Livio Cricelli

Knowledge‐based inter‐organizational collaborations

Purpose – The evolution of organization, management and production processes is moving towards complexity. The ever growing competition presses firms to give intangible internal and external exclusive resources the utmost attention. The improvement of the performance, through the retrieval of resources, neither available internally nor achievable autonomously, can be reached by going beyond traditional firm boundaries and by enforcing an external relationship system: proliferation of networks, partnerships, and inter‐organizational collaborations should be, consequently, triggered. The purpose of this paper concerns the evaluation of knowledge impact on relationships among the members of an inter‐organizational collaboration. It also aims to suggest conditions for the improvement of knowledge management in different types of knowledge‐based inter‐organizational collaborations.Design/methodology/approach – Critical success factors of the networked organizations have been defined. Distinctive characteristic...

A methodology to assess value creation in communities of innovation

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology to assess the capacity of communities of innovation (CoI) to improve the value creation process. The methodology consists of a sequence of successive steps, which aim at identifying the characteristics, the influence, and the relationships between the intellectual capital (IC) elements, and finally evaluating their performance.Design/methodology/approach – The proposed methodology has been defined through the joined activity of academic researchers, experienced consultants, and community managers and is grounded on an interview‐based approach. The methodology has been implemented into the CoI of Finmeccanica, the Italian leading company in the industry of high technology for aerospace, defence and security.Findings – The methodology has been shown to be suitable in singling out the factual contribution of every IC element and its direct and indirect influence on the economic performance of the CoI.Originality/value – The implementation of the...

Open innovation actions and innovation performance

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify the recurrences in the empirical evidences that link open innovation (OI) actions and innovation performance in European countries. It provides managers with useful strategic suggestions, emphasizes the limitations of the state of the art, and recommends future directions of research. Design/methodology/approach – The authors systematically reviewed empirical articles linking OI actions and innovation performance in European countries, published on peer reviewed journals from January 2003 until May 2013. The authors organized the evidences according to a novel taxonomy grounded in the literature. Findings – The paper shows an increasing interest in the research of empirical evidence regarding OI and innovation performance. Nonetheless, evidence of the role played by outbound OI activities are extremely rare. The authors found that process innovations are more likely to benefit from coupled OI activities rather than inbound activities. Moreover, the effect...

A theoretical framework for assessing managing and indexing the intellectual capital

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretical framework which defines, analyses and assesses the intellectual capital (IC) value drivers (VDs) to increase the value creation of an organization. Design/methodology/approach – The proposed framework is composed by an arrangement of procedural steps. In the first step IC VDs are selected by reason of their relevance and of their occurrences in recent literature. Then, an assessment of the VDs is carried out on the basis of their strategic importance and of their inter-relationships with otherVDs. Finally, an index is constructed from the combination of the static and dynamic characteristics of the selected VDs. Findings – This integrated framework provides managers with the possibility of monitoring the response of IC performance to their strategic decisions and helps them to adjust and improve measures to reach the prefixed objectives. Managers’ perception is the fundamental input to the assessment of the contribution of the IC to the value...

A dynamic view of knowledge and information: a stock and flow based methodology

Traditional accounting systems focus on the evaluation on tangible assets, neglecting the value addition contributed to business performance by intangibles. This paper explores the intangible evaluation concept and suggests a stock and flow based analysis to assess a methodology that could highlight static and dynamic aspects and their mutual impact on business performance. A general sketch, clarifying the numerous cause-effect relations among intangible assets, is provided to support the management in decision making. The aim of this methodology coincides with the main target pursued by firms: to get a competitive advantage or to maintain the already acquired leadership.

Vertical Integration in International Telecommunication System

The process of liberalization and privatization is drastically altering the links among international telecommunications carriers. The model presented in this paper analyses the international telecommunications market illustrating the effects of vertical mergers, under symbiotic production conditions, when vertically integrated and unintegrated carriers coexist. The effect of competition is analysed both in the final market and in the intermediate one where carriers compete over tariffs to get an appropriate distribution of profits. In particular, the results show the relations between final market prices, intermediate tariffs and market dimensions and their implications on profits.

The assessment of the intellectual capital impact on the value creation process: a decision support framework for top management

This article proposes a framework designed to support the top management in the tactical and strategic planning of the investments on critical ICAs. The framework consists of a sequence of steps, which aim at assessing the organisational intellectual capital. The framework takes into consideration the impact of intellectual capital assets on the value creation process. The framework resorts to the analytic network process in order to synthesise the interdependences among intellectual capital assets and identify the individual impact of each intellectual capital asset. The implementation of the proposed framework provides managers with strategic considerations, which can be drawn from the results and compared through a synoptic analysis and through a cost/benefit analysis.

Intangible asset contribution to company performance: the “hierarchical assessment index”

Purpose – This paper aims to define a theoretical model that assesses and measures the intangible asset contribution to company performance. The model keeps in focus the most meaningful elements that reflect the success factors, crucial to company business strategy and value creation.Design/methodology/approach – The model adopts a hierarchical structure. The strategic intangible assets of the company have been divided into value drivers; a series of measurement indicators have been selected to describe the characteristics of each aspect of the intangible company performance. The measurements obtained from numerical indicators, which express the totality of the results achieved by the organizational strategies, are combined to create the hierarchical assessment index (HAI), by assessing quantitative and qualitative company features, through the analytic hierarchy process (AHP).Findings – The HAI identifies the sources of added value and competitive advantage in each business context; it traces the subordi...

ASSESSING THE OPEN INNOVATION TRENDS BY MEANS OF THE EUROSTAT COMMUNITY INNOVATION SURVEY

Many authors showed the benefits of open innovation (OI) to firms, consequently encouraging managers to adopt the OI paradigm to improve innovation performance. Nevertheless, whether firms have accepted such exhortations or not is almost empirically unexplored. The frequent claim that firms are increasingly adopting the OI paradigm is mostly anecdotal. This paper presents a large-scale analysis of firms’ OI adoption by means of four waves of the community innovation survey, including 275,697 questionnaires. The analysis focuses on the trends in the use of inbound (internal use of external knowledge) and coupled (collaboration with partners) OI approaches. The results confirm that the share of firms adopting the OI paradigm has increased, both in terms of inbound and coupled OI actions. Similarly, firms have intensified the use of the inbound OI mode, whereas they have not intensified the use of collaborations. However, the analyses of different measures of OI show that in most cases the positive trends have not been monotonic, nor steep as they are anecdotally considered to be.

An overall index of intellectual capital

Purpose – The aim of this article is to expound a holistic intellectual capital index. Moreover, the paper presents its implementation within a real estate organization. Design/methodology/approach – The index is calculated on the basis of 14 structured interviews synthesized through the analytic hierarchy process, min–max normalizations and weighted sums. Findings – The authors estimate a holistic intellectual capital index and show that an analysis of its components may allow identifying discordances within the organization about the contributions of its value drivers. Research limitations/implications – The proposed index may be used in a medium-/long-term research to measure the evolution in the organizational intellectual capital and its relation with the top management’s initiatives and the competitive environment changes. Practical implications – The proposed methodology may integrate the reports prepared for shareholders and stakeholders and provide the top management, with an in-depth understandi...