Gianluigi Viscusi

Research Summary: Prior studies have often conceptualized entrepreneurial experimentation as an activity over which founders exert a high amount of discretion in decision‐making. However, the locus of control over experimentation programs is dynamic, shifting with varying external stakeholder influence and venture growth. This paper proposes an integrative framework explaining how different stakeholder influence mechanisms function as frictions or enablers, shaping a venture's experimentation program. Resource provision mechanisms determine ventures' capacity for experimentation, while stakeholder strategic orientation and governance mechanisms shape the context within which ventures experiment, influencing how ventures deploy resources toward experiments. We further discuss how a venture's development stage shapes the relative value and impact of these stakeholder influences. Managerial Summary: Experimentation and the Lean Startup approach are well‐established methods for navigating the inherent uncertainties of entrepreneurial ventures. While conventional wisdom often portrays founders as exercising substantial discretion over experimentation, this research demonstrates that a venture's experimentation program can be systematically shaped by external stakeholders. Rather than being solely founder‐driven, entrepreneurial experimentation is embedded in a broader stakeholder context that conditions what can be tested, how broadly, and how radically. Stakeholders shape ventures' experimentation by providing and controlling resources, influencing strategic directions, and structuring governance relationships. Strategic attention to which actors influence experimentation, how that influence is exercised, and how its relative importance shifts across venture development stages is important for fostering experimentation and improving venture performance.

This ongoing study addresses the increasing need for human-AI collaboration in newsrooms by conversational system to enhance teamwork. Our prototype leverages retrieval-augmented generation to provide features for content analysis and social networking. Expert evaluation validated the value of the content analysis feature, while highlighting areas for improvement in expert identification. The preliminary results offer practical insights and design guidelines for news media organizations.

Current societal changes and challenges demand a broader role of technological universities, thus opening the question of how their role evolved over time and how to frame their current responsibility. In response to urgent calls for debating and redefining the identity of contemporary technological universities, this paper has two aims. The first aim is to identify the key characteristics and orientations marking the development of technological universities, as recorded in the history of engineering education. The second aim is to articulate the responsibility of contemporary technological universities given their different orientations and characteristics. For this, we first provide a non-systematic literature review of the key pedagogical orientations of technological universities, grounded in the history of engineering education. The five major orientations of technological universities presented in the paper are technical, economic, social, political, and ecological. We then use this historical survey to articulate the responsibilities of contemporary technological universities reflecting the different orientations. Technological universities can promote and foster the development of scientific, professional, civic, legal, or intra- and inter- generational responsibility. We argue that responsibility is not specific to any particular orientation, such that the concept is broadened to complement each orientation or mix of orientations of a technological university. Our contribution thus serves as a call for technological universities to self-reflect on their mission and identity, by offering a lens for identifying the orientations they currently foster and making explicit the responsibility arising from their current orientation or the ones they strive to cultivate.

Since its first appearance as the infrastructure supporting Bitcoin, blockchain has received different waves of attention from practitioners and academics. Besides the degree of interest, the attention to blockchain has often focused not merely on its own potential and characteristics but on its applications field. However, looking at its application and deployment in domains other than cryptocurrency or the nascent non-fungible tokens (NFTs), blockchain technology does not seem to be widely adopted or is still in its early stages. Given this, we are interested in how managers and the general public are informed about new technology other than through academic papers or the specialized press. In this paper, we analyze how blockchain has been presented by speakers invited to give TED and TEDx Talks to identify the most common terms used to present blockchain in these talks using a multi-methods approach (qualitative analysis and big data analysis) and see if the discourse surrounding blockchain has shifted over time. The results of this study show how the different perspectives brought by broadcasters like TED often overshadow a technological innovation like the blockchain in its evolution and application by the fact that the focus is instead shifted to products and services built on it. Also, this study shows how different degrees of attention and expertise are associated with each fashion wave of new or emergent technology innovations.

Universities and their changing role in society is a source of perennial debate. In this article, we examine the emergent phenomenon of University Campus Living Labs (UCLL), the set of practices by which universities use their own buildings, streets or energy infrastructure as experimental settings in order to support applied teaching, research and co-creation with society. While most existing studies of UCLLs focus on them as sustainability instruments, we explore the UCLL phenomenon from an open-ended and fresh angle. Using living labs in five European universities as exemplary cases, we demonstrate the breadth and variability of this emerging phenomenon through five analytical dimensions to unpack the multiple forms and purposes that UCLLs can have. We furthermore consider aspects of inclusiveness and situatedness of living lab co-creation and testing and what the UCLL phenomena may come to mean for the continuously changing university, calling for future studies to substantiate these aspects.