Innovative new ventures (INVs) cope with the lack of legitimacy and liability of newness that may... more Innovative new ventures (INVs) cope with the lack of legitimacy and liability of newness that may hinder their likelihood of survival. Those risks increase with the novelty introduced by the INV. Radically INVs are the ones that have the highest degree of novelty, and, consequently, face the highest risks. Understanding the elements and mechanisms that sustain radically INVs is of paramount importance due to the great benefits they bring to society. This article explores how the regional legacy, defined as the combined effect of regional business and industrial practices and culture, supports those ventures in facing those risks. The regional culture and tradition create a sense of familiarity in stakeholders that facilitates the understanding of the radically INV, lowering the lack of legitimacy. Meanwhile, the shared culture within a region favours the creation of a collaborative climate that allows the radically INVs to access relevant resources and, finally, reduce the liability of newness.
International Journal of Production Economics, Mar 1, 2020
Sustainability of Industrial Symbiosis (IS) businesses plays a key role in supporting the circula... more Sustainability of Industrial Symbiosis (IS) businesses plays a key role in supporting the circular economy. Industrial symbiosis networks (ISNs) can survive in the long run if they have high resilience to perturbations that lead to operational uncertainties. The literature highlights that the resilience of ISNs can be enhanced by ensuring high redundancy of IS relationships: accordingly, firms should exchange the same waste with more symbiotic partners. However, the impact of increasing redundancy on economic and environmental performance of IS has not been investigated so far. This paper proposes a theoretical framework to understand the effect of the redundancy strategy on the performance of companies involved in IS. Accordingly, the optimal redundancy strategy refers to an optimal number of partners to (from) which waste producers (users) should send (receive) wastes to maximize the IS performance. An agent-based model is designed to explore the proposed framework and an agent-based simulation is applied to a marble-concrete IS case. The analysis shows that the optimal redundancy strategy is influenced by the combined effect of waste market dynamicity and transaction costs, and is usually different when viewed from an economic versus an environmental perspective. The paper provides a theoretical contribution based upon the integration of operational aspects of IS with the redundancy concept in IS-based businesses. The adopted methodology is innovative as it integrates willingness to cooperate, bargaining power, and inter-company trust development into the business decision-making process. Finally, how to overcome trade-off challenges between environmental and economic performance is discussed from managerial and practical perspectives.
International Journal of Management Reviews, Aug 24, 2015
The view of innovation as a process of searching and recombining existing knowledge elements has ... more The view of innovation as a process of searching and recombining existing knowledge elements has been adopted in several industries. The innovation management literature has recognized the fundamental role that search and recombination play in innovation development. However, the relevant research has provided complex, fragmented and mixed results. The authors aim to identify areas of convergence and provide directions for future research by collecting empirical evidence regarding how firms conduct the search and recombination process. They conducted a systematic literature review of 87 empirical articles in the innovation management field. The review reveals differences among the solutions adopted both within and across organizational boundaries. Specifically, it shows that the variety and diversity of knowledge elements are critical in creating breakthrough innovations. Therefore, this paper discusses how to provide access to a variety of knowledge elements. It also highlights other fundamental questions calling for further investigation, such as how scientific knowledge elements are successfully recombined and how recombination and search dynamics occur in small and medium‐sized firms. The review concludes by summarizing the current state of affairs and suggests promising directions for future investigation.
Advances in business strategy and competitive advantage book series, 2017
Starting from the increasing difficulties for firms to create new value for customers and consequ... more Starting from the increasing difficulties for firms to create new value for customers and consequently to achieve competitive advantage, the present paper proposes an alternative strategic approach based on the notion of tradition. Specifically, tradition is defined as the whole set of competencies, knowledge, values, and culture that characterize a specific firm, territory, and/or age. Analyzing three successful Italian companies (Barilla Group, Brunello Cucinelli Group, Aboca), the paper clearly shows how tradition may be effectively employed to face competition, allowing companies both to create and to appropriate value.
In the last decades, academic and managerial literatures have paid great attention by about the n... more In the last decades, academic and managerial literatures have paid great attention by about the notion of the business model (BM). Accordingly, a wide range of literature was created to identify and acknowledge the capacity to create and renew organizational BM as one of the fundamental sources of competitiveness and value creation. However, until now, the notion and application of business model innovation (BMI) research has mostly been developed in relation to large companies and organizations. Very limited studies have explored what and how context-specific characteristics and knowledge asset management may have effects on BM development and organizations’ sustainability. This latter aspect is particularly true for technological start-ups. Until now, research and managerial practice have been not aligned with national and international policies’ great emphasis on technological start-ups, as well as about the role of the BMI to support organizational performance improvement and stimulate entrepreneurship. From this perspective, technological start-ups represent an interesting basis for analyzing business model mapping and BMI along a knowledge-based perspective. The creation, survival, development, and market success of such organizations are mainly based on the identification, acquisition, and exploitation of their knowledge-based assets. Therefore, it can be relevant to study and analyze how such knowledge assets significantly drive organizational performance and value creation by leveraging innovative technology breakthroughs, highly qualified and distinctive competencies, and implicit knowledge embedded into valuable networks of relationships.
An exhibition system is typically a physical open space made of several buildings devoted to perf... more An exhibition system is typically a physical open space made of several buildings devoted to performing demonstrations or social activities. Several examples of exhibition systems can be found word wide. The management of these spaces, even in presence of a limited number of activities, requires significant efforts: safety, welcome, merchandising, public services, etc. Nowadays, the new trend is to offer multiple, contemporary use of exhibition spaces, allowing exhibition events and regular social activities (commercial, cultural, etc.) to be dynamically intertwined, either to endeavor the huge economic investments behind infrastructures or to increase the attractiveness of the exhibition activities. This is the case of "Fiera del Levante", one of the oldest exhibitions located in a fascinating central area on the seaside of the city of Bari-Italy. Here, multiple social scopes, such as multi-exhibitions and contemporary social activities related to public offices, restaurants and entertainment, live together. This is an almost unique setting, which makes Fiera del Levante (FdL) a complex system and makes the management of the exhibition a challenging co-management task. The paper deals with the development and demonstration of a complex-system modeling framework for the decision support of the co-management of Fiera del Levante exhibition system, taking into account the interaction both physical aspects (building assets, infrastructure, equipment, fittings, …) and intangible aspects (permanent and temporary events, management and business activities, etc) and, of course, considering as a main input the needs of the different stakeholders involved.
Industrial symbiosis (IS) is a collaborative approach concerning physical exchange of materials, ... more Industrial symbiosis (IS) is a collaborative approach concerning physical exchange of materials, energy, and services among different firms: accordingly, wastes produced by a given firm are exploited as inputs by other firms. This approach is able to generate economic and environmental benefits at the same time, the former for the involved firms and the latter for the collectivity as a whole. For these reasons, the implementation of IS is largely recommended. However, despite its huge potentialities, the IS approach seems to be actually underdeveloped and not fully exploited. Firms without any prior experience of IS exchanges suffer from lack of awareness about how to integrate the IS practice into their current business models and how to gain economic benefits from IS. Since the willingness to obtain economic benefits is the main driver pushing firms to implement the IS practice, this issue constitutes an important barrier to the development of new IS relationships. In this paper, we contribute to this issue by identifying the different business models that each firm can adopt to implement the IS approach. In particular, we identify several business models for both firms producing waste and firms requiring waste. For each model, we highlight how firms can create and get economic value from IS. Moreover, from the interaction among firms, each of them implementing its own business model, several business scenarios at inter-firm level can arise. These scenarios are also presented: for each of them, strengths and weaknesses are identified and a short case study is discussed. The identified models can be useful at the company level since they provide indications about how to integrate the IS approach within their current business model.
This chapter deals with complexity science issues from two sides: from one side, it uses complexi... more This chapter deals with complexity science issues from two sides: from one side, it uses complexity science concepts to give new contributions to the theoretical understanding of geographical clusters (GCs); from the other side, it presents an application of complexity science tools such as emergent (bottom-up) simulation, using agent-based modeling to study the sources of GC competitive advantage. Referring to the first direction, complexity science is used as a conceptual framework to identify the key structural conditions of GCs that give them the adaptive capacity, so assuring their competitive advantage. Regarding the methodological approach, the agent-based simulation is used to analyze the dynamics of GCs. To this aim, we model the main characteristics of GCs and carry out a simulation analysis to observe that the behaviors of GCs are coherent with the propositions built up on the basis of complexity science literature.
This paper contributes to green product development by identifying the green products with the hi... more This paper contributes to green product development by identifying the green products with the highest potential for growth in a country. To address our aim, we use the concept of product proximity and product space and, borrowing from the results of recent studies on complexity economics, we advance that the green products with the highest potential for growth among all green products in a given country are those being in close proximity to the products a country produces with high Relative Comparative Advantage (RCA). We test this hypothesis performing a regression analysis. We build the product space for 141 different countries for the years between 2005 and 2013 and for each country we compute the maximum proximity of each green product to the products with high RCA (i.e., the proximity of the product source of competitive advantage closest to the green product considered). Results confirm that green products with high maximum proximity to the products with high RCA had the highest growth. So doing, we contribute to the literature by providing a new application of the product space as a policy making tool for green development. We also provide several applications of the proposed method.
Abstract Debate surrounding the performance outcomes of a firm’s strategic commitment to digitali... more Abstract Debate surrounding the performance outcomes of a firm’s strategic commitment to digitalization and environmental sustainability (namely, digital orientation and environmental orientation, respectively) is gathering pace. Despite progress, there remains no conclusive evidence on whether, and how digital orientation and environmental orientations enhance innovation outcomes, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Therefore, this paper examines the direct and complementary effects of digital and environmental orientations on the likelihood that SMEs introduce product and/or process innovations (i.e., product and process innovation performance). The study tests its hypotheses on a sample of 369 North American SMEs. Results demonstrate that digital and environmental orientation have a positive direct effect on product and process innovation performance. Instead, the complementary effect of pursuing a dual strategy towards digitization and environmental sustainability has a negative impact on process innovation performance and is not significant for product innovation performance. These results add new insights to theory linking strategic orientation to innovation performance, with specific regard to smaller firms.
The aim of this paper is to propose a taxonomy of industrial symbiosis (IS) business models. Rath... more The aim of this paper is to propose a taxonomy of industrial symbiosis (IS) business models. Rather than to adopt a firm perspective, we take a system perspective and focus on the governance of the system made up of the firms implementing IS, being the latter considered an important factor influencing firm's competitive advantage. Four extreme IS business models are identified, characterized on the basis of two governance features: (1) need for coordination and (2) centralization of control. For each model, the main characteristics are presented and the main factors influencing firm value creation and value capture discussed. In doing so, our study contributes to clarify how and why firms applying IS practice can gain competitive advantage, a major gap in the current literature. Consequently, we contribute to the practical development of IS, which appears to be still not fully exploited by firms, despite its relevance.
This paper reviews the state of the art on the resilience of complex systems by embracing differe... more This paper reviews the state of the art on the resilience of complex systems by embracing different research areas and using bibliometric tools. The aim is to identify the main intellectual communities and leading scholars and to synthesize key knowledge of each research area. We also carry out a comparison across the research areas, aimed at analyzing how resilience is approached in any field, how the topic evolved starting from the ecological field of study, and the level of cross-fertilization among domains. Our analysis shows that resilience of complex systems is a multidisciplinary concept, which is particularly important in the fields of environmental science, ecology, and engineering. Areas of recent and increasing interest are also operation research, management science, business, and computer science. Except for environmental science and ecology, research is fragmented and carried out by isolated research groups. Integration is not only limited inside each field but also between research areas. In particular, we trace the citation links between different research areas and find a very limited number, revealing a scarce cross-fertilization among domains. We conclude by providing some directions for future research.
Innovative new ventures (INVs) cope with the lack of legitimacy and liability of newness that may... more Innovative new ventures (INVs) cope with the lack of legitimacy and liability of newness that may hinder their likelihood of survival. Those risks increase with the novelty introduced by the INV. Radically INVs are the ones that have the highest degree of novelty, and, consequently, face the highest risks. Understanding the elements and mechanisms that sustain radically INVs is of paramount importance due to the great benefits they bring to society. This article explores how the regional legacy, defined as the combined effect of regional business and industrial practices and culture, supports those ventures in facing those risks. The regional culture and tradition create a sense of familiarity in stakeholders that facilitates the understanding of the radically INV, lowering the lack of legitimacy. Meanwhile, the shared culture within a region favours the creation of a collaborative climate that allows the radically INVs to access relevant resources and, finally, reduce the liability of newness.
International Journal of Production Economics, Mar 1, 2020
Sustainability of Industrial Symbiosis (IS) businesses plays a key role in supporting the circula... more Sustainability of Industrial Symbiosis (IS) businesses plays a key role in supporting the circular economy. Industrial symbiosis networks (ISNs) can survive in the long run if they have high resilience to perturbations that lead to operational uncertainties. The literature highlights that the resilience of ISNs can be enhanced by ensuring high redundancy of IS relationships: accordingly, firms should exchange the same waste with more symbiotic partners. However, the impact of increasing redundancy on economic and environmental performance of IS has not been investigated so far. This paper proposes a theoretical framework to understand the effect of the redundancy strategy on the performance of companies involved in IS. Accordingly, the optimal redundancy strategy refers to an optimal number of partners to (from) which waste producers (users) should send (receive) wastes to maximize the IS performance. An agent-based model is designed to explore the proposed framework and an agent-based simulation is applied to a marble-concrete IS case. The analysis shows that the optimal redundancy strategy is influenced by the combined effect of waste market dynamicity and transaction costs, and is usually different when viewed from an economic versus an environmental perspective. The paper provides a theoretical contribution based upon the integration of operational aspects of IS with the redundancy concept in IS-based businesses. The adopted methodology is innovative as it integrates willingness to cooperate, bargaining power, and inter-company trust development into the business decision-making process. Finally, how to overcome trade-off challenges between environmental and economic performance is discussed from managerial and practical perspectives.
International Journal of Management Reviews, Aug 24, 2015
The view of innovation as a process of searching and recombining existing knowledge elements has ... more The view of innovation as a process of searching and recombining existing knowledge elements has been adopted in several industries. The innovation management literature has recognized the fundamental role that search and recombination play in innovation development. However, the relevant research has provided complex, fragmented and mixed results. The authors aim to identify areas of convergence and provide directions for future research by collecting empirical evidence regarding how firms conduct the search and recombination process. They conducted a systematic literature review of 87 empirical articles in the innovation management field. The review reveals differences among the solutions adopted both within and across organizational boundaries. Specifically, it shows that the variety and diversity of knowledge elements are critical in creating breakthrough innovations. Therefore, this paper discusses how to provide access to a variety of knowledge elements. It also highlights other fundamental questions calling for further investigation, such as how scientific knowledge elements are successfully recombined and how recombination and search dynamics occur in small and medium‐sized firms. The review concludes by summarizing the current state of affairs and suggests promising directions for future investigation.
Advances in business strategy and competitive advantage book series, 2017
Starting from the increasing difficulties for firms to create new value for customers and consequ... more Starting from the increasing difficulties for firms to create new value for customers and consequently to achieve competitive advantage, the present paper proposes an alternative strategic approach based on the notion of tradition. Specifically, tradition is defined as the whole set of competencies, knowledge, values, and culture that characterize a specific firm, territory, and/or age. Analyzing three successful Italian companies (Barilla Group, Brunello Cucinelli Group, Aboca), the paper clearly shows how tradition may be effectively employed to face competition, allowing companies both to create and to appropriate value.
In the last decades, academic and managerial literatures have paid great attention by about the n... more In the last decades, academic and managerial literatures have paid great attention by about the notion of the business model (BM). Accordingly, a wide range of literature was created to identify and acknowledge the capacity to create and renew organizational BM as one of the fundamental sources of competitiveness and value creation. However, until now, the notion and application of business model innovation (BMI) research has mostly been developed in relation to large companies and organizations. Very limited studies have explored what and how context-specific characteristics and knowledge asset management may have effects on BM development and organizations’ sustainability. This latter aspect is particularly true for technological start-ups. Until now, research and managerial practice have been not aligned with national and international policies’ great emphasis on technological start-ups, as well as about the role of the BMI to support organizational performance improvement and stimulate entrepreneurship. From this perspective, technological start-ups represent an interesting basis for analyzing business model mapping and BMI along a knowledge-based perspective. The creation, survival, development, and market success of such organizations are mainly based on the identification, acquisition, and exploitation of their knowledge-based assets. Therefore, it can be relevant to study and analyze how such knowledge assets significantly drive organizational performance and value creation by leveraging innovative technology breakthroughs, highly qualified and distinctive competencies, and implicit knowledge embedded into valuable networks of relationships.
An exhibition system is typically a physical open space made of several buildings devoted to perf... more An exhibition system is typically a physical open space made of several buildings devoted to performing demonstrations or social activities. Several examples of exhibition systems can be found word wide. The management of these spaces, even in presence of a limited number of activities, requires significant efforts: safety, welcome, merchandising, public services, etc. Nowadays, the new trend is to offer multiple, contemporary use of exhibition spaces, allowing exhibition events and regular social activities (commercial, cultural, etc.) to be dynamically intertwined, either to endeavor the huge economic investments behind infrastructures or to increase the attractiveness of the exhibition activities. This is the case of "Fiera del Levante", one of the oldest exhibitions located in a fascinating central area on the seaside of the city of Bari-Italy. Here, multiple social scopes, such as multi-exhibitions and contemporary social activities related to public offices, restaurants and entertainment, live together. This is an almost unique setting, which makes Fiera del Levante (FdL) a complex system and makes the management of the exhibition a challenging co-management task. The paper deals with the development and demonstration of a complex-system modeling framework for the decision support of the co-management of Fiera del Levante exhibition system, taking into account the interaction both physical aspects (building assets, infrastructure, equipment, fittings, …) and intangible aspects (permanent and temporary events, management and business activities, etc) and, of course, considering as a main input the needs of the different stakeholders involved.
Industrial symbiosis (IS) is a collaborative approach concerning physical exchange of materials, ... more Industrial symbiosis (IS) is a collaborative approach concerning physical exchange of materials, energy, and services among different firms: accordingly, wastes produced by a given firm are exploited as inputs by other firms. This approach is able to generate economic and environmental benefits at the same time, the former for the involved firms and the latter for the collectivity as a whole. For these reasons, the implementation of IS is largely recommended. However, despite its huge potentialities, the IS approach seems to be actually underdeveloped and not fully exploited. Firms without any prior experience of IS exchanges suffer from lack of awareness about how to integrate the IS practice into their current business models and how to gain economic benefits from IS. Since the willingness to obtain economic benefits is the main driver pushing firms to implement the IS practice, this issue constitutes an important barrier to the development of new IS relationships. In this paper, we contribute to this issue by identifying the different business models that each firm can adopt to implement the IS approach. In particular, we identify several business models for both firms producing waste and firms requiring waste. For each model, we highlight how firms can create and get economic value from IS. Moreover, from the interaction among firms, each of them implementing its own business model, several business scenarios at inter-firm level can arise. These scenarios are also presented: for each of them, strengths and weaknesses are identified and a short case study is discussed. The identified models can be useful at the company level since they provide indications about how to integrate the IS approach within their current business model.
This chapter deals with complexity science issues from two sides: from one side, it uses complexi... more This chapter deals with complexity science issues from two sides: from one side, it uses complexity science concepts to give new contributions to the theoretical understanding of geographical clusters (GCs); from the other side, it presents an application of complexity science tools such as emergent (bottom-up) simulation, using agent-based modeling to study the sources of GC competitive advantage. Referring to the first direction, complexity science is used as a conceptual framework to identify the key structural conditions of GCs that give them the adaptive capacity, so assuring their competitive advantage. Regarding the methodological approach, the agent-based simulation is used to analyze the dynamics of GCs. To this aim, we model the main characteristics of GCs and carry out a simulation analysis to observe that the behaviors of GCs are coherent with the propositions built up on the basis of complexity science literature.
This paper contributes to green product development by identifying the green products with the hi... more This paper contributes to green product development by identifying the green products with the highest potential for growth in a country. To address our aim, we use the concept of product proximity and product space and, borrowing from the results of recent studies on complexity economics, we advance that the green products with the highest potential for growth among all green products in a given country are those being in close proximity to the products a country produces with high Relative Comparative Advantage (RCA). We test this hypothesis performing a regression analysis. We build the product space for 141 different countries for the years between 2005 and 2013 and for each country we compute the maximum proximity of each green product to the products with high RCA (i.e., the proximity of the product source of competitive advantage closest to the green product considered). Results confirm that green products with high maximum proximity to the products with high RCA had the highest growth. So doing, we contribute to the literature by providing a new application of the product space as a policy making tool for green development. We also provide several applications of the proposed method.
Abstract Debate surrounding the performance outcomes of a firm’s strategic commitment to digitali... more Abstract Debate surrounding the performance outcomes of a firm’s strategic commitment to digitalization and environmental sustainability (namely, digital orientation and environmental orientation, respectively) is gathering pace. Despite progress, there remains no conclusive evidence on whether, and how digital orientation and environmental orientations enhance innovation outcomes, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Therefore, this paper examines the direct and complementary effects of digital and environmental orientations on the likelihood that SMEs introduce product and/or process innovations (i.e., product and process innovation performance). The study tests its hypotheses on a sample of 369 North American SMEs. Results demonstrate that digital and environmental orientation have a positive direct effect on product and process innovation performance. Instead, the complementary effect of pursuing a dual strategy towards digitization and environmental sustainability has a negative impact on process innovation performance and is not significant for product innovation performance. These results add new insights to theory linking strategic orientation to innovation performance, with specific regard to smaller firms.
The aim of this paper is to propose a taxonomy of industrial symbiosis (IS) business models. Rath... more The aim of this paper is to propose a taxonomy of industrial symbiosis (IS) business models. Rather than to adopt a firm perspective, we take a system perspective and focus on the governance of the system made up of the firms implementing IS, being the latter considered an important factor influencing firm's competitive advantage. Four extreme IS business models are identified, characterized on the basis of two governance features: (1) need for coordination and (2) centralization of control. For each model, the main characteristics are presented and the main factors influencing firm value creation and value capture discussed. In doing so, our study contributes to clarify how and why firms applying IS practice can gain competitive advantage, a major gap in the current literature. Consequently, we contribute to the practical development of IS, which appears to be still not fully exploited by firms, despite its relevance.
This paper reviews the state of the art on the resilience of complex systems by embracing differe... more This paper reviews the state of the art on the resilience of complex systems by embracing different research areas and using bibliometric tools. The aim is to identify the main intellectual communities and leading scholars and to synthesize key knowledge of each research area. We also carry out a comparison across the research areas, aimed at analyzing how resilience is approached in any field, how the topic evolved starting from the ecological field of study, and the level of cross-fertilization among domains. Our analysis shows that resilience of complex systems is a multidisciplinary concept, which is particularly important in the fields of environmental science, ecology, and engineering. Areas of recent and increasing interest are also operation research, management science, business, and computer science. Except for environmental science and ecology, research is fragmented and carried out by isolated research groups. Integration is not only limited inside each field but also between research areas. In particular, we trace the citation links between different research areas and find a very limited number, revealing a scarce cross-fertilization among domains. We conclude by providing some directions for future research.
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Papers by Vito Albino