Entrepreneurial universities: A bibliometric analysis within the business and management domains

Abstract This study presents a bibliometric analysis of scientific publications investigating entrepreneurial universities in the business and management fields. The authors collected 511 documents from the Web of Science and analysed them using Bibliometrix, an RStudio package for performance analysis and science mapping. The study aims to provide an overview of the evolution of research about this topic and describe the structures (i.e., conceptual, social, and intellectual) characterising it. It discusses the results to identify the main areas addressed so far and highlight gaps in the literature, offering avenues for possible future research. The results show that publications on entrep…

Innovazione e sostenibilità nei nuovi modelli di business del settore vitivinicolo. Analisi del caso Fontanafredda

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Intellectual capital and business model: a systematic literature review to explore their linkages

PurposeIn the last decades, business and management scholars have given great attention to intellectual capital (IC), which could seem a mature topic, having arrived at its third wave of studies. However, its intersections with the business model (BM) remain an under-investigated topic, and the authors wanted to investigate two research questions (RQs): how the literature addressing IC and BM has evolved so far in the business and management domains? What are possible future research trends of business and management studies regarding IC and BM?Design/methodology/approachThis study answers these questions through a systematic literature review (SLR) of 74 peer-reviewed articles in the area …

Circular Business Models and Their Systemic Implications: The Too Good To Go Case Study

The role of system dynamics to unveil the complexity of academic missions. An integrated approach for entrepreneurial universities’ performance evaluation and management.

The third mission concept implies that universities are expected to perform several diversified activities besides teaching (first mission) and scientific research (second mission). Third mission efforts may include activities such as knowledge dissemination, technological innovation, social innovation, advisory services, or entrepreneurship. Through third mission activities, universities engage in sustainable, inclusive development and/or territorial competitiveness by interacting with a wide range of subjects far beyond their students and reference scientific communities. The third mission’s activities vary a lot according to the specific characteristics of each university, the territory …

Beyond the “ivory tower”. Comparing academic and non-academic knowledge on social entrepreneurship

The increasing relevance of societal challenges has recently brought social entrepreneurship to the fore due to its capacity to leverage entrepreneurial processes to achieve social value while ensuring profits. In this study, we apply an experimental research method to analyse the concept of social entrepreneurship comprehensively. More specifically, we develop bibliometric analysis and web crawling techniques to gather information related to social entrepreneurship from Scopus and Wikipedia. We conduct a comparative network analysis of social entrepreneurship’s conceptual structure at academic and non-academic levels. This analysis has been performed considering scientific articles’ keywor…

Direct Compensation and Risk Management: A Key Study from the Insurance Sector

This paper examines the business model of an Italian company (TIS) that manage the claims for non-life insurance companies with innovative solutions. When a policy-holder make a claim for a loss or damage, the insurer may decide either to repair, rebuild or replace the property or to offer a cash settlement. To provide these services, many insurance companies have started developing strategic relationships directly with building firms, repairers, specialist suppliers and project managers, in order to find reliable contractors that will repair or replace the policy holder’s property quickly, with high quality and at a low cost. Opposite to other EU Countries, in Italy many insurance companie…

Innovating business processes in public administrations: towards a systemic approach

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to study the credit collection process in public administrations in order to develop a conceptual model which goes beyond the traditional logic of linearity, adopting system thinking approaches.Design/methodology/approachThis study analyses the case of an Italian local government-owned enterprise. Data collection through semi-structured interviews and document analysis has enabled the development of propositions, the identification of systemic variables, and the development of an explanatory modeling process based on the system dynamics approach.FindingsThis paper shows that public administrations can effectively involve external actors, especially citize…

Pouring new wine into old bottles: A dynamic perspective of the interplay among environmental dynamism, capabilities development, and performance

In order to face increased environmental dynamism (ED), firms are increasingly called on to leverage deliberate learning processes that make dynamic capabilities emerge in a path-dependent way from the conversion of tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge. Moreover, to mitigate the effect that ED can play in eroding a firm's capabilities and subsequently its performance, managers need to effectively align short- and long-term strategies, which in the literature have been addressed as ‘capability traps’. Although these two processes are strictly interrelated, to date they have been treated in quite an isolated way and usually through the development of linear approaches. To fill this gap, leve…

Unpacking Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) performances through the institutional logics lens

In the current knowledge-based economy, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are called to play different interconnected roles related to triple university missions. Alongside the two traditional missions of teaching and research, HEIs have experienced the emergence of the so-called “third mission”, which sees HEIs as knowledge-based agents part of ecosystems of public institutions, companies and citizens oriented to coknowledge creation. Finding a balance between the traditional missions and the third mission can be a serious challenge. For this reason, HEIs need to revise their objectives, strategies and performance indicator systems to plan, monitor and assess their social, cultural, and…

How can organisations and business models lead to a more sustainable society? A framework from a systematic review of the industry 4.0

The concept of Industry 4.0 has been mainly addressed by the current literature from a technological perspective, overlooking the organisational and even ethical challenges related to this recent paradigm. In order to become &lsquo

Knowledge behaviors when the commons are at stake: Insights from the Covid-19 crisis

How do people’s beliefs on the likely system-level consequences of circulating a certain piece of knowledge influence those people’s knowledge behaviors? To address this question, we leverage the most recent developments of the theory of the commons as learning systems. According to this theory, people are strongly responsive to perceived threats to the commons they (may) benefit from, and strive to learn and respond accordingly. Through this theoretical lens, we analyze thick qualitative data (January-April 2020) from the Covid-19 crisis, which resulted in unprecedented visibility of commons-related knowledge behaviors. The contribution of this inductive study is fourfold. First, we identi…

How Pioneering Managers Strive to Integrate Social Risk Management in Government Debt Collection

This study explores risk management issues in local government-owned enterprises in accordance to the third wave of governance, organization and management logics of Public Administration: the Public Value approach. However, the coexistence between the emerging Public Value approach and the more traditional and consolidated ones is often difficult, also because of the resistance of shareholders who may not consider the management of system-level risks as a priority mission for their company. For this reason, we have analysed the strengths and weaknesses of the Traditional Approach and the New Public Management approach in the public sector management. The case study presented reveals some i…