Best research at SDA Bocconi is awarded
Andrea Dossi, Lorenzo Patelli and James Hayton for the best management papers, Stefano Gatti, Gianmario Verona, Giada Di Stefano and Francesco Perrini for the case studies of the year. These are the professors SDA Bocconi honored last evening during the Day of Research by the SDA Bocconi Research Division, led by Giuseppe Soda.
Recipients receiving awards tied in both categories, two for best management paper and three for case study of the year, so that at total of five works were recognized.
James Hayton was honored for the article Culture of Family Commitment and Strategic Flexibility: The moderating effect of stewardship, published by the journal Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. Thanks to a database of information on 248 family businesses, the British scholar in Organization at SDA Bocconi, along with co-authors Shaker Zahra, Donald Neubaum, Clay Dibrell and Justin Craig, demonstrated that family businesses are particularly reactive to changes in their competitive environments and that this flexibility is positively influenced by the involvement of family ownership in the business and by a stewardship-oriented culture (the stewardship theory counters the agency theory and maintains that the alignment between the company's objectives and managers' objectives is possible not only on the basis of incentives and controls, but also through manager empowerment, which would be guided by more than just objectives of maximizing income).
Andrea Dossi, along with co-author Lorenzo Patelli, published the paper The Decision-Influencing Use of Performance Measurement Systems in Relationships Between Headquarters and Subsidiaries in the journal Management Accounting Research. Looking at 100 multinational businesses, the work analyzed the influence of performance control systems designed by headquarters on the decisional processes of subsidiaries. The researchers discovered that subsidiaries often develop alternative systems and that this behavior creates conflicts with headquarters. The evaluation system designed by headquarters becomes more effective in influencing the subsidiary's decisions the more the subsidiary participates in the design, the more headquarters has a culture that tolerates uncertainty, the bigger the subsidiary is and the more it feels global pressure in their competitive environment.
The case study written by Stefano Gatti with Veronica Bonetti, Quezon Power Ltd Co Project Finance: The impact of risk management on the cost of funding faces the problem of analyzing risk in a complex financial operation like the one that led to carrying out the first project finance case study in 1994 on an energy plant in the Philippines. Counter-party risk is among the themes discussed in the case study.
In the case study Protecting Innovation in Low-IPR Regimes: The case of fine fashion Giada Di Stefano and Gianmario Verona describe the instable balance in which the fashion industry moves, which has always succeeded in characterizing itself with a high rate of innovation, notwithstanding the sparse formal protection of intellectual property. This balance is continuously put at risk by new competitive dynamics, the latest being the overbearing affirmation of brand name product outlets, which add confusion to the framework by putting out of season non-counterfeit products in circulation.
Francesco Perrini and Angelo Russo are the authors of Illycaffè: Value Creation through Responsible Supplier Relationships, the third case study honored.