Francesco Cappa was awarded the second best doctoral thesis prize during WOA Annual Conference, held in Palermo on 7th-8th February 2019. Francesco’s doctoral thesis titled “Crowd Science: Methods to Motivate Contributors and Firms’ Benefits” was completed under the supervision of Luca Giustiniano and Raffaele Oriani.

 

CLIO is pleased to host professor Julie Fabbri (profile, fabbri@em-lyon.com) from Emlyon Business School, OCE Research Center, for the seminar titled “From Liminality to Liminalization: A Socio-historic Exploration of Work Practices Through Fiction” . The seminar will be held on March 15th, 2019, 2:00PM-3.30PM, at LUISS, Viale Romania Campus, Room 202.

Abstract:  

Liminality is at the heart of numerous research about organizations and organizing. We focus here on the context of “new” work practices. By means of two TV series, Ally McBeal and Silicon Valley, two different periods and two sets of practices are captured and systematically compared. We focus the comparison on the liminalization process, how liminality emerge in work practices spatially, temporally and emotionally. Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze are used as two distinct but interrelated perspectives to describe this process. Our work results in different categories which could help to condense and describe further ongoing ethnographical work about new work practices and their relationships with emotions and society.

Keywords:

Liminality; Liminalization; New work practices; Fiction; History; Merleau-Ponty; Deleuze.

On January 18th, 2019 LUISS will host the first LUISS and Tilburg TiSEM Joint Workshop 2019. The workshop builds on earlier collaboration between both institutes led by LUISS Rector Andrea Prencipe and has been organized by Richard Tee (LUISS) and Niels Noorderhaven (Tilburg).

LUISS Guido Carli University and the School of Economics & Management (TiSEM) of Tilburg University intend to increase their collaboration in research, building on the existing excellent collaboration in education.

The workshop is set up to forge links between both institutes, with the aim to explore the possibility of collaborating in conducting research and in seeking international research grants. It will bring together a group of researchers from LUISS and TiSEM for a day of presentations and roundtables, starting with two groups consisting of economists and management scholars.

CLIO will be well represented by Richard Tee, as organizer, and by Luigi Marengo, Luca Giustiniano and Paolo Spagnoletti as presenting scholars.

Clio’s director Luca Giustiniano and Miguel Cunha, Nova School of Business and Economics, presented the paper titled “It’s Just a Hobby! (Isn’t It?): A Case of Digital Entrepreneurship and its Paradoxes“, co-authored with Arménio Rego, ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon, and Stewart Clegg, University of Technology – Sydney, at Strategic Management Society (SMS) Special Conference in Hyderabad (15-18 December 2018).

The paper has been awarded the conference prize “That’s Promising!”, a prize for early-stage research that showed the greatest potential for future impact in the field of strategic management.

Here’s the abstract of the paper:

How do people turn a hobby into a business? Since sometimes business opportunities are discovered in the context of play this is an important yet under-researched question. In this paper we present the case of National Racers 3D, a business venture spawned from a hobby. Private enthusiasms and public entrepreneurship are paradoxically potentially each other’s friend and foe. The sentiment of the former and the realism of the latter do not necessarily gel. The process of turning a hobby into a business depends on the capacity to explore synergies between two opposite disciplines, those of play and work, in a way that turns their inherent tensions into a source of vitality rather than a dichotomy to be solved by emphasizing one of the disciplines.

Friday 12th October 2018, as part of the 15th Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS itAIS 2018, during the presentation of the activities of the SIGs within the annual assembly, Tommaso Federici of CLIO presented content and progress of the MASTIS project which LUISS is involved in.
MASTIS is a European project originating within the ERCIS network, which LUISS is proudly part of. MASTIS is funded by the Erasmus + Program and aims at defining a modern study program in Information Systems for university courses at different levels.

Presentazione progetto MASTIS – itAIS 2018

 

Venerdì 12 ottobre 2018 nell’ambito della 15° Conferenza del Chapter Italiano di AIS itAIS 2018, nello spazio riservato alle attività dei SIG all’interno dell’assemblea annuale, Tommaso Federici del CLIO ha presentato i contenuti e lo stato di avanzamento del progetto MASTIS al quale partecipa la LUISS.
MASTIS è un progetto europeo originato all’interno della rete ERCIS della quale fa parte la LUISS, che è finanziato dal Programma Erasmus+ ed è destinato a definire un programma aggiornato di studi in Information Systems nei diversi livelli di corsi universitari

 

 

LUISS University is hiring a post-doc to work on Cybersecurity Governance within an interdisciplinary research group at the CLIO center (http://clio.luiss.it). The focus of the position is on publications on high-ranked IS journals.

Application closing date: 28 Sept 2018

Further details:
http://impresaemanagement.luiss.it/en/node/4862

The Department of Business and Management of LUISS University invites outstanding scholars to express their interests for one full-time tenured professorship (Full or Associate Professor) in Business Transformation and Data Driven Innovation sponsored by CISCO.
Application closing date: 12 Oct 2018

Further details:
http://www.luiss.edu/co-sponsored-expression-interest/call-Business-transformation-data-driven-innovation

Luca Giustiniano and Kerem Gurses present their research outputs at the LAEMOS 2018 conference on “Organizing for Resilience” https://www.laemos2018.com/urban.

Project partners from 17 Universities out of 10 different European countries are sharing teaching practices for experiential learning. The main objective of MASTIS is to align and possibly update programs and teaching methods in a group of Universities of Ukraine and Montenegro, and as a secondary outcome, it supports a fruitful exchange of experiences on methods, tools, arguments among universities of several western and eastern European countries. Here is a summary of the outcomes of the project meeting held in Bled (Slovenia) from September 26^th to 29^th 2017.

Prof. Škraba from Maribor University (SLO) made an interesting presentation, during which he highlighted the importance of introducing to the IS students the logic of feedback loop based on hydraulic laws. According to him, this may be a very promising adoption for control and reaction systems in Internet of Things applications. He made also a practical demonstration involving all meeting’s attendants on how to build a simple IoT solution, starting from simple and cheap hardware components to connect and mount – like a Linux Mini pc, an Arduino controller, some resistors, an actuator -, and reusing and adapting a very short code written in Javascript. The just-built system perfectly worked and was immediately controllable from all attendants, from either their pc or their smartphone.

What is interesting is that this kind of experience is provided in Maribor University at the faculty of Organizational Studies to students of Organization and Management courses, who are thought to gain important knowledge by learning the system dynamics, in terms of actions and reactions, laws of feedback and stabilization, etc. This simple practical application may be a source of knowledge on systems like inventory management and even in social systems. The aim is that of demonstrating through a practical – then much more effective – experience how all systems are sensible to internal and external impulses, and how difficult tuning the action to reach and stabilize the desired situation is.

Prof. Gregor Lenart from Maribor University made an interesting presentation on “Teaching by design thinking”, a method they use since 3 years. They use this human-centered method for problem solving by stimulating students to face complex problem situations in social contexts. He described in detail how they use this method during classes to make students familiar with problems in the real world where IS are a component of the context, but most issues come from the social side. They apply this method in undergraduate courses like “Enterprise Architecture (BPM)”, “Business Information Systems”, “Electronic commerce/Digital business”, where the focus is on analysis of problems and contexts and on design of solutions at a high level.

SAP, within its University Alliance Curriculum, provides various tools to support the use of design thinking method during classes, where students are organized in work-teams. The equipment needed is fully analogical, and involves paper, scissors, stickers, color markers. Prof. Lenart reported the lesson learnt through this experience: 1) appointing students to real business companies is often challenging; 2) this is not a one-day workshop: it takes 2/3 months; and 3) students need steering from faculty and business side. On the other side, the method reveals very effective in facing students with broad variety of real world problems, and students become better equipped for practice.

Prof. Marko Urh and Prof. Eva Jereb, still from Maribor University, made a presentation on gamification in education, stressing the big issue of involving and motivating students during classes (where they usually are not), just like videogame producers succeed to do. They highlighted the components of gamification (use of videogame logic and solutions in different fields), illustrating what are important and reusable in education (awards, progress in status, …). It should be found a balance between challenge level and skill level to let the student be in the right flow channel, and to avoid either frustration or boredom, which appear when challenge overcomes, or vice versa. They also presented a real case study on the entire process of adopting gamification with students, who had to face a real world problem (how to sell a new car model, and how to motivate dealers for selling it).

Esistono ambiti di business in cui si ha l’illusione che servizi, prodotti e modi di realizzarli non cambino mai. Nel settore energetico, dove i consumi sono misurati dai “contatori”, si può pertanto soffrire dell’illusione – fuorviante – che questi
continuino a girare a prescindere dalle scelte aziendali. Quella dei “contatori che girano, e continuano a girare” è una delle
immagini ricorrenti nell’analisi che Andrea Prencipe e Luca Giustiniano, entrambi professori di Organizzazione Aziendale alla
LUISS, hanno effettuato rispetto alla storia recente di ACEA.
L’azienda, multi-utility italiana con oltre cento anni di storia, rappresenta una delle organizzazioni più longeve nel
panorama energetico nazionale. L’immagine ricorrente, quasi un mantra per molti, dei contatori che girano stride tuttavia con il recente passato dell’azienda, scandito da trasformazioni radicali che hanno visto la municipalizzata romana diventare multi-utility, quotarsi in borsa, e intraprendere a fine 2014 ACEA 2.0, il coraggioso progetto di innovazione, organizzativa oltre che tecnologica. ACEA 2.0 esprime infatti una vera e propria svolta strategica, pensata per e dimostratasi in grado di migliorare significativamente le
performance operative ed economiche; il progetto, inoltre, ha rimodellato le formule di condivisione del valore generato verso tutti gli stakeholder (clienti, azionisti, dipendenti, ambiente, fornitori) attraverso il ripensamento del ruolo dell’azienda e della propria responsabilità nel tessuto sociale ed economico di riferimento.
Nello specifico ACEA 2.0, progettato e realizzato anche grazie al leader di tecnologie informatiche SAP, ha portato ACEA a digitalizzare i processi di gestione di infrastrutture e reti (ridefinendone il modello operativo), a rileggere radicalmente le logiche di gestione della forza lavoro (Work Force Management) e a ripensare la customer experience, disegnando i processi in ottica end-to-end e ridefinendo le competenze tecniche e manageriali necessarie.
Tale rivoluzione nel modello operativo ha richiesto un imponente sforzo di cambiamento organizzativo, che ha incoraggiato il management ad ingaggiare uno dei guru mondiali sul tema: John Kotter, professore emerito della Harvard Business School. Per spiegare l’urgenza del cambiamento anche in contesti in cui sembra non essercene alcuna esigenza, in uno dei suoi libri Kotter illustra la storia di una comunità di pinguini che vive su un iceberg che si sta sciogliendo molto lentamente, senza che tuttavia il pericolo diperdere la propria casa sia percepito dai più. La stessa immagine è presto attecchita in ACEA, laddove invece dell’iceberg a “sciogliersi” erano la staticità di un contesto competitivo in larga parte protetto da monopolio e l’illusione che l’utente dei servizi – in quanto vincolato – non stesse maturando esigenze e aspettative sempre più sofisticate.
La riflessione di Prencipe e Giustiniano su ACEA 2.0 approfondisce pertanto il tema della gestione del cambiamento organizzativo e di come questo sia stato preparato, progettato e implementato negli ultimi anni.
Oltre ad una consiste nte ed accurata raccolta documentale, lo studio è stato realizzato grazie ad interviste in profondità con rappresentanti dell’organizzazione operanti a tutti i livelli organizzativi, nonché con la partecipazione diretta ad eventi interni. Il libro racconta di come l’impegno di tanti, diventati consapevoli di come il mondo stesse cambiando nell’intero settore energetico, abbiano trovato il coraggio di abbracciarela sfida di cavalcare l’onda della digitalizzazione e di tutto ciò che questa riuscisse ad esprimere in termini di competitività aziendale. Una storia di coraggio, dimostrato dai vertici aziendali, e diffusosi poi in tutta
l’organizzazione.