Business Studies and Researches

The highly complex environmental conditions and hyper-competitivity of the markets have created the need to review government action, in the sense that the latter has to be more careful in evaluating the risks which influence the integrity of the relational capital of the organization. In this context, there is a need to review the traditional DSS, with the intention of making them more appropriate for the global hyper-competitivity which, unavoidably, influences the competitive dynamics of the organization. * The work derives from a joined engagement; nevertheless Marco Pellicano is responsible for the formulation of the paragraphs 2, 5; Mirko Perano for the paragraphs 3 and Salvatore Esposito De Falco for the paragraphs 4. due to the fact that the evolutional dynamic has, basically, relational contents and nature. These involve, in a more or less collaborative way, a plurality of subjects and interlocutors, who are either internal or external to the system. Therefore, the GBO appears to be more of a facilitator rather than a driver. It is a facilitator of relational dynamics, which tries to lead and guide using only communicative levers, therefore activating a continuous dialogue and constructive confront with the other actors of the dynamics. If only this use turns out to be efficient, the good functioning of the relational dynamic exalts the entire systemic self-regulation ability .

The paper aims at giving an answer to the requirements of ICT spinoffs throughout their lifecycle. The starting assumption has been that the ICT spin-off are small ICT companies. The awareness that small ICT companies don't usually follow a linear process of development leads us to think of a model that allows an “injected” support at each phase of the spin-off lifecycle,
by training resources that meet the requirements of the particular company’s circumstances. The evolutionary phases of the spin-off companies lifecycle had been reread in a dynamic way, to get to the idea of a model to support them and allows an adequate outliving. The model envisages a support both for resources
and for finances. The adopted approach recycles the job carried out by the third generation business incubators and it introduces the “injectors”, service providers and facilities to raise resources that might be later employed by the spin-off itself.

This paper focuses on a decision system for family – run businesses. The aim is to capture the leadership instinct and experience in order to guarantee a human resource management instrument for the next entrepreneurial generations. The design of a decision system considers the need of assembling work teams for business orders via the following steps. First, a KSA (Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes) model is analysed for the description of workers and their abilities for each work order. Then, an Apriori algorithm studies the logic by which the leadership makes the work teams. Finally, the information fusion, due to both KSA and Apriori algorithm, allows the reconstruction of leadership decisions with a high accuracy degree. A real case of family – run business is useful to test the approach, showing that the entrepreneurial success is not always due to the best work teams.

This work focuses on a University-based Spin Off (USO) with consequent review of the traditional university mission on the need/opportunity to give more to Knowledge. Europe, Italian government and other institutions fund spinoffs through announcements, in which the evaluation method for merits still shows limitations, due to a light presence of Italian excellence. The work, starting from the Service Science Management Engineering and Design (SSMD+D), proposes a review of the literature about demographic factors in the founding team, but more generally of human capital in spin-offs in order to create value. According to Visintin and Pittino (see [23]), the paper aims to design a kernel of a fuzzy logic based DSS to evaluate ex-ante the likely success of the founding team of a USO. Academic spin – offs of the University of Salerno are useful to test the DSS.

This paper focuses on a possible improvement of knowledge-based decision support systems for human resource management within Public Administrations, using a co-creation of value’s mechanism, according to the Service-Dominant Logic (SDL) paradigm. In particular, it applies ontology-driven data entry procedures to trigger the cooperation between the Public Administration itself and its employees. Advantages in such sense are evident: constraining the data entry process by means of the term definition ontology improves the quality of gathered data, thus reducing potential mismatching problems and allowing a suitable skill gap analysis among real and ideal workers competence profiles. The procedure foresees the following steps: analyzing organograms and job descriptions; modelling Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes (KSA) for job descriptions; transforming KSAs of job descriptions into a standard-based model with integrations of other characteristics; extracting information from Curricula Vitae according to the selected model; comparing profiles and roles played by the employees.
The 'a priori' ontology-driven approach adequately supports the operations that involve both the Public Administration and employees, as for the data storage of job descriptions and curricula vitae. The comparison step is useful to understand if employees perform roles that are coherent with their own professional profiles.
The proposed approach has been experimented on a small test case and the results show that its objective evaluation represents an improvement for a decision support system for the re-organization of Italian Public Administrations where, unfortunately often, people are engaged in activities that are not so close to their competences.
Keywords: Decision support systems, service quality, SDL, co-creation of value, ontology-driven data entry, skill gap analysis.

The paper examines the relationship between sustainable tourism governance and Cittaslow certification. As an organised network of small cities, Cittaslow is attempting to focus plans around the primary assets of locality-based identity, by choosing to preserve the unique characteristics of each urban area. Through a quantitative analysis, based on International Cittaslow certified cities, the paper aims to examine the effects of Cittaslow certification on local government for the implementation of more sustainable tourism governance. Findings reveal that interest in being certified acts as a stimulus to the definition and the implementation of more sustainable development, allowing a destination to become part of an international network of cities. The results highlight the need to fully exploit the various opportunities in order to be certified,
moving primarily from the implementation of policy initiatives coherent not only with the many requirements laid down by Cittaslow, but which have a positive impact on areas considered more strategic for small town development, while avoiding the waste of effort and scarce resources on other less focused projects.

This paper focuses on a possible improvement of knowledge-based decision support systems for human resource management within Public Administrations, using a co-creation of value's mechanism, according to the Service-Dominant Logic (SDL) paradigm. In particular, it applies ontology-driven data entry procedures to trigger the cooperation between the Public Administration itself and its employees. Advantages in such sense are evident: constraining the data entry process by means of the term definition ontology improves the quality of gathered data, thus reducing potential mismatching problems and allowing a suitable skill gap analysis among real and ideal workers competence profiles. The procedure foresees the following steps: analyzing organograms and job descriptions; modelling Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes (KSA) for job descriptions; transforming KSAs of job descriptions into a standard-based model with integrations of other characteristics; extracting information from Curricula Vitae according to the selected model; comparing profiles and roles played by the employees. The 'a priori' ontology-driven approach adequately supports the operations that involve both the Public Administration and employees, as for the data storage of job descriptions and curricula vitae. The comparison step is useful to understand if employees perform roles that are coherent with their own professional profiles. The proposed approach has been experimented on a small test case and the results show that its objective evaluation represents an improvement for a decision support system for the reorganization of Italian Public Administrations where, unfortunately often, people are engaged in activities that are not so close to their competences.

Open Innovation and Services Science are two distinct paradigms that share some principles 0. While some attempts to investigate open innovation according to a service science perspective exist, there is currently a gap with regards to the analysis of intermediaries of open innovation according to a service science perspective and even more regarding to recent trends about smart service system. This paper aims to fill this gap and, to this purpose, we present two interesting and original results. After an analysis of the key features of Open Innovation Intermediaries, we discuss a characterization of these intermediaries as service systems by mapping their features on the ten fundamental concepts of a service system. Next we propose a new model that goes in the direction of the convergence between service and cognitive system (smart service system) and aims at overcoming some traditional issues of the intermediaries. The new model foresees the distribution of Open Innovation Intermediaries features, enhanced with a set of cognitive assistants to the stakeholders within open innovation processes, and proposes the adoption of responsible innovation frameworks as a base to add right and responsibilities to cognitive assistants.

This study is focused on the role, importance and practice of Business Continuity Management (BCM) in relation with Strategic Planning (SP) and Cultural Context (CC) by offering a holistic framework for short-term and long-term strategic business analysis. The purpose is to create a unique structured plan for understanding the organizational failure willingness and to create a culture of readiness, feedback and risk management. The methodology used is quantitative with questionnaire for collection data. The study sample includes 50 organizations from four different sectors: banking, services, industrial and insurance in Shkoder (Albania). The research findings show a positive correlation between SP and BCM (0.54{\%}), with a significant positive impact of SP on BCM. A positive correlation is founded between SP and CC (0.588{\%}). The study suggests that placing the BCM in the Corporate Culture may be entitled as another manner of integrating BCM and SP in one structure. Between culture and strategy there is a huge number of characteristics and similarities they have in common with each other.

Objectives. In general, the smart approach allows strengthening the ability to solve problems (e.g. those related to sustainability) through an efficacious use of knowledge. Smart management of tourism rests on an information-driven logic, becoming critical the capacity of organizations to capturing data from diverse sources and makes them
available to managers. It is recognized that smart tourism destinations are built around a number of areas, within which sustainability is one of them. The paper intends: to present how the literature has addressed the intersection between the smart and sustainability concepts and to display diverse cases in that intersection.
Methodology. The study presents a review of the literature of smart tourism and sustainability, trying to unravel the link between both concepts. Then, it performs a collection of experiences on the components of smartness, implemented with satisfactory results and aligned to the management of sustainability issues.
Findings. The analysis reveals several gaps that should be bridged for a full exploitation of the intersection between smartness and sustainability. Firstly, the need to move from a focus based on technology, to a more global and long-term perspective on how the data-driven logic of smartness can help to tackle sustainability issues in destinations. Secondly, the smart tourism approach has a potential for the preservation of local heritage, way of living and culture, connecting its capabilities with the social components of smart people, smart mobility and smart living. Finally, the insertion of tourism into the emergent paradigm of circular economy.
Research limits. Although the completeness in the collection of experiences in a so vast and dynamic field is a utopia, it is honest to recognize that the speed of technological evolution prevents to present a set of initiatives fully updated, together with their outputs.
Practical implications. The design of tourism destinations should not be based on harnessing the ICTs proliferation only, but, more importantly, on the need for balancing all the beneficiaries -from internal publics (residents, local people) and external ones (visitors in one single word, both excursionists and tourists)- through the paradigm of “smartness”, that, in the search for a more sustainable tourism industry, guides people’s living conditions.
Originality of the study. The study promotes to moving forward in this area through a cross-fertilization between theory and practice, with the outline of a number of recommendations together with some suggestions for further research in a still under explored field of study.