Systemic Approaches in Business and Marketing Group

The RIC involves (but is not limited to) 3 main research topics:

1- Systemic approaches to Sustainable Business and Marketing (coordinators: Gandolfo Dominici and Mauro Sciarelli)
There is a widespread need of change, that means to take advantage of the actual period of crisis to overcome its causes and improve. Sustainable Business Practices can be extraordinarily effective toward the required paradigm shift. This implies a new and wider concept of value, overcoming the limits of the classical economic and business theory based on financial capital and profit that are among the causes of the actual economic, social and environmental world crisis.
It is pivotal to shed the light on the systemic relationships linking the firm and its context towards new Business Management models and wider definition of corporate value, overcoming the limits of the classical economic theory based on financial capital and profit.
Market formation, Marketing and the stimulation of consumer demand have often been criticized as a major part of the problem of unsustainable economic growth. One of the biggest issue confronting the shift of the marketing paradigm is sustainability. To change the path of economic development we need new foundations of global Markets and a new concept of Marketing.
The sustainable marketing focuses on integrating sustainability principles into both marketing theory and the sensible decision making of managers. Sustainable Marketing offers a set of tools that can be used as part of the solution to the problem of unsustainable development. This involves a deeper analysis of socio-environmental priorities to complement the actual set of consumer research tools with social, ethical and environmental values in order to seek a new concept of marketing strategy development and Market value (co)creation.
This research topic aims to highlight the approaches and criticalities through which a systemic framework may assume a key role to reshape the foundations of the XXI century economy.

2- Place Marketing and Management: a Complex Systems Adaptive view (Coordinators: Gianpaolo Basile and Gandolfo Dominici)
To better understand the dynamics of actual place management and marketing, it is pivotal to consider the Territory as a system emerging by its capacity, its social actors and governance, and the analysis, creation and maintenance of relational dynamics both between territory components and its many and varied stakeholders. Indeed, these relational dynamics produce continuous and reciprocal adaptive behaviours among social actors which determine, influence and/or adapt the vision of the territory.
We aim to explore new approaches to place management and marketing studies, by reading the district or territory as a Complex Adaptive System able to achieve dynamic balance (steady state).
This methodological approach is the result of an interdisciplinary scientific work which attempts to bridge the gap in place management and marketing literature, by including contributions coming from other disciplines such as place planning, urban sociology and geography.
This research topic aims to make a scientific and operational contribution, based on systemic and complexity theory, proposing an analysis model that supports decision makers in identifying a method for choices in place management and marketing to model future scenarios.

3- Project Management and Project Based Organizations (coordinators: Primiano di Nauta,Rosa Lombardi)
While in contemporary society projects support the creation of considerable, economic and social value, still we miss out opportunities, as we have become accustomed to projects failing with considerable rates. Projects rarely fail due to technical challenges, but most cause to soft skills reasons and/or cause to a not adequate awareness of the social organizations about the processes. In these environments, Project Management (PM) can play an interesting role reducing the risk of project failure and addressing good practice to the development of tasks.
The nature and origins of PM have always intended to reduce complexity instead of following Ross Ashby’s law of requisite variety and looking for ways to enhance its inner complexity to cope with the complexity of today’s projects. However, in contemporary project management, projects are often considered as complex technical systems. This leads to the understanding that projects are technical endeavours and thus are managed as such. Project Managers have been educated in reducing complexity, and often focus on technical solutions, instead of a more holistic perception of a project in its specific context, including, for example, the different interests of project stakeholders.
We stress the perspective of projects as social systems, which leads to need for managing project structures as well as project contexts. We name this approach Project Management and Project Based Organizations.
The proposed research topic aims to involve and bring together scholars and professionals from the academy and the social organizations to explore the state of the art of project management and to create a roadmap for the improvement of the research and practice/application path for project management and project based organizations.

CHAIR:

Gandolfo Dominici

MEMBERS:

Mauro Sciarelli, Primiano Di Nauta, Gianpaolo Basile, Rosa Lombardi,