Federica Ceci

• Professor (Full) at University of Chieti-Pescara

Questo studio esamina il potenziale delle tecnologie di intelligenza artificiale (IA) nel supportare processi decisionali data-driven per una gestione urbana efficiente e nell’integrare i cittadini nella trasformazione digitale attraverso strumenti come gli IA-BOT comunali. Partendo da un’analisi qualitativa basata su interviste a manager pubblici,...

Ecosystems comprise complex webs of affiliated entities, characterized by multilateral connections that transcend bilateral relationships, encompassing dependencies across dimensions. Participants in ecosystems are interconnected through resource dependencies and product/service offerings, fostering collaboration, innovation, and knowledge generati...

Open Innovation and the Quadruple Helix framework have emerged as key concepts in the public policy domain, particularly within smart city initiatives. Contemporary cities face growing expectations to unite multiple actors – including citizens, private and public institutions, and firms, to shape urban development and facilitate social, economic, a...

Rapid economic growth, intense competition, and rising environmental concerns are compelling businesses to attain sustainable performance and preserve long-run interests. Considering the lack of EO in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the emerging context of Pakistan, the present study investigates the impact of entrepreneurial orientation (EO...

Open innovation has increasingly become a central concept in the public policy domain, and its impact is further amplified within smart city initiatives. Contemporary cities are positioned at a pivotal crossroads in our society, where there is a growing expectation to unite multiple actors-including citizens, private and public institutions, and co...

Smart cities, while widely recognized for utilizing information communication technologies (ICTs) to amplify urban efficiency, face challenges given the varied local interests and factors that influence their effective implementation. Existing urban divides further complicate the understanding of how smart city technologies truly function. While te...

Over the years, we have witnessed an ongoing and interrelated combination of smart city implementation and tourism trends. The current development of cities integrates technological implementation, the adoption of social media, and "smart" practices to interact with users and tourists, influencing their travel choices by offering a highly technolog...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a pivotal role in both global and developing economies, yet they grapple with significant resource limitations and challenging environments. The lack of innovation and entrepreneurial focus among SMEs has heightened their failure rates. Addressing this gap, our study explores ‘bricolage’ – the practice...

The Social Media landscape is characterized by constant and rapid changes, with new platforms emerging in the market and existing ones evolving by integrating new features. Amidst this dynamic environment, the phenomenon of Social Media Dependency (SMD) has become particularly salient. This study seeks to explore individual usage behavior on Social...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in emerging economies strive to achieve and sustain their financial and competitive positions in a dynamic resource-constrained environment. The concept of resource bricolage has received little attention in the literature on emerging economies. To fill this gap, we draw perspectives from the Resource-Based...

The drones’ market is anticipated to grow significantly because of its increasing use for commercial and professional purposes. They are currently used in many industries and the next frontier is represented by the automotive industry. The volume of disposable data is growing exponentially, reaching more than 44 zettabytes of valuable data in 2020....

Southern Italy has been confronting dire economic and resource scarcity challenges to keep up with the national growth. Digitalization is a changing phenomenon that transforms the firm’s structure and enhances production, operational, and service efficiency helping to reduce economic and geographical disparity. Firms play a crucial role in the deve...

The worldwide growing concern for environmental protection compels businesses to incorporate green orientation in their strategies. Crowdfunding has opened new possibilities to attract investors by encompassing green concerns in their agenda. This study investigates the relationship between green orientation and UK crowdfunding campaign success. We...

Cities are facing increased dynamism due to rapid technological development, digitalization, and citizens' requirements, creating novel opportunities for smart city transformation. If, until a few years ago, the city's development from a smart perspective was an opportunity, today, it has assumed a predominant character on a social and economic lev...

Rising environmental and social challenges have compelled policymakers and academicians worldwide to look for an optimal solution to spur cities into a new dimension to meet future needs. In this transition, technological advancement and institution quality has emerged as viable solutions to ensure sustainable city development. However, urban inequ...

The surge of economic activities in the world's top economies has resulted in a cumulative 57% of the world's pollution, leaving an innate impact on global environmental sustainability goals. This study investigates if financial development and green innovation play some role in de-escalating the pressing environmental challenges worldwide. By deve...

Southern Italy has been confronting dire economic and resource scarcity challenges to keep up with the national growth. Digitalization is a changing phenomenon that transforms the firm’s structure and enhances production, operational, and service efficiency helping to reduce economic and geographical disparity. Firms play a crucial role in the dev...

Over the last two decades, the phenomenon of green growth has gained much attention from academics and policymakers striving to find a sustainable solution to environmental problems worldwide. Technological innovation serves as a tool to abate the acute environmental crisis and continuously promote sustainable development by converting traditional...

The paper explores the concept of cultural proximity and its effects on firm innovation, paying specific attention to the moderator role played by digital technologies. In order to improve the innovative performance, firms should construct and maintain relationships with the members of other organizations and should develop and take care of the rel...

Southern Italy has been confronting dire economic and resource scarcity challenges to keep up with the national growth. Digitalization is a changing phenomenon that transforms the firm’s structure and enhances production, operational, and service efficiency helping to reduce economic and geographical disparity. Firms play a crucial role in the dev...

Innovation takes place at fast pace in digital ecosystems, asking for increasing attention by academic scholars. In line with this call, we offer an overview of the most recent advances in the studies on innovation and technology in the digital space. We delve into the cultural elements that affect the diffusion and adoption of digital technologies...

This paper investigates the functioning of Online Black-Markets (OBMs), i.e. a digital infrastructure operating in the Dark Net that enables the exchange of illegal goods such as drugs, weapons and fake digital identities. OBMs exist notwithstanding adverse conditions such as police interventions, scams and market breakdowns. Relying on a longitudi...

The paper investigates information and communication technology (ICT)‐based and face‐to‐face interactions for knowledge sharing during the activities characterizing the innovation process rather than strategic or operative ones. It also discussed the benefits of working remotely in companies or in a network of companies, also due to the pandemic si...

In a world where around 3.5 billions of the entire population are active social media users, the individual usage behavior of social network sites and related aspects should require further investigation. Specifically, this paper focuses on the social network dependence, considering the utilitarian and goal-oriented facet rather than the psychologi...

Digital technology is the heart of the modern economy. Digital skills are then the reference point for many firms and workers. This means that employees should have skills to face change and at the same time have excellent technical preparation. Innovation and competitiveness of organizations are guided by today’s skills, the so-called twenty-first...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how bonding (i.e. tightly knit, emotionally close social relationships) and bridging social capital (i.e. outward looking open social relationships) affect opportunity recognition and innovation implementation in a cultural network of firms, investigating the main benefits of and drawbacks to both bon...

While IT integration is recognised as an important capability, the mechanisms through which it creates value and the contingencies that delimit its effectiveness are unclear – particularly, in the case of firms that deliver solutions embodying both products and services. We focus on IT vendors to investigate the effectiveness of IT integration capa...

Securing national electronic identification (e-ID) systems requires an in depth understanding of the associated threats. The trade of identity related artefacts in the darknet facilitates illegal activities such as identity theft in both physical and virtual worlds. This paper reports the findings of an exploratory analysis of identity trading in t...

Entrepreneurs' personal beliefs determine how external information, conditions and stimuli are filtered, interpreted and incorporated into a decision, which has a profound impact on firm performance. Spirituality, one of the most prominent aspects of personal beliefs, derives from the effects of both personal and social religious practices and conf...

Several studies prove the existence of a relationship between entrepreneurs’ personality traits and firm performances. However, few of them focus on how these personality traits can be correlated with start-ups’ innovativeness. We focus on start-ups because entrepreneurs play a crucial role in managing them: their personality strongly influences bu...

In this chapter we look at entrepreneurs as permanent learners (Franco and Haase 2009). We posit that the networks to which the entrepreneurs belong play a crucial role in their learning process. It is widely accepted that being immersed in a network is strongly related to the sharing of similar cultural values. However, we know precious little abo...

We focus on a group of firms that share the same norms, beliefs and values to analyse how bonding social capital (i.e. internal links within the group) and bridging social capital (i.e. links with actors outside the group) affect innovation based on content analysis of qualitative data. We find that bonding and bridging social capital affect differ...

This paper illustrates how organizations change their architecture in response to environmental feedback, measured in relation to performance gaps. Based on a study of 762 organizations, we explore the modus operandi underpinning architectural change and argue that the interplay between social and historical aspiration levels: (i) constitutes a ben...

In this paper we illustrate how the kind of interorganizational network influences firm innovation. .We distinguish between a bonding social capital kind of network, where members share the same norms, beliefs and value and bridging social capital kind of network, where . To explore this issue, we collected qualitative data that we analyse using co...

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive picture of knowledge dynamics in fragmented industries in which economic activities are performed through inter-firm projects. The organization performing the project often does not survive the project itself, though knowledge is acquired and retained over time and across the whole industry. Notwithstandin...

Whereas systems integration is recognized as an important organizational capability, the mechanisms through which it creates value as well as the environmental contingencies that delimit its effectiveness remain unclear, particularly when firms deliver integrated solutions embodying products and services. Focusing on IT solution providers, the auth...

This article explores the case of Gruppo Loccioni, a medium-sized Italian firm that, despite the economic crisis, has been able to obtain good performance through the adoption of the integrated solutions business model. This paper examines the choices taken by the firm, analysing the evolution of the firm, the activities implemented, decisions and...

Contingency theory suggests that the selection of coherent combinations of organisational capabilities and operational environments has important performance implications. This paper builds upon this perspective to analyse the emergence of a new business model that is modifying the structure of many industries: the provision of integrated solutions...

Networks have been hailed as a third organizational form, between markets and hierarchies. One of the main characteristics of networks is the coexistence of different kinds of relationships, personal and professional among these. The presence of multiple types of relationships modifies inter-firm dynamics, creating a space where traditional innovat...

The aerospace industry is characterized by an intensive net of relationships and information in the supply chain. The small and medium enterprises (SMEs) working for this kind of industry needs to be innovative and adopt information and communication technologies (ICT) tools to work with bigger companies. This paper explore three networks of relati...

Networks have been hailed as a third organizational form, between markets and hierarchies. One of the main characteristics of networks is the coexistence of personal and professional relationships. This coexistence modifies the development of economic activities; strategic decisions are largely influenced by the presence of trust between network me...

Offshoring of intangibles is a global production strategy based on the decision to externalize intangible activities to foreign countries. In the present work we test the existence of a positive relationship between offshoring intangibles and firm performance. To reap the full benefit of offshoring, firms are required to integrate and coordinate ac...

Integrated bundles of products and services are gaining importance in various sectors and are reshaping the competitive landscape of many industries. They also pose new challenges to established firms, who need to reconfigure their capabilities. Drawing upon the resource-based view and contingency theory, we test a model of fit between environmenta...

Integrated bundles of products and services are gaining importance in various sectors and are reshaping the competitive landscape of many industries. They also pose new challenges to established firms, who need to reconfigure their capabilities. Drawing upon the resource-based view and contingency theory, we test a model of fit between environmenta...

This paper investigates the way that firms' environmental context and organizational structure influence their strategic choices and lead to different capabilities configurations. Drawing on contingency theory and the resource-based view, we explore integrated solutions—an emerging business model in which firms bundle products and services—in the I...

This book is based on the idea that society is entering an era characterized by turbulence and rapid technological change. In the ensuing competitive context, information technology has become pervasive and increasingly important and new organizational forms have emerged to respond to the new competitive challenges. The so-called knowledge intensiv...

Product bundling consists of "the practice of package selling". This practice, mostly studied by economists and marketing scholars, has significant implications for monopoly power, level of welfare and marketing strategies. In recent years, product bundling has gained in importance because, especially in the capital product industries, firms are mo...