What Are the Useful Past Inter-Organizational Relationships (IORs) for Forming Complex IORs?

Purpose: The purpose is to explore the relationship between prior and later inter-organizational relationships (IORs) by studying whether past experience can be leveraged on when forming new, more complex, IORs. Methodology: Participation in prior IORs is characterized in terms of both resource- transferring and resource-pooling IORs in home-country networks, while complex IORs are considered those with foreign partners. An empirical test on 366 Italian firms is performed using OLS with robust standard errors. Findings: Both resource-transferring and resource-pooling IORs have non-convergent effects. The former has controversial effects on the base of the position a firm occupies, that in turn affects the structure of interests between the partners. The latter has different effects in line with the information complexity of the objective of the relationship. Research Implications: Results provide support to the idea that structure of interests and information complexity represent \u201cdiscriminating characteristics\u201d that identify salient structural alternatives in the analysis of inter-firm organization. Practical Implications: The paper advances that firms can partially leverage on the exploitation of prior experience in settings that are explorative in nature, by carefully selecting within past experiences. Originality: A distinction between coordination \u201cgiving\u201d and coordination \u201ctaking\u201d IORs is proposed to discern among different types of inter-firm coordination forms

Oltre le ragioni: tempi e distanza nei processi di reshoring delle imprese italiane

Giornali e riviste riportano con sempre maggiore frequenza notizie casi di imprese che scelgono di lasciare Paesi a basso costo del lavoro per riportare la produzione in Italia. L\u2019emergere di questo fenomeno, che prende il nome di reshoring o backshoring, porta a chiedersi quali siano i motivi che spingono le imprese a rivalutare le loro scelte di localizzazione produttiva. Al di l\ue0 delle ragioni, tuttavia, sembra opportuno sottolineare che si tratta di processi complessi dove le ragioni del reshoring appaiono solo come uno degli elementi da analizzare per averne una visione completa. Se si considera che le operazioni di reshoring stanno avvenendo da Paesi diversi, attraverso modalit\ue0 diverse, in tempi diversi, viene quasi scontato chiedersi se esistono delle regolarit\ue0 tra le varie operazioni e se s\uec, rispetto a quali variabili. Questo lavoro, attraverso un\u2019analisi su 32 operazioni di reshoring avvenute in Italia, fa emergere che il tempo intercorso tra la scelta di offshoring e quella di reshoring, e la distanza (geografica e culturale) tra il Paese di origine e il Paese estero da cui avviene il rientro sono due variabili significative per spiegare la variet\ue0 dei casi. Tempo e distanza, infatti, si qualificano in chiave organizzativa, rispettivamente come proxy per il rischio di perdita di competenze e per i costi di coordinamento e controllo associati alla gestione delle attivit\ue0 delocalizzate. La nostra analisi suggerisce pertanto che un\u2019approfondita analisi delle operazioni di reshoring deve necessariamente essere collegata alle caratteristiche della (precedente) operazione di offshoring

La resilienza dell'imprenditore

Prefazione del libr

Organizational life cycle models: a design perspective

New competitive and environmental challenges have fostered renewed attention towards organizational design. This scenario calls for a significant return to organizational design studies that embrace a holistic approach, especially those focusing on the simultaneous interaction of multiple design elements. Organizational life cycle (OLC) models provide a fitting response to this call. In this paper, we review the organizational design characteristics of five seminal OLC models. We show that according to these OLC models, growth in size—which is described as unavoidable—generates business issues that firms are forced to solve by adopting only one possible organizational configuration, here following a deterministic organizational approach. We challenge this approach and propose conceiving of OLC as an evolutionary process, which calls for a variety of equifinal organizational solutions. We conclude by proposing future research avenues

Quasi-successful and Quasi-failing academic spin-offs: The role of technological and commercial alliances

Preface and acknowledgements This volume grows out of a three-year research project funded by the Italian Ministry of Education and Research (PRIN, 2010). The project involved eleven teams operating in different Italian universities from various parts of the country, and its main goal was to understand the main determinants of firms\u2019 growth in high-technology sectors. The topic is of particular concern to Italian policy makers, given the notorious dwarfism of Italian companies (90% of the companies have less than 5 employees) and the particularly high level of youth unemployment (44.5% at the time of the writing of this book). Identifying the determinants of firm growth in high-technology sectors has been considered particularly crucial for the future of the Italian economy, so much so that the project was one out of only eight financed in 2010 in the Management/Economics and Statistics area, and it received the highest budget. Large Italian companies (leaving aside banks and media services) operate primarily in the medium-low tech manufacturing sectors, which are typically mature industries that are facing extreme difficulties in absorbing the younger generations of highly educated Italian students. Small companies are predominantly family businesses that rely on the activities of the family members and hardly follow trajectories of sustainable growth, opting for a small, easier to manage, size. High-tech companies, both manufacturing and service, though growing in number and size, today represent only a tiny fraction of the country\u2019s value added. In the past few years, rather late in comparison with other advanced countries, a conspicuous number of start-ups have appeared on the business stage, mostly driven by business plan competitions organised by universities, incubators within technology parks or as the result of spin-off processes from established companies. While most of these companies stay small (the list of the best start-ups of 2015 includes companies with an average of three employees), a good number of those established in the last ten years have reached an interesting size, different rounds of venture funding and an established presence in the international arena. Besides being among the slowest growth economies of the OECD, Italy has been systematically included among the medium-low innovative countries (see, for example, subsequent editions of the Innobarometer by CORDIS, or the various results of the CIS surveys), mainly as a result of a lack of a supportive Innovation System. Among others, the reasons are to be found in the low public and private investments in RandD, the underdeveloped venture capital industry, the various obstacles that the public administration poses in starting a business and the rigidity of the labour market. Understanding the conditions under which a number of companies in the high-technology sectors have succeeded in proceeding along trajectories of high growth through innovation, despite the adverse conditions, is therefore of great interest both for theory building and for the managerial implications of the phenomenon. This book is entirely based on novel research. With respect to its theoretical foundations, the book adopts an eclectic approach, as it relies on a variety of perspectives, consistent with the desire to capture a multifaceted phenomenon. We seek an integrative approach, which may help to overcome the lack of consistent results and comprehensive conceptualisations characterising the state-of-the-art of the literature on this topic. Given the different research specialisations of the teams participating in the project, we organised the study according to three main pillars, namely contexts, actors and strategies. Due to the shortage of companies with histories of outstanding performance in the country, we have been in the interesting position of studying a good section of the population of young outliers. The research team analysed sixty-six companies in depth and carried out a survey on nearly a thousand companies established in the last seven years. The cases included in this book are those that, among others, represent instances of how the absence of a National Innovation System may not be an obstacle to growth in high-technology sectors. At this point, it is customary to acknowledge the help and advice of those who anonymously reviewed the project proposal and the draft chapters, and those who commented on parts of the book presented at conferences and seminars. Notably, we thank Robert Garret, Stephen Syrett, Elias Hadjielias, Vangelis Souitairs, Elisa Salvador, Mitja Ruzzier, Uriel Stettner, Antti Johannes Kauppinen, and Aard Groen. We also thank our Scientific Committee made up of some of the most renowned Italian scholars in the Economics, Management and Engineering fields who supported in planning and concluding the project, namely Giovanni Costa, Alberto Felice De Toni, Enzo Rullani, Riccardo Varaldo, Enrico Zaninotto. We apologise if we were not able to fully exploit the excellent advice we received

Modularity in KIBS: the case of third-party logistics service providers

This paper investigates service modularity and inter-organizational coupling in knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS). While KIBS literature traditionally emphasizes tight client–provider interactions with service customization, modularity literature emphasizes inter-organizational decoupling with service standardization. We disentangle this tension by exploring how KIBS firms utilize service modularity and shape their client–provider relationships in terms of information and knowledge sharing. Conducting two in-depth case studies of third-party logistics (TPLs), we show that TPLs extensively rely on service modularity with standard procedures as their constitutive element. We also demonstrate that service modularity and inter-organizational decoupling are aligned for knowledge sharing but not for information sharing, which remains high regardless of the service architecture. Overall, we suggest that modularity in KIBS differs in many aspects from modularity in products and that these differences significantly impact the organizational design consequences of service modularity. Theoretical and managerial implications are drawn

Organizational design configurations in the early stages of firm’s life cycle

http://ocs.editorial.upv.es/index.php/CARMA/CARMA2016Mosca, L.; Gianecchini, M.; Campagnolo, D. (2017). Organizational design configurations in the early stages of firm’s life cycle. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/CARMA2016.2015.3104OC

Defective proteasome biogenesis into skin fibroblasts isolated from Rett syndrome subjects with {MeCP}2 non-sense mutations

Rett Syndrome (RTT) is a rare X-linked neurodevelopmental disorder which affects about 1: 10000 live births. In >95% of subjects RTT is caused by a mutation in Methyl-CpG binding protein-2 (MECP2) gene, which encodes for a transcription regulator with pleiotropic genetic/epigenetic activities. The molecular mechanisms underscoring the phenotypic alteration of RTT are largely unknown and this has impaired the development of therapeutic approaches to alleviate signs and symptoms during disease progression. A defective proteasome biogenesis into two skin primary fibroblasts isolated from RTT subjects harbouring non-sense (early-truncating) MeCP2 mutations (i.e., R190fs and R255X) is herewith reported. Proteasome is the proteolytic machinery of Ubiquitin Proteasome System (UPS), a pathway of overwhelming relevance for post-mitotic cells metabolism. Molecular, transcription and proteomic analyses indicate that MeCP2 mutations down-regulate the expression of one proteasome subunit, α7, and of two chaperones, PAC1 and PAC2, which bind each other in the earliest step of proteasome biogenesis. Furthermore, this molecular alteration recapitulates in neuron-like SH-SY5Y cells upon silencing of MeCP2 expression, envisaging a general significance of this transcription regulator in proteasome biogenesis

Escore prognóstico precoce após 15 minutos do tratamento da asma aguda na sala de emergência

16