Paolo Landoni

Politecnico di Torino | polito · DIGEP - Department of Management and Production Engineering

This paper examines the impact of universities on the technological performance of adjacent firms. We extend existing research by jointly analyzing, and comparing, the effects of education (graduates) and scientific research (publications) activities of universities on firms’ technological performance. Adopting the knowledge production framework, o...

Regional foresight is receiving a fast growing attention and interest from public policy makers and other regional stakeholders. Until recently, regional foresight has been implemented in most cases as a scaling down of national studies, by applying approaches and methods of national foresight to specific regional themes. The purpose of this paper...

While recent research indicates that combining scientific and entrepreneurial activities at the level of academic scientists is feasible, the literature has remained muted on the dynamics behind such successful combinations. Indeed, little is known about how researchers avoid conflicts of commitment and conflicts of interest as well as the so-calle...

Purpose The purpose is to assess the usefulness of creative vouchers, a specific kind of technology and innovation vouchers (small grants usually given to SMEs to acquire external knowledge) where the knowledge suppliers are creative firms such as design agencies. Design/methodology/approach A multiple case analysis of four EU-funded pilot voucher...

Purpose This paper aims to provide a comprehensive view of the different competition-based approaches that policymakers can exploit to foster external knowledge search and their positioning among innovation policy measures. A growing number of companies have implemented initiatives to access external knowledge to increase their innovativeness, cons...

Blockchain is a promising and emerging technology. Despite the number of studies on the subject, several studies require further exploration of the relationship between blockchain and social innovation. Moreover, there is an increasing interest in social entrepreneurship and in how technical solutions may address social or environmental issues. Hen...

Science and technology parks (STPs) are non-spontaneous agglomerations aimed at encouraging the formation and growth of on-site technology and knowledge-based firms. STPs have diffused worldwide, attracting significant, and often public, investment. However, there are contrasting evidence and insights on the effectiveness of these local development...

Innovation vouchers are policy instruments supporting the collaboration of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with specialized knowledge suppliers. These innovation vouchers are typically appreciated by beneficiaries because of their simple application and reporting procedures. However, because of their small size, innovation vouchers seem to have...

Publicly funded collaborative projects can represent an embryonic form of open innovation, as they force firms to collaborate and share knowledge with external partners. In this vein, they can trigger the implementation of a broader set of open innovation practices, despite usually operating according to policy logics that are not always aligned wi...

We studied the effects of a pilot project that strengthened savings incentive mechanisms. The project was established by The Small Enterprise Foundation (SEF), a leading microfinance institution based in South Africa. The program introduced a savings stimulus in the form of a Goal Card: clients subscribing to this (non-coercive) tool were required...

Science and Technology Parks (STPs) are key elements of the infrastructure supporting the growth of today's global knowledge economy. STPs create environments that foster collaboration, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and provide innovation services to support new technology-based firms in their activities. However, despite the extensive research...

Although a great deal of attention has been paid to entrepreneurship education, only a few studies have analysed the impact of extra-curricular entrepreneurial activities on students’ entrepreneurial intention. The aim of this study is to fill this gap by exploring the role played by Student-Led Entrepreneurial Organizations (SLEOs) in shaping the...

A quasi-natural experiment has been carried out at The Small Enterprise Foundation, a South African microfinance institution offering group lending with joint liability. In a pilot project, the frequency of meetings was reduced from fortnightly to monthly and the members of the groups were no more required to attend all the meetings but they could...

New ventures depend on the capability of entrepreneurs to transform an idea or a technology into a successful company. The literature on entrepreneurship has recognized that Entrepreneurship Education (EE) plays a key role in this process, but the literature on academic spinoffs has focused on other determinants (e.g., Technology Transfer Offices -...

This study uses a randomized control trial to evaluate the outcome of integrating money management and entrepreneurial training into a microcredit program in India. We find positive and significant effects on clients' financial management skills and entrepreneurship abilities, particularly for clients with higher human capital, or more diligent, or...

Clusters have been the subject of many studies in the last three decades. They are important drivers of regional development and many have attempted to replicate the most successful ones. Most cluster policies are designed with a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach and the outcomes have often been below expectations; we here argue that the basis for clust...

Clusters have been the subject of many studies in the last three decades. They are important drivers of regional development and many have attempted to replicate the most successful ones. Most cluster policies are designed with a 'one-size-fits-all' approach and the outcomes have often been below expectations; we here argue that the basis for clust...

Both project management and international development came of age as scholarly and practice domains in the 20 th century. They share a central concern with organizing work and delivering change. Though international development played a role in defining the project management domain in the 1950s and the 1960s, there has been little cross-fertilizat...

The point of departure of this special issue is that the conversation between the neighboring ( Davies, Manning & Söderlund, 2018 ) schol- arly domains of project management and international development (ID) has been narrow and shallow. This special issue brings together a collection of six papers at the interface between project management and in...

Collaborative research and development (R&D) requires specific management approaches in several aspects including the measurement of R&D performance. This paper aims to contribute to the debate on how performance of different types of collaborative R&D activities should be measured. To this end, we conduct an exploratory research based on case stud...

Despite the wealth of research on open innovation, the mechanisms that enable capturing value through adopting an open innovation approach remain largely unexplored. In this study, we focus on open innovation processes among firms and radical circles and shed light on the related value capture mechanisms. We rely on a detailed qualitative case anal...

This paper defines and analyses incubators that mainly support start-ups with a significant social impact. In 2016, a survey was conducted on the 162 incubators active in Italy, and a total of 88 responses were received. An analysis of the literature and of this dataset led to the identification of three types of incubators: Business, Mixed, and So...

Purpose In recent years, companies have started to open up their Research and Development (R&D) and their innovation activities to external partners. They aim to access new resources and capabilities and to gain shorter time-to-markets. However, as several studies have shown, it can be difficult to manage collaborative (open) innovation projects to...

Sustainable entrepreneurs (SEs) operate under different institutional pressures, but they also aim to provoke changes in their institutional environment in order to advance the goals of sustainability. These changes are not always large‐scale, successful transformations. This article adopts the concept of institutional work to explore how SEs engag...

Purpose Evidence from previous literature indicates that adopting a new innovative technology has a positive impact on a company’s business performance. Much less work has been carried out into examining whether a technology adoption has impact on corporate reputation. This paper aims to examine the latter topic in a context where social media is t...

This book reviews the social role of universities in their local urban contexts and describes a number of initiatives of major interest in terms of the impact achieved, the range of stakeholders involved, and the significance of the university campus and teachers as agents of change. It is divided into three parts, the first of which draws on the i...

The process to develop a Sustainability Model Canvas described in the previous chapter was applied to three different social innovation projects of the CampUs program: Plug Social TV, Shared Garden, and Adaptable Self-Managed Itinerant Pavilion (PAAI in Italian). In this chapter, we illustrate the canvases developed for these social innovation proj...

How can a Triple Bottom Line organization understand and visualize the way in which it creates, appropriates, and delivers value? How can the Sustainability Model Canvas be implemented? This chapter aims to propose a co-design methodology to conceive the main building blocks of the Sustainability Model Canvas. In particular, it offers a way to move...

How can social innovation projects evolve into organizations with long-term economic sustainability? How can organizations aiming for a triple bottom line become economically sustainable in the long run? Can these organizations use the tools and methods used by for-profit organizations to describe their business model? This chapter starts off with...

The literature is indicating an emerging need for customized tools to model how Triple Bottom Line organizations and nonprofit organizations deriving from social innovation projects have to operate to be economically sustainable. Starting from three editions of the top 100 NGOs as ranked by The Global Journal, NGOs are analyzed and classified accor...

This study develops an understanding of the role of emotional connectivity for volunteer retention in prosocial business venturing. By embedding it in organizational ambivalence theory, our analysis of four volunteer-dependent community ventures reveals two mechanisms through which entrepreneurs strengthen volunteers’ emotional connectivity. We fir...

This paper contains an exploratory analysis of the business model innovations (BMIs) that firms in cultural and creative industries (CCIs) undertake along their life-cycle. Despite the role that creative and cultural and creative firms (CCFs) have in the economic development of industrialised countries, they tend to remain small and often fail due...

The advantages of innovation strategies that are based on collaboration with users have been demonstrated by several studies, which have highlighted emerging shifts from a user-centred approach (in which the user is a subject) to a participatory one (in which the user is a partner). The Living Lab methodology, which is a design research methodology...

The diffusion and importance of open and collaborative innovation are widely acknowledged. Generally, policy makers launch programs fostering collaboration without awareness of the factors surrounding the collaborations. Moreover, while linkages between two organisations (dyadic relationships) have been largely explored, collaborative innovation ca...

The diffusion and importance of open and collaborative innovation are widely acknowledged. Generally, policy makers launch programs fostering collaboration without awareness of the factors surrounding the collaborations. Moreover, while linkages between two organisations (dyadic relationships) have been largely explored, collaborative innovation ca...

The rising cost of R&D activities and the increasing complexity of technologies and markets have led to the widespread diffusion of collaborative and open innovation processes. As a consequence, different open innovation paradigms have become the protagonists of many innovation strategies. Although this type of approach is an optimal strategy to id...

Un fenomeno di grande attualità e rilevanza, che sta attirando sempre maggiore attenzione all'interno degli ecosistemi imprenditoriali a livello internazionale è rappresentato dalle start-up create da studenti universitari o neo-laureati. Questo fenomeno sta diventando sempre più frequente e rilevante anche in Italia, sebbene rimanga ancora poco st...

Innovation is often the result of collaborative efforts, but many firms lack skills and resources to engage in collaborations. Therefore, policy-makers have developed a variety of measures and programmes to increase interaction and favour partnerships between organisations. They range from innovation vouchers, meant to provide SMEs with external kn...

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play a fundamental role in International Development but their projects often lack efficiency and effectiveness. A key aspect is the proper use of project management tools and methodologies. The Logical Framework (LF) has been suggested as a key tool in this sector. However, the extent and impact of its use by...

The Balance of Inequality (BOI) is a new approach to the measurement of inequality in which each individual is given a mass equal to his/her income, the population is aligned at regular intervals in order by income, and the center of mass of the income distribution is used to measure its inequality. The BOI index features an intuitive physical inte...

Presentation of the paper ”The Balance of Inequality: A rediscovery of the Gini’s R concentration ratio and a new inequality decomposition by population subgroups based on a physical rationale” available at http://www.ecineq.org/ecineq_nyc17/FILESx2017/CR2/p195.pdf

Purpose The importance and complexity of proposing radically new meanings are well-established in the literature. However, a limited number of contributions have analyzed how they can be developed. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the development of radically new meanings at the basis of the Slow Food movement to contribute to the topic. De...

The importance of international development projects in the field of international aid is growing. Given the characteristics of these projects, some specific methodologies have been developed, such as project cycle management (PCM) and the logical framework (LF) to efficiently carry out social impact assessment and project execution. However, few s...

Social networking sites are an increasingly important tool for career development, especially for highly skilled individuals. Moreover, they may constitute valuable sources of data for scholars and policy mak- ers. However, little research has been conducted on the use by highly skilled individuals of those social networks. In this paper, we focus...

The Balance of Inequality (BOI) is a new approach to the measurement of inequality in which each individual is given a mass equal to his/her income, the population is aligned at regular intervals in order by income, and the center of mass of the income distribution is used to measure its inequality. The BOI index features an intuitive physical inte...

Published open access: Journal of African Economies, DOI: 10.1093/jae/ejab004

In industrialized contexts Sustainable Product-Service Systems (S.PSS) have been studied since the end of the 90's as business models with the potential to decouple the creation of value from the consumption of materials and energy, and thus significantly reducing the environmental load of the life-cycles of current product systems.

Recent contributions suggest that non-economic factors could be important motivational drivers of scientific mobility. We investigate this hypothesis in a sample of foreign researchers in Italy and Portugal, examining their willingness to leave the host country. We distinguish between economic factors, non-economic relational factors and non-econom...

The strategic role of design-driven innovation is being increasingly recognized. Many studies show that investments in design positively influence the innovative capacity of firms and consequently their competitive performance. However, few researchers have explored how this relationship comes about. The studies that over the years have contributed...

A better understanding of loan repayment behavior of borrowers can contribute to the development of microfinance. This paper investigates the repayment performance of borrowers of a nonprofit Indian microfinance institution, the Indian Institute for Mother and Child – IIMC, using a novel data set. We collected raw data on more than 1600 borrowers,...

This study analyses the effects and dynamics behind a new type of innovation policy for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs): innovation vouchers. This policy is aimed at encouraging SMEs to collaborate with universities and with organisations offering Knowledge Intensive Services. Despite its innovativeness and growing diffusion, the innovation vou...

Virtual knowledge brokers help their clients solve challenging innovation problems by leveraging the diverse knowledge basis of vast communities of solvers. Despite the increasing diffusion of virtual knowledge brokers, no efforts have been done so far to investigate the anatomy of the brokering process they follow to deliver a service to their cli...

The aim of the paper is to introduce and clarify the financial and non-financial characteristics of the microcredit programs based on a credit guarantee scheme, i.e. Indirect Microcredit Models (IMMs). IMMs are emerging models of microcredit in high-income countries able to combine the contribution of the public sector, non-profit sector or sociall...

The aim of the paper is to introduce and clarify the financial and non-financial characteristics of microcredit programs based on a credit guarantee. We call these programs, which are widespread in Europe, Indirect Microcredit Programs (IMPs) because they use an indirect microcredit model. We discuss their differences with respect to the traditiona...

In the increasingly knowledge-based economy, the role of the service sector, and in particular, of Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS), is widely acknowledged. KIBS are considered 'bridges of innovation'. Furthermore, in addition to this pivotal role in supporting the competitiveness and development of other firms, KIBS sectors are, per se...

In this paper, we show how the inequality of the income distribution of a population can be measured with the percentile income shares, or with the mean income of each percentile and the mean income of the population, with a negligible error. The results, obtained using the Balance of Inequality index, also apply for the Gini index.

Most Microfinance institutions (MFIs) worldwide focus their efforts in relieving the poor from financial constraints through micro-loans. This research focuses on integrating a money management and entrepreneurial training plan to a lending program in a non-profit MFI in Kolkata, India. The paper’s main purpose is to measure the marginal impact of...

Universities are central actors in the production and delivery of new knowledge, and they play a unique role in National and Regional Innovation Systems. Almost all research universities have established Knowledge Transfer Offices (KTOs) to pursue their so-called ‘third mission’. This paper analyses the organizational structure of KTOs by discussin...

High-quality evidence and derived guidelines, as typically published in major academic journals, are a major process that shapes physician decision-making worldwide. However, for many aspects of medical practice, there is a lack of High-quality evidence or an overload of somewhat contradictory low-quality information, which makes decision-making a...

International Development (ID) projects carried out by Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are considered one of the pillars for providing assistance to developing countries, but these projects are reported to have high failure rates and their performance is often considered not satisfactory. Only recently researchers started to consider project...

Living Labs have received limited attention in the literature despite their diffusion throughout Europe and recent interest from policy makers. This limited attention is linked to the newness of the phenomenon, the high heterogeneity of cases and the consequent lack of definitions and acknowledged frameworks for scholarly analyses. In this work, we...

International development (ID) projects are pivotal in the field of international aid, but their actual impact is difficult to assess and often questioned. Focusing on non-governmental organizations (NGOs), in this paper we analyse two aspects related to the impact of ID projects. The first concerns the characteristics of ID projects. We reviewed t...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to investigate how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can engage in collaborations with universities in different phases of the new product development process, taking into account the peculiarities of SMEs. Design/methodology/approach – This paper combines a qualitative methodology (five SME case studies)...

Although many authors have analysed the role and the efficiency of science parks, only a few contributions have analysed national science park systems (SPSs) as a whole. Because of the lack of data, evidence regarding the performance of science parks in a nation is very limited and there is a lack of comparisons between different systems. This pape...

Through an analysis of 497 foreign researchers in Italy and Portugal we verify the impact of home linkages on return mobility choices and scientific productivity. We consider the presence of several different types of linkages of the researchers working abroad with their country of origin and control for the most relevant contextual factors (age, r...

In this article we investigated whether academic departments do experience a trade-off among different research outputs. More specifically, we define four types of academic research outputs: quantity (publications); quality (citation indexes); research funds obtained through research grants; and applied research funds obtained through external orde...

This paper investigates the efficiency of university departments in science, technology and medicine in an Italian Region (Lombardy). The aim of the paper is twofold: (i) to analyse the changes in productivity in recent years (from 2004 and 2007); and (ii) to detect factors that are potentially affecting efficiency. The research benefited from a ne...

The phenomenon of entrepreneurial universities has received considerable attention over the last decades. An entrepreneurial orientation by academia might put regions and nations in an advantageous position in emerging knowledge-intensive fields of economic activity. At the same time, such entrepreneurial orientation requires reconciliation with th...