Blending “hard” and “soft” TQM for academic excellence: the University of Siena experience in the field of Life Sciences

Purpose – Focusing on the adoption of Total Quality Management (TQM) principles in universities, this research paper explores how the “soft” dimensions of TQM trigger its “hard” dimensions considering them at the individual (micro-) and the university (meso-), and eventually at cluster (system-), levels. Design/methodology/approach – Adopting a qualitative approach, this study presents an in-depth, longitudinal case study of University of Siena, one of the oldest Italian universities, that has been at the core of the research-based cluster on vaccines, today converged in the Tuscan Life Science Cluster. In particular, data were collected between 2018 and February 2022 and consists of archival data (press articles, websites, books), nine interviews to key informants, multiyear experience of the Life Sciences sector by two of the authors and other material put at disposal by university offices, and emails. Data analysis relied on a timeline, a coding procedure that considered three levels of analysis (individual, organization and cluster). Finally, the authors looked at the “how” and “why” the emerged themes have contributed to academic excellence. Findings – This paper unveils how “soft” and “hard” sides of TQM are blended across multiple levels for reaching academic excellence. The grounded model emerged enlightens the importance of an individual “soft” dimension, academic passion (composed by its three subdimensions of individual research, teaching and entrepreneurial passion) and also sheds light on the organizational “soft” and “hard” sides that the university has been able to design for encouraging research, teaching and third mission quality. Academic excellence has been possible thanks to the capitalization of the individual and organizational“soft” sides into real outcomes as represented by the organizational and individual “hard” sides. Practical implications – The paper suggests the importance of TQM principles applied at universities’ level, providing an in-depth description of “soft” and “hard” sides dimensions of TQM and their impact on all the three pillars of academic excellence. The study findings suggest implications for managers and professionals in the higher education domain as well as for policymakers emphasizing the importance of supporting the individual and organizational soft sides of TQM. The authors provide practical implications recommending universities to consider not only the organizational dimensions but also individual ones when pursuing higher education excellence. In particular, individual passion plays a crucial role and universities need to identify ways of nurturing it. The authors also recommend policymakers to think about new ways to sustain universities as crucial actors in boosting a cluster development, as well as to consider higher education institutions, especially in more rural areas, as a privileged player not only capable of nurturing academic excellence but also able of creating an internationally renowned cluster. Originality/value – TQM principles have been intensively analysed from an industrial perspective focusing on manufacturing and services, while this paper focuses on TQM in universities, presenting a grounded model that blends the individual and organizational “soft” and “hard” sides

Gender differences and tech-based entrepreneurship: a literature review and research agenda

Despite the widespread recognition of the growing, positive contribution of female entrepreneurship in economic and social development processes, women are still less involved in high-growth entrepreneurship, especially in Europe, where their participation is lower than in most part of the world, and where they show some of the lowest rates of entrepreneurial perceptions (seeing new business opportunities, having the skills to start a new business, being undeterred by fear of failure), according to Women's Entrepreneurship GEM Report (2021). Gender gap in entrepreneurship and management is confirmed by the European Institute for Gender Equality, whose statistics show that across the EU, women business owners make up only 33.2% of self-employed people, and management boards are dominated by men (EIGE Report, 2021). This gap is somewhat larger in tech-based industries, where founding and managing a technology-based firm has been commonly considered to be a male affair (Green et al., 2003; Nelson and Levesque, 2007) and prominently within STEM fields (Poggesi et al., 2020), where women entrepreneurs are still strongly underrepresented (Dautzenberg, 2012; Tonoyan and Strohmeyer, 2021). Since the seminal contribution of Schwartz (1976), the debate surrounding women and entrepreneurship has grown up, focusing on their underrepresentation and their “marginalization” into sectors with low growth perspectives (Carter et al., 2000). There has been, among scholars as well as policymakers, a tendency to interpret this evidence as the expression of female structural weaknesses, to be fixed through specific programs aimed at training women to adopt prototypical entrepreneurial attitudes (Marlow, 2019). Despite this generalized view, a different perspective emerged in the same years, suggesting that female entrepreneurship specificities had to be considered as the result of a generalized gendered subordination (Fischer, 1993; Jennings and Brush, 2013). Even though this topic has given rise to a substantial body of literature, there are relatively few studies dedicated to investigating the presence of women entrepreneurs in technology-based sectors. Except for a few recent works (Wheadon and Duval-Couetil, 2019; Poggesi et al., 2020) that propose a literature review on the topic of gender and technology entrepreneurship, there is currently no dedicated strand of research that, in the field of management, identifies the issue of gender differences with reference to high-tech entrepreneurship. This is even more surprising, when considering that today technology plays a pervasive role and that even mature industries are undergoing strong changes precisely because of the spread of new technologies related to STEM fields. This opens great opportunities from which, once again, women risk being excluded or marginalized. It is therefore important, in our opinion, to examine this issue in depth and take stock of the results of the research conducted so far. Given the above, our study has two overarching objectives. The first is to document the development of the body of work related to gender differences and high-tech entrepreneurship. The second is to assess its contributions vis-a-vis the broader corpus of literature on female entrepreneurship

Exploring the attitude towards the adoption of a sustainable diet: a cross-country comparison

Purpose: Understanding the determinants that influence consumers' attitude to adopt sustainable diets represents an important area of research to promote sustainable food consumption. The aim of this study is to investigate how (1) the individual openness to new foods (ONFs), (2) the involvement in food trends (IFTs) and (3) the social media use (SMU) can potentially impact the attitude towards the adoption of a sustainable diet (ATSD). Design/methodology/approach: The authors conducted a structured survey in eight countries: Italy, Germany, Poland, USA, Brazil, Japan, Korea and China. The final sample of 5,501 individuals was analysed applying a structural equation model. Findings: The main results show that attitude towards the ATSD is influenced differently by the antecedents investigated in each country. In particular, the ONF positively influences the ATSD only in Italy, USA and Germany. IFT positively influences the ATSD only in Italy, Poland and USA, while negatively in Germany. SMU has a positive influence on the ATSD only in Japan, USA and Germany, while a negative one in Brazil and Korea. Originality/value: This study presents a cross-country comparison about the antecedents of attitude towards the ATSD, thus providing evidence for the need of ad hoc marketing strategies by companies and policies by institutions at single country level

The virtuous cycle of stakeholder engagement in developing a sustainability culture: Salcheto winery

Stakeholder engagement in sustainability represents a powerful driver for value creation. Drawing from stakeholder theory, this paper explores how a firm with a proactive sustainable behaviour engages stakeholders in developing innovation and creating value. A longitudinal, single case study of the Salcheto winery was carried out. Since the late 1990s, Salcheto has been at the forefront of wine eco-innovation and it has played a key role in the development of Montepulciano (Tuscany, Italy) as one of the first sustainable wine clusters worldwide. The development of a sustainable wine culture is one of the firm's various innovations. In doing so, the firm has had to face three challenges - identity creation, legitimization and enhancement - and has engaged its stakeholders through three specific mechanisms (adoption and development; co-creation and diffusion; exploitation and contamination). This virtuous cycle of stakeholder engagement has resulted in value creation at a firm, stakeholder and local level

Ready for Take-Off”. How Open Innovation Influences Startup Success.

New ventures’ formation is among the most significant sources of technological innovations and fast economic development. Nonetheless, most of the attempts will never be successful: It is a common saying in Silicon Valley that nine out of ten start-ups fail or suspend their activities without growing (they start “walking dead”) within 5 years. This paper links entrepreneurship and open innovation research in order to provide an integrated view of the probability of a startup to succeed. We suggest that the probability of startup success depends on five main factors, namely (i) the variety of OI practices performed by the founding team; (ii) the breadth of knowledge skills in the founding team; (iii) the amount (the depth) of the team’s prior joint experience; (iv) the moderating effect of the breadth of knowledge skills on prior joint experience (the team’s “learning potential”) and (v) the type of innovation ecosystem a start-up is embedded in. We draw on a unique database built from the business plans of 134 startups participating to the final round of INTEL Global Challenge (IGC) at UC Berkeley (California) from 2005 to 2012. We test five research hypotheses through logistic regression estimates. The model assesses the influence of “openness”, learning potential and innovation ecosystems on the odds of startup “Take-off” (with respect to failure). We find that the extent to which teams build on external innovation sources and integrate external knowledge in the pre-startup phase is a strong determinant of startup success. From an organisational perspective, a higher learning potential (the moderating effect of diversity of skills in the founding team on prior joint experience working at the technology), positively influences the odds of “Take-off”. Moreover, being incubated during the pre-startup phase significantly increases this probability. Our analysis extends previous entrepreneurship research on successful new venture creation and suggests new fields for research on OI in SMEs. Moreover, we take into consideration the role of “open environments” (innovation ecosystems), one of the most actual topics in OI research

Editorial: "Crises and resilience in family firms"

Purpose: In this editorial, the Guest Editors introduce the key themes of the Special Issue “Crises and resilience in family firms”. The five papers here presented provide theoretical and empirical contributions to the family business field, by analysing resilience in the context of the pandemic Covid-19. Specifically, resilience is explored at the firm level through the lenses of entrepreneurship, strategic management, and innovation management literature. Findings: Authors illustrate how family businesses managed the changes brought by the unexpected spread of the pandemic and underline how the specificities of family firms, like the preservation of SEW, a purpose driven orientation, the routinized capacity of being resilient, the care of customer relationships, the individual resilience of the entrepreneur and the specific female characteristics of successor represent a key competitive advantage of family businesses, especially if female-driven, over non-family firms