Highlights

2025-03-31 Bruno Busacca, Giuseppe Bertoli

Leveraging Loyalty to Create Value

Companies need to manage their customer base according to loyalty-based logic, focused on building and maintaining loyal relationships that stand the test of time. This reality has long been underscored by the shift from transactional to relationship marketing. The digital revolution has fueled and accelerated this transition, redefining the structure and competitive mechanisms of many industries and creating new ones, breaking down geographic barriers and activating processes of cross-sector convergence. On the one hand, the exponential increase in available information (on individual preferences, ...

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2025-02-27 Andrea Ciacci, Claudio Raimondi

Successful Business Cases: AI Implementation Best Practices

In September 2023, Microsoft Italy launched the AI L.A.B. (Learn – Adopt – Benefit) project, an initiative designed to help companies assess and implement generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions through tailored consulting, training, and skill development to enhance individual productivity and business competitiveness. Including currently over 320 companies and 450 generative AI projects—half already in production—the program has also trained thousands of professionals in AI-related skills. The project involves universities, institutions, and strategic partners to bridge the ...

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2025-01-07 Severino Meregalli

Creating Value with AI: Post-Digital Business Strategies

Since 2022, artificial intelligence (AI) has firmly established itself as a central topic on the innovation agendas of companies across a wide range of industries. From the first months of the launch of generative AI tools with easy-to-use interfaces targeting the consumer market, the scale of this phenomenon has been clear. OpenAI's ChatGPT, for instance, counted 100 million users within two months of its debut, becoming the fastest growing digital service ever. Fast forward to 2024, and the market’s overall focus on generative AI is unmistakable, as evidenced by the upsurge in investments ...

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2024-12-13 Giuliana Bensa, Giovanni Fattore

Artificial Intelligence and the Administrative Side of Public Healthcare

There is no doubt that technological innovation in the digital domain is accelerating, and that applications of artificial intelligence (AI) could have a profound impact on society. The future holds the prospect of a different way of life from the one we know today, with potential changes in the way we are citizens (e.g., how we engage in political life or use public services), consumers (digital marketing, already a reality, will continue to evolve), and workers (we can expect further automation and a major redefinition of job skills). While technological innovation advances rapidly, its practical ...

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2024-10-24 Andrea Ciacci and Lara Penco

Unveiling the Nature of Big Data Analytics Capabilities

Introduction Big data represents a disruptive paradigm shift for businesses (Chauhan et al., 2022; George et al., 2014; Ekbia et al., 2015). According to McAfee and Brynjolfsson (2012), firms that anchor their activities on data show productivity rates and profitability that are 5% or 6% higher than their counterparts. Data-driven firms are business organizations that build tools, abilities, and culture on data (Anderson, 2015; Persaud and Zare, 2024). To leverage the potential of data effectively, the various roles in these firms are often structured into multiple teams, each possessing complementary ...

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2024-09-24 Daniele Dotto

Bringing Innovation to EU Public Administrations

The communication “Enhancing the European Administrative Space,” also known as “ComPAct,”[1] was adopted by the European Commission on October 25, 2023. It is innovative in that, for the first time, the Commission proposes a comprehensive set of actions in support of administrative modernization and cooperation in and between Member States at all levels (national, regional and local). The aim is to learn, improve, and make effective use of European funds, such as those provided by the Cohesion Policy and the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). The ComPAct crowns the natural evolution ...

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2024-08-18 Francesco Grillo

Internet of Beings. AI and Hyper Data Revolutionize Healthcare

The use of telemedicine dates back to at least as early as the inception of the Internet (Hjelm, 2017). In the same year that Vincent Cerf and Robert Kahn proposed using the Internet Protocol for internal Pentagon communication, astronauts donned spacesuits equipped to continuously monitor their vital signs, sending data back to Houston and streaming it live to a global audience during the Moon landing. But despite decades of optimistic predictions about how digital tools could revolutionize healthcare and disease prevention, these expectations have largely gone unmet. Paradoxically, the healthcare ...

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2024-07-28 Giovanni Valotti

A Forward-Looking Vision. Rethinking HR Strategies and Public Employee Roles

People are an organization's most adaptable asset, embodying a diverse set of skills, roles, expectations, and motivations that evolve over time. The organization can choose to be a passive bystander to this change, or it can play an active role by facilitating and managing change: in the former case, organizations that are slow to respond to contextual demands risk being unprepared for crises and missing many opportunities. Conversely, administrations that invest time and resources in developing a forward-looking vision, as in the second case, are ideally positioned to drive essential change. The ...

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2024-07-04 Stefano Pogutz, Francesco Perrini, Jan Hans Georg Pachner, Rafael Sardà, Federico Fumagalli

Protecting the Ocean for a Sustainable Planet

The health of the ocean is in critical condition, and it is deteriorating at a rate and in ways scientists say are unprecedented in the history of our planet. Huge amounts of plastics and chemicals are dumped into the environment every year in all parts of the world. Overexploitation of fish stocks has pushed fisheries of several species beyond the threshold of sustainability, with serious implications for the proper functioning of food chains and the integrity of the ocean floor. Acidification, stemming from the substantial volumes of carbon dioxide produced by industrial and consumer activities, ...

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2024-05-24 Nic Beech, Paul Hibbert and Katy Mason

A Learning Orientation to Improve Impact Across Sectors

‘If you want truly to understand something, try to change it.’ Kurt Lewin Over the past two decades, there has been a significant global focus on improving the impact of research on practice. Governments, research funders, academics, practitioners, and businesses all perceive value in enabling a stronger connection between research and practice to improve practical outcomes (Haley, 2021). For this to work effectively, there is a need to understand not only the roles that academics and practitioners play, but also how we can adapt to create new practices and processes. While more traditional ...

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