Current Research
DOC-TRACK: STEM Doctoral Graduates and Inventive Activities in Four European Countries (01/12/2024-31/12/2025): The initiative is extending its scope to Italy with the aim of developing a comprehensive longitudinal database of Italian PhDs in STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics and Medicine). Given Italy's notable contributions to European patent applications and scientific research this expansion presents an opportunity to study the career trajectories of Italian PhD holders. The project will utilize public repositories of doctoral theses integrating these with publication and patent records through the established DOC-TRACK methodology. This approach will help quantify the extent to which Italian STEM graduates’ transition into inventors or contribute to inventions through their academic work aligning with similar analyses conducted in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. The project includes several key components. The first work package focuses on linking Italian Electronic Doctoral Theses (EDT) records with the PATSTAT database to identify patents associated with STEM graduates and their supervisors. This involves using classification algorithms to match graduates with scientific publications and patents and inco porating measures of the 'distance' of publications from patent literature. The second work package aims to integrate the Italian dataset with the broader DOC-TRACK project deliverables ensuring a unified dataset accessible for public research. The final work package involves producing a detailed report that includes a descriptive analysis of the DOC-TRACK database with a focus on data sources methodology gender bias in patenting and patenting propensity by nationality.
PI: Stefano Breschi
Project funded by the European Patent Office (EPO)
LIFTEU: Lobbying and Inequality: Firm Strategy in the EU (01/05/24-30/04/26): The prevalence of lobbying in the EU has become a cause for concern. The 50 most active lobbying firms spent spent EUR 90 million in 2015, and by 2022 the figure will be EUR 120 million. This raises questions about the ethical considerations of the lobbying activities of large companies and how their competitors can keep up. LIFTEU will investigate the imbalance in access and benefits of lobbying and its impact on inequality. We will build a database to track lobbying activity in the EU and examine how it affects market power, industry, industry concentration, firm size, access to policymakers and business performance. In Italy, the case is particularly worrying: there is no register, yet Italian companies engage in a considerable lobbying activity. With LIFTEU we will understand the extent to which corporate lobbying contributes to the spread of inequality.
PI: Nilanjana Dutt
Project funded by the Cariplo Foundation
Three Essays on Multiple Evaluations (01/01/2024-31/12/2025): The initiative focuses on the concept of third-party intermediation particularly the role of professional evaluators in guiding consumer choices and shaping market dynamics. It explores how intermediaries create market hierarchies by conferring status to certain producers influencing their access to resources and competitive advantage. This status can lead to higher prices lower costs and other benefits for favored firms. Your research examines various aspects of this phenomenon including the evolution of intermediation in modern markets the diverse forms of intermediaries and the implications of multiple evaluations within the same market. Overall the initiative sheds light on the pivotal role of intermediaries in shaping markets and influencing the success of producers.
PI: Giada Di Stefano
Project funded by the Strategic Management Society
Women in science and technology: career impediments and the child penalty (01/09/24-31/10/27): The overall project is studying the following question: Women face difficult trade-offs in juggling the demands of working life and family life. The Nordic countries have responded to this through the introduction of ‘family-friendly’ policies whereby women could stay on paid parental leave. These policies have contributed to high labor force participation rates for women and lower so-called “child penalties” in earnings. There remain however potential adverse consequences of parental leave in high-skilled jobs that build upon the continuous accumulation of knowledge: workers suffer from a “burden of knowledge” in keeping up with an ever-expanding knowledge frontier in their field and time away from the job can lead to quick depreciation of knowledge. Thus, parental leave may favor women’s participation in the labor market generally but jobs characterized by rapid knowledge accumulation may suffer. The project presents a proposal for comparative research across the Nordic countries with an international and gender-diversified team of established researchers.
PI: Myriam Mariani
Project funded by the Copenhagen Business School
SAIM: A Scientific Approach to Innovation Management (01/09/21-31/08/26): Innovation depends on the ability to make decisions under uncertainty. However, evidence suggests that managers and entrepreneurs do not have good methods to make these decisions that often depend on gut feelings and biases. This is a serious problem that explains in part the decline in research productivity or the high rates of entrepreneurial failure. At the aggregate level it translates into poor rates of economic growth and low returns from the massive public and private resources invested worldwide in entrepreneurship. This project argues that managers and entrepreneurs can improve their ability to make these decisions by adopting a scientific approach based on the formulation of models tested with data such as scientists do. It proposes to conduct a very large-scale RCT in five international sites to provide solid evidence and claim that this approach can be employed extensively to generate aggregate implications. The scale of this RCT can produce three important novelties: 1) provide external validity by testing the approach in different contexts from high-tech to bottom-of-the-pyramid entrepreneurs; 2) compare it to other approaches in innovation management and entrepreneurship; 3) estimate its impact using measures of the adoption of the scientific approach and test the mechanisms with which it affects performance. The results of this RCT are ground-breaking because they can: (i) change the way we think innovation management and entrepreneurship; (ii) encourage the practical application of many economic and managerial theories ignored by managers or entrepreneurs in spite of their practical prescriptions; (iii) help to rethink the curricula of business schools by making a scientific approach to management more prominent and by revamping the application of economic and managerial theories; (iv) improve the mentorship of the many public and private initiatives that support entrepreneurship worldwide.
PI: Alfonso Gambardella
Project funded by the European Union (European Research Council – ERC – Program)
The geography of return migration in Italy: the role of STEM workers and PhD students (30/11/23-29/11/25): the project will study the diaspora networks of return migration of Italian high skill workers. Pavia University is the leader of the project, and Bocconi is a partner.
PI: Stefano Breschi
Project funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (PRIN: Progetti di ricerca di rilevante interese nazionale – Bando 2022)
Knowledge flows across the borders for the green digital transition (30/11/23-29/11/25): The green digital transformations have the potential of making countries more resilient and sustainable while at the same time opening new business opportunities for companies. Nevertheless, there is still not enough overlap in the policy arena of environmental sustainability and digitalization. This is the case of the Italian Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP) in which the green and digital transitions are addressed in two separate missions. The urgency of better understanding the interactions between the green and digital transitions is clearly indicated at the level of European Commission in the 2022 Strategic Foresight Report. According to the Commission digital technologies provide functions that can catalyze the green transition (e.g. monitoring and tracking can propel the circular economy). But the development of the full potential of the green and digital transitions will depend on the ability to develop new knowledge and technologies which combine both elements. To foster these research and innovation efforts it is essential to develop an innovation and technological ecosystem promoting transdisciplinary research and combining digital and green knowledge that enable transformational change. Against this backdrop the project investigates how the knowledge base of green digital technologies develops both at the macro level of countries and at the micro level of firms and sectors with a focus on the energy and transport industries. The main objective is to understand which countries and firms can leverage external knowledge sources to develop green digital innovations. To address this research aim we focus on two key knowledge channels for combining different competencies: foreign direct investments and international collaborations in co-patenting involving firms and universities and research institutions.
PI: Stefano Breschi
Project funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (PRIN: Progetti di ricerca di rilevante interese nazionale – Bando 2022 PNRR)
Managing sustainability tensions for change (28/09/23-27/09/25): Despite the mounting pressure for organizations to reduce their negative social and environmental (S&E) footprint results are still disappointing. Important changes in the processes and products are needed to effectively reach S&E results together with economic sustainability. However, as profit-seeking and S&E aspects involve desirable yet conflicting objectives multiple tensions emerge when aiming to address both. Confronted with such tensions some firms change and find successful ways to integrate S&E concerns in their activities while others still perpetuate wrongdoing giving priority to the profit-seeking goals. We aim to investigate “What factors make organizations effectively address the tensions between profit-seeking and S&E goals? And what factors prevent them to do so We aim at understanding how their different W&A allow different actors to deal with tensions in an array of ways along the value chain. Overall the project aims at producing relevant and actionable knowledge. Accordingly, an important attention will be devoted to effectively translating the academic knowledge developed within the project to a wider audience and in particular to: i) regional/national/EU policy makers; ii) managers activists and consultants; iii) knowledge and media intermediaries iv) students.
PI: Anne Jacqueminet
Project funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (PRIN: Progetti di ricerca di rilevante interese nazionale – Bando 2022)