attention from both researchers and practitioners, mainly due to their ability to advance industrial application of scientific knowledge. Much of the studies available in literature on this matter, however, have focused on USA’s spin-offs, while still little attention has been paid to the European countries, and to Italy in particular. Thus, the aim of our research is twofold: first, to fill this gap in literature. Second, to propose, on the basis of the above mentioned literature review, a model of ex-ante evaluation of the spin-off companies’ performance. Specifically, the research methodology followed was a combination of literature analysis and Delphi technique: we first extensively reviewed the extant literature on spin-off companies, then we proposed to a panel of expert the indicators that emerged from the literature as affecting the performance of academic spin-offs

Environmental Collaboration for Sustainability in the Construction Industry: An Exploratory Study in Italy

The notion of sustainability, in its three-fold meaning (economic, environmental, and social), is being adopted more and more by companies. Today it is widely accepted that sustainability cannot be achieved by firms in isolation, but requires the collaboration of all supply chain players. This issue is particularly relevant in industrial contexts where the supply chains are complex in terms of structure and number of players, such as the construction industry. Thus, the aim of the paper is to explore the sustainability practices adopted in the construction industry, with a particular attention to the role of environmental collaboration of supply chain partners in achieving sustainability. By means of multiple case study-based research, we investigate sustainability practices on a sample of construction companies of Italy, thus identifying three main sustainability approaches, which differ in both the strategic orientation towards sustainability and the level of implementation in design, purchasing, and governance processes, as well as the main variables driving the adoption of these approaches

The Intention to Purchase Recycled Products: Towards an Integrative Theoretical Framework

The growing interest of the scientific literature regarding purchase behavior, circular economy and new business models has generated the need, as well as the opportunity, for a comprehensive review and categorization of the state of the existing research carried out so far. The present study aims at reconciling the wide but fragmented literature dealing with the purchase intention of recycled products. An integrative theoretical framework, able to combine several constructs, perspectives, and theories discussed to date on the topic, is proposed. Such framework represents a further step toward a comprehensive understanding of behavioral theories and constructs, which need to be understood to design effective business models for the circular economy. This effort could be highly valuable both for scholars interested in the topic—as the integrative framework could assist them in theorizing additional effects—and for firms’ managers—who can understand, more in depth, the drivers of the consumers’ purchasing process and act accordingly

Industry 4.0 Applied to Food

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Industry 4.0, (Big data management, internet of things, cloud computing, automation process control) includes a variety of new enabling technologies (i.e., Big data, Internet of Things, cloud computing, automation, and so on) that allow the digitization of a manufacturing environment. Consequently, the way companies operate is drastically changing, regardless of the industry they belong to. As for the food industry in particular, its increasingly customer-oriented characterization implies the need of faster response times in order to address dynamic and collaborative supply chains. Thus, it can be stressed that Industry 4.0 is changing the food industry. In the present work, a systematic literature review is realized on the implementation of the Industry 4.0 paradigm in the food industry, and a general framework is derived from the review