Valentina Elena Lazzarotti

Innovative Circular Business Models (CBMs) can extend product and material lifecycles through reduction, reuse, recycling, and recovery. Achieving this, however, requires guidance from the performance management field. Most existing Performance Management Systems (PMS) focus primarily on material metrics, like recycling rates or waste volumes, often overlooking the role of managerial practices in CBMs. Addressing this gap, our research introduces the Circular Business Scorecard (CBS), a PMS based on Balanced Scorecard theory that integrates managerial practices for CBMs. The CBS includes four perspectives, encompassing financial and non-financial dimensions, to support the circular economy (CE) transition. Tested in a manufacturing case study, the CBS enabled the creation of a strategic map, highlighting two main pathways for companies moving toward CE: one pathway emphasizes cost reduction through eco-efficiency, while the other focuses on increased turnover driven by product design for circularity. Our contribution offers a structured, process-oriented approach, providing scholars and practitioners with a practical, step-by-step guide to implementing a PMS that supports CE transition.

The internal innovation activities of firms often encounter obstacles (i.e., factors hampering innovation activities) such as economic constraints and lack of skilled employees within enterprises, prompting them to adopt an Open Innovation (OI) approach as a means to overcome the obstacles and thus to achieve innovation performance, intended as Innovation Industrial Performance (IIP) and Innovation Financial Performance (IFP). Using data from the Community Innovation Survey (CIS), the study firstly investigates whether OI is able to exert this mediation role. Second, the study investigates the moderating role of financing techniques, specifically debt and equity, on the relationship between OI and firm Innovation Industrial Performance (IIP) and Innovation Financial Performance (IFP). It explores whether equity and debt support OI in enhancing such performance types. Our results show that, while OI proves effective in overcoming innovation hurdles, it does not mediate the relationship between the factors hampering innovation activities and IFP, suggesting a temporal lag between innovation and its financial outcomes. The findings of this study suggest that equity enhances both IIP and IFP by bolstering competencies and financial capacity. In contrast, debt primarily benefits IFP by providing readily available resources. Notably, debt does not influence IIP, indicating its limited contribution to cognitive and knowledge resources essential for innovation. However, the study acknowledges limitations, including the lack of longitudinal data, which hinders the assessment of time lag effects between innovation and financial performance.

Strategic networks have been attracting the interest of both scholars and practitioners because of their high potential to increase firms’ competitiveness, especially in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Despite the potential benefits provided by strategic networks, they often fail. Network management (i.e. the set of organizational and managerial roles and activities aimed to the development of the network) is recognized as an important determinant of network success and literature also provides a useful guide on how to assign roles and to carry out activities so that the network can be successful. In order to improve the practical understanding of the phenomenon, we rely on such a literature guide but we focus on an unsuccessful case, so attempting a list of worst practises to be avoided.

Technologies play an important role for firm success as they contribute to create value and to strengthen the firm position relative to competitors. But technologies are also resource-consuming. Therefore, managers have to get most out of technologies, while getting the best use of resources, properly allocating them between the most promising technologies. The extant literature has put forward many tools and models in order to support managers in choosing the technologies to be boosted or abandoned, but they mainly concentrated on a few criteria relative to internal or co-developed technologies. However, since the above argumentations (contribution in terms of competitiveness/value vs. consumption of resources) are true not only for internal/co-developed technologies, but also for external ones, it emerges the need for a tool which on the one hand enlarges to an ample set of criteria for evaluating technologies’ competitiveness and value, and on the other is open to external technologies as well. This paper, while offering a list of criteria for the evaluation process, extends to external technologies. Also, it proposes a peer-based modification of intuitionistic fuzzy (IF) multi-criteria group decision-making with TOPSIS method (peer IFTOPSIS) in order to coping with subjectivity, imprecision and vagueness in group decision-making problem under multiple criteria. An empirical test of both the criteria and the methodology is presented within a company operating in the Advanced Underwater Systems sector.

Collaboration with universities and Public Research Organizations (PROs) provides a valuable contribution firms’ innovation. Specifically, PROs represent a highly valuable source of innovation for firms, as they transfer know-how about leading edge technologies. This study focuses on the measurement and evaluation of value for companies in their collaboration with PROs. Using a survey-based methodology, we analyse the benefits for firm that collaborate with the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), an Italian PRO that represent an excellence in the field of physic research. Our findings provide evidence of the multidimensional benefits for companies, which are mainly intangible and are related to the transfer of specific competencies for new products development, ability to enter new market and create alliances, reputation and social benefits, in terms of employment and training of young researchers.

The concept of open innovation (OI) has generated a great interest in the last decade. implementing an open approach means defining a set of variables, between which the information and communication technologies (ict) firms can use to support the implementation of oi. given that limited ict research has theoretically modelled and empirically examined how firms can mobilize their ict resources to support open innovation, the aim of this article is to define a framework for the development of the functions and tools of a platform supporting all the phases of the open innovation process. In this article preliminary results will be presented are: (i) the development of an effective methodology for partner selection within the open innovation context; (ii) the implementation of technology scouting in the firm involved in this research; (iii) the development of a methodology for technology assessment.

Although there is an increased interest in studies on FFs and open innovation (OI) the existing knowledge is rather limited. This study explores the open innovation choices, their determinants and the relative innovation performance in FFs with respect to non-family firms. By means of an European survey involving Italian, Swedish, Finnish and UK family and non-family firms we aim at investigating whether FFs are adopting a peculiar behaviour in the open innovation era. In order to achieve this goal, we rely on concepts and constructs already defined by open innovation literature and we explore the behaviour of FFs and non-family firms. Analysis of differences show that family firms are in general less open than non-family firms, when we consider openness in terms of breadth, while they show a higher intensity of collaboration behaviour when we consider the measures of depth. FFs perceive as slightly higher the competitive pressure, but very similar is the perceived technological pressure. Also drivers of collaboration and innovation strategy are on average very similar. Significant differences between FFs and non-FFs are found as concerns the use of IP legal rights (lower for FFs). On average, FFs declare a slightly higher novelty performance. A first type of regressions shows the contribution of some environmental and internal firm-specific factors as explanatory variables of openness degree and thus allow to depict the specific profile of FFs. When we explore differences on the supposed mediating factors of the relationship between openness and innovation performance, the organizational-managerial mechanisms emerge as factors over which FFs exert particular care. A second type of regressions shows that, beside the external social capital, organizational-managerial mechanisms emerge for FFs as a relevant mediator in the relationships between OI depth and innovation performance.