Report

2024-06-18 Gulnaz Rakhmatullina

Avatars and (Virtual) Consumption: New Frontiers in the Metaverse

With the increased popularity in recent years, metaverse worlds have created additional opportunities for companies to reach customers. We define metaverse worlds as permanent and immersive mixed-reality worlds where people can interact synchronously with other people and objects beyond the limitations of time and space by using avatars and immersion-supporting devices (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2009). In these worlds, users are represented by avatars, and avatar design alongside the user’s choice of self-representation strategies impacts the user’s identification with these avatars, which in turn ...

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2024-06-09 Gianmarco Ottaviano

Western Sanctions and Russia's Resilience: A Dead End?

According to the Russian Statistical Office, 2023 saw the gross domestic product grow by 3.6%, outpacing the average global economic growth. While data from Moscow should be evaluated cautiously, even the IMF revised its estimate to 3%, suggesting that Russia's economy has indeed grown faster than the global average. The oil and gas industry has been at the forefront of supporting Moscow's economic resilience, providing foreign currency to the Kremlin, expanding trade horizons, and generally shifting Russia's economic center of gravity toward Asia. To maintain a steady flow of foreign currency ...

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2024-06-06 Laura Gatti

Women in Innovation: Overcoming the Gender Gap for a Bright Future

In recent years, the presence of women in the fields of scientific research, life sciences, and startup management has gained attention and recognition. However, despite the vibrant and dynamic innovation landscape, gender equality remains a persistent challenge. Women, with their creativity, intuition, and determination, are gradually gaining ground in sectors historically dominated by men, but it is crucial to keep a spotlight on the gender gap and focus on gender perspectives to support its overcoming. Scientific Research, Life Sciences, and Academia In scientific research, women are increasingly ...

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2024-05-27 Sylvie Goulard

Beyond illusions, within limits: business and the sustainability challenge

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, we have drawn on natural resources as if they were limitless. The air and water, the soil, the fish and the trees, all living things seemed at our disposal. Economic science has long suggested that wealth results from the combination of only two factors of production: capital and labor. As Jean-Baptiste Say wrote in 1803 in his book on Political Economy: “Natural resources are inexhaustible, because otherwise we would not obtain them for free. Since they cannot be multiplied or exhausted, they are not the subject of economic sciences”. We have ...

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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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2024-05-23 Luigi Rinzivillo

Generative AI: A Source of Wisdom

In "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," the journey and adventures of a young girl, Dorothy, are recounted as she navigates the magical Land of Oz after being swept there by a tornado that struck Kansas. The story describes Dorothy's travels with her "new friends" to meet the wizard who can grant each of their wishes. Although being displaced by a tornado is not a common experience, the feeling of being "swept away by a cyclone" is more common than one might think. A defining characteristic of our time is undoubtedly the rise of "artificial intelligence" (AI), the ability of a computer system (an algorithm) ...

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2024-05-10 Andrea Ciacci

The Strategic Value of Big Data Transition

Overwhelmed by massive data flows and compelled by the need to intercept the real customer needs in a competitive, swiftly changing world, firms must take rapid action to address economic needs by restructuring how they think and operate. Since big data is changing the intrinsic nature of strategy, firms need to shape their functions and processes to facilitate the big data transition, implementing data-driven business models and capitalizing on big data value. While big data provides significant opportunities to enhance a firm's potential in terms of competitiveness and innovativeness, it also ...

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2024-05-02 Donato Masciandaro

Declining Interest Rates and the Five Faces of the Fed

In recent months, financial markets seem stuck in a repetitive cycle: analysts closely watch US economic indicators to gauge the timing of the Fed's interest rate cuts. This represents the "macroeconomic" face of the Fed. Yet, there are at least four other faces that need attention: the political and bureaucratic ones, followed by the psychological aspect, and not forgetting, albeit last, the financial. Last March, the Fed confirmed its decision to maintain the maximum level of the benchmark interest rate at five hundred and fifty basis points, as decided eight months prior. This phenomenon is ...

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2024-04-16 Sandro Castaldo

A Journal with an Impact

One of the priority issues facing the different management disciplines today is the critical question of research impact. We are confronted with the question of how to translate the immense potential of knowledge produced by the scientific community into management practices that are useful for transforming organizations and their processes to create value and generate welfare for society. In management studies, it is not difficult to find works that question the relevance and real impact of research. It is also not uncommon to find evidence from the world of management that the academy is a distant, ...

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2024-04-16 Salvatore Vicari

Artificial Intelligence Ethics: a Brief Overview

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly revolutionizing our world, with applications in every sphere of life, from medicine to finance, manufacturing to entertainment. It is estimated that, in the near future, a large part of our activities will be carried out by intelligent machines or will see a collaboration between humans and AI. However, this unprecedented technological progress brings with it new ethical challenges. Intelligent machines, in fact, can make decisions that have a significant impact on the lives of people and society. It is no coincidence that the first Artificial Intelligence ...

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