25 research outputs found
Innovation Labs for Digital Transformation Strategies and Business Model Innovation in the Digital Age: a Focus on Tourism and Cultural Sector
The research proposes the Innovation Labs as a valuable management initiative to support tourism and cultural organisations in developing Digital Innovation Capacity, fostering Digital Transformation (DT) and Business Model Innovation (BMI).
Innovation Labs are innovation management models aimed at fostering creative and critical thinking, driving the organisation in finding the best ways to generate knowledge and digital culture, introduce technologies, digitise operations, and implement digital strategies for continuous and sustainable innovation paths (Santarsiero et al., 2019; 2020).
The need for investigating and identifying possible solutions, and governance models, in terms of management initiatives that follow emergent innovation trends, and support tourism and cultural organisations in embracing digital innovation journeys, is having a growing interest, both in scholars and practitioners, especially after the pandemic Covid-19.
Tourism and cultural organisations, pursuant their attitude to be a labour-intensive production sector, in which the competitive advantage depends on the differentiation of the tourism product and the humanisation of the offered experiences, resulted as one of the sectors that most repudiate DT, conceiving it as a process that would lead to standardisation and loss of appeal to the end customer.
However, nowadays, due to the emerging challenges in the Digital Age that are also affecting the tourism and cultural sector, the need for embracing digital journeys favouring DT and BMI should be considered mandatory to guarantee competitiveness and the gain of a sustainable competitive advantage.
The rapid development of digital technologies and solutions, and their democratisation, induced changes in consumersâ and usersâ habits and behaviours, resulting in the need for developing new products, services and methods of use based on emerging market needs. In the same way, organisations are asked to become resilient, proactive and able to evolve in the same way the competitive landscape does. After Covid-19, besides, the needs for digital innovation journeys and digital revolutions are even more accentuated, confirming that the pandemic has acted as an accelerator of DT dynamics. The competitiveness and attractiveness of organisations and destinations will therefore depend on the digital innovative capacity and ability of operators and destination managers to rethink the tourist offer according to the new emerging trends and context dynamics.
Although the need for embracing digital innovation journeys is crucial, it is not an easy process to manage and exploit. Organisations, indeed, experience several difficulties and innovation barriers. In SMEs, in particular, which represent a typical configuration of tourism and cultural organisations, resistance to innovation, and insufficient skills, finance, culture, attitudes, and often also the time to devote to innovation due to overburden of bureaucratic aspects and various routines, are particularly accentuated. It follows these organisations require forms of support to face these needs and develop an innovative capacity, fostering DT and BMI to improve offers, competitiveness, efficiency, as well as customisation and customer relationships.
Despite the relevance of these topics, however, the search for solutions and ways to support tourism and cultural organisations in embracing digital innovation journeys has not structurally explored yet.
On this vein, the research aims to explore and investigate, in the field of innovation management, models and approaches to face DT and BMI challenges and opportunities, and thus to investigate the emerging phenomenon of Innovation Labs to understand their management model and assess their suitability for tourism and cultural organisations.
In the theoretical section, the study presents a systematic literature review of Innovation Labs to provide a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon and identify critical patterns according to two main dimensions of analysis: space & infrastructure, and strategy & management.
Furthermore, the study utilises a multiple-case study approach to better enrich the insights gathered from the literature, and to propose an Innovation Labâs working definition and a management framework. The working definition takes into account all the emerging aspects, the new principles and paradigms that are governing the field of innovation management and that become essential for the organisations competing in this scenario. The framework describes key phases and relevant issues for effective management of Innovation Labs as catalysts of DT and BMI.
Then, the research applies the proposed framework through an Action Research (AR) project involving an organisation operating in the tourism sector, to assess its efficacy in fostering tourism and cultural organisationsâ digital innovation journeys.
The research contributes to enrich knowledge and build theory in the field of Innovation Labs and tourism innovation management. In particular, the study led to developing theories on the contributions of Innovation Labs in fostering DT and BMI in tourism organisations. A further framework explaining the business modelâs dimensions on which DT processes impact thanks to these initiatives has been proposed.
Lastly, the analysis of the AR project compared Innovation Labsâ management framework with change management frameworks to detect alignments and to highlight insights to support researchers in considering the model as a tool to support innovation dynamics in times of crisis.
This research also has relevant practical implications since it provides managers and practitioners with an overview of the dimensions to be considered while designing and managing an Innovation Lab to develop digital innovation capacity and foster DT and BMI. Expressly, managers and practitioners are provided with a framework supporting them designing and exploiting management initiatives aimed at embracing digital innovation journeys to generate marketable digital solutions, improve performance and develop a mindset continuous learning and innovation.
The study also reveals some limitations that may address future research.
Further empirical, also quantitative, investigations could be developed to extend the sample and to allow a comprehensive validation of the Innovation Labâs management framework, focusing the research also on the evaluation of Innovation Labsâ activities
Decomposing Tensor Spaces via Path Signatures
The signature of a path is a sequence of tensors whose entries are iterated
integrals, playing a key role in stochastic analysis and applications. The set
of all signature tensors at a particular level gives rise to the universal
signature variety. We show that the parametrization of this variety induces a
natural decomposition of the tensor space via representation theory, and
connect this to the study of path invariants. We also examine the question of
determining what is the tensor rank of a signature tensor.Comment: 22 page
Immunometabolism Modulation by Extracts from Pistachio Stalks Formulated in Phospholipid Vesicles
Several studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of plant extracts against various
diseases, especially skin disorders; namely, they exhibit overall protective effects. The Pistachio
(Pistacia vera L.) is known for having bioactive compounds that can effectively contribute to a personâs
healthy status. However, these benefits may be limited by the toxicity and low bioavailability
often inherent in bioactive compounds. To overcome these problems, delivery systems, such as
phospholipid vesicles, can be employed. In this study, an essential oil and a hydrolate were produced
from P. vera stalks, which are usually discarded as waste. The extracts were characterized by liquid
and gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry and formulated in phospholipid vesicles
intended for skin application. Liposomes and transfersomes showed small size (<100 nm), negative
charge (approximately â15 mV), and a longer storage stability for the latter. The entrapment efficiency
was determined via the quantification of the major compounds identified in the extracts and was
>80%. The immune-modulating activity of the extracts was assayed in macrophage cell cultures. Most
interestingly, the formulation in transfersomes abolished the cytotoxicity of the essential oil while
increasing its ability to inhibit inflammatory mediators via the immunometabolic citrate pathway
Innovation labs as organisational catalysts for innovation capacity development: A systematic literature review
Innovation labs are increasingly adopted as an organizational and management initiative to catalyse innovation and support the development of an organizational innovation capacity. Despite the growing attention to the role of innovation labs, the extant studies appear scattered. There is a lack of a comprehensive understanding of their relevance as innovation spaces for developing and sustaining organisations' innovation processes. For this reason, this study aims to expand and update the existing understanding of innovation labs by demonstrating their evolution from closed innovation spaces within large firms to organisational catalysts that foster open, collaborative and user-driven innovation dynamics. Adopting a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) based on 152 peer-reviewed journal articles, the study provides an integrative picture of the current literature on innovation labs. In particular, the study proposes a reference framework distinguishing Innovation Labsâ typologies and critical dimensions, a comprehensive definition of an innovation lab, a framework to assess the maturity level of innovation labs, and a research agenda to advance the understanding of innovation labs further
Innovation labs to support tourism organization in transforming crisis into opportunities: Insight from a case study
This paper aims to discuss the importance of the Innovation Lab as an effective management initiative supporting tourism organisations in facing the serious challenges of innovation posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. The analysis of literature related to tourism innovation and Innovation Labs, is integrated with the field study of an Innovation Lab, that is intensely working with several companies and their stakeholders of a tourism ecosystem located in south of Italy, to seize opportunities and new solutions facing the tremendous crisis of the tourism industry. The paper contributes to study how Innovation Lab can constitute an effective management initiative supporting knowledge co-creation and exploitation for innovation dynamics in organisations, in response to disruptive socio-economic crisis and the negative outcomes of the Covid-19 outbreak
How Wise Companies Drive Digital Transformation
Enterprises aimed at acquiring a sustainable competitive advantage in the Digital Era are challenged to develop a Transformative Digital Leadership marked by a set of abilities. The paper introduces the Digital Transformative Leadership Compass as an innovative framework to assess wise leadersâ characteristics driving organisational digital transformation in todayâs complex business landscape. It identifies the critical abilities, attitudes, and behaviours distinguishing the profile of a transformative digital leader leading an organisation to continuously innovate and digitally evolve in the same way as the business landscape. This paper contributes to theory building by proposing an interpretative framework of critical abilities distinguishing a transformative digital leader of a transformative digital company. Furthermore, the paper provides practitioners with valuable insights and theoretical evidence on leadership practices in the digital era
Evaluation of Spatial Variables Related to the Provision of Essential Services in the Basilicata Region
Basilicata is composed by many small municipalities that offer poor accessibility to essential services. The key theme of this work is the evaluation of the endowment of these services, analyzing, in a GIS environment, their accessibility in terms of temporal distance. This work explores the specific issues and challenges for accessibility to internal areas and reflects on the future development prospects of the 131 Lucanian municipalities. The analysis was conducted on the basis of two types of information layers in relation to the totality of the municipalities: demographic structure of the population and provision of essential services, divided into 3 macro classes: education, health and mobility. Evaluations were thus extracted which provided a comparative-objective analysis of the presence of essential services. The result is a picture that shows serious difficulties linked to the socio-cultural and territorial fabric, the railway and motorway networks are profoundly lacking, showing a clear gap between the municipalities in terms of provision of services. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG