Beniamino Callegari

This paper investigates the integration of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) principles with focus on public engagement within the Norwegian Biotechnology Advisory Board (NBAB). RRI, as an inherently relational set of practices, requires flexibility and adaptability from the State to promote responsible innovation. The NBAB case study provides insights into the complexities and tensions of State intervention, highlighting the necessary shift from rigid control to a more flexible approach. This shift is crucial for effectively fostering RRI among citizens, firms, and organizations. By examining NBAB's role in evaluating and advising on the ethical implications of biotechnology, this study demonstrates the importance of inclusive and deliberative governance. The findings suggest that public institutions must adapt to changing societal needs and engage diverse stakeholders to promote responsible innovation practices effectively.

The challenge of pursuing sustainable development highlights the relevance of the complex mechanisms through which natural and social selection processes affect and are affected by the economic system. Current economic development is unsustainable because it fails to generate long-term systemic compatibility between firms and their natural and social environment. This paper evaluates the issue from an evolutionary perspective by conceptualising unsustainability as the emergence of negative macro-selection effects, arising from both the natural and social domains, and argues for a methodological need for closer integration of system dynamics modelling within the evolutionary field. The Earth4All model is then used to illustrate the complex interactions between economic, social, and natural selection processes. The model results illustrate that the current global development trajectory is strongly unsustainable from both a natural and a social perspective, leading to the emergence of relevant natural and social macro-selection mechanisms, whose systemic interactions bring further complex adverse effects.

Recent developments in digital technologies have challenged the ways in which service firms create, deliver, and capture value. Although research and practice suggest business model innovation as an effective response to digitalization, many firms are not willing to make radical changes in the architecture of the firm’s activities. In this study, we take an in-depth look at which factors influence the firm’s capability for technology-driven business model innovation in the legal industry context. As our empirical context, we have chosen the legal industry, notorious for its risk aversion and for practices that inhibit innovation, but where the focus on digitalization is increasing due to external pressures. We interviewed nine law firms in Norway, representing together the largest share of the country’s legal services market, four of them being traditional law firms and the rest being newly established yet large digital New Law organizations. We find that profitability acts both as an inhibitor of business model innovation for established firms and as a driver for New Law firms. However, the relatively high job satisfaction of Norwegian lawyers in comparison to their US-based counterparts dampens the pull of technological opportunities on business model innovation by making human capital more difficult to acquire by new entrants. Barring an unexpected profitability crisis, digitalization of the Norwegian law sector will not disrupt traditional law firms’ business models. However, New Law firms are accumulating the competences required to compete with the incumbents.

Pandemics have been a long-standing object of study by economists, albeit with declining interest, that is until COVID-19 arrived. We review current knowledge on the pandemics’ effects on long-term economic development, spanning economic and historical debates. We show that all economic inputs are potentially affected. Pandemics reduce the workforce and human capital, have mixed effects on investment and savings, but potentially positive consequences for innovation and knowledge development, depending on accompanying institutional change. In the absence of an innovative response supporting income redistribution, pandemics tend to increase income inequalities, worsening poverty traps and highlighting the distributional issues built into insurance-based health insurance systems. We find that the effects of pandemics are asymmetric over time, in space, and among sectors and households. Therefore, we suggest that the research focus on the theoretical plausibility and empirical significance of specific mechanisms should be complemented by meta-analytic efforts aimed at reconstructing the resulting complexity. Finally, we suggest that policymakers prioritize the development of organizational learning and innovative capabilities, focusing on the ability to adapt to emergencies rather than developing rigid protocols or mimicking solutions developed and implemented in different contexts.

The Covid-19 epidemic is a global challenge requiring adequate public and private responses to overcome the emergency, shape new development trajectories, and prepare for future outbreaks. As socioeconomic turning points, epidemics imply an entrepreneurial response in which not only managers and entrepreneurs, but also policymakers, health professionals, and civil society as a whole are active participants. Using the PRISMA methodology, we provide a comprehensive review of the complex interactions between entrepreneurship and epidemics over time. Applying a combined Kirznerian-Schumpeterian theoretical framework, we find that, in the short term, epidemics trigger a wave of Kirznerian entrepreneurship aimed at reducing the uncertainty generated directly and indirectly by the medical emergency. In the long term, as medical uncertainty abates, Schumpeterian entrepreneurship can contribute to transforming the post-crisis environment, either supporting or undermining the public reaction to the crisis and determining the path of institutionalization, in the process of defining a new normal. Thus, epidemics could lead to unpredictable socioeconomic and technological improvements, but also to highly undesirable outcomes. The construction of a satisfactory new normal requires the integration of entrepreneurial capabilities within the public sector and an explicit policy of cooperation with the private sector. Therefore, as the short-term phase of the Covid-19 pandemic draws to a close, policymakers must shift their focus away from restrictions and obligations towards a collaborative framework supportive of private entrepreneurial efforts.

COVID-19 has brought to the forefront of academic debates the consequences of pandemics and their appropriate policy responses. Using the PRISMA methodology, we provide a comprehensive review of the economic and historical analysis of the long-term economic consequences of pandemics. Mainstream economists focus on the impact of pandemics on production factors, finding a rich but contrasting set of mechanisms with overall negative or insignificant effects. Historians focus on the institutional impact, finding positive effects of pandemics when they trigger new socioeconomic arrangements. Evolutionary economists can integrate into the economic debate both historical elements and the complex biological characteristics of pandemics. We argue that the evolutionary approach provides new and fertile theoretical foundations to understand the phenomenon and develop effective policies.

Declining public trust in science and innovation triggered the emergence and development of the responsible research and innovation (RRI) concept among policymakers and academics. Engaging stakeholders in the early phases of innovation processes has been identified as a major driver of inclusive, responsible, and sustainable development. Firms however have often adopted practices entirely opposite to those being advocated within the RRI framework, namely, reducing external interaction with stakeholders, focusing on exclusive communication with the scientific community and legal authorities while avoiding the social spotlight. We illustrate these practices, their causes and consequences using the case of the Aquadvantage salmon, the first genetically modified (GM) animal approved to petition for the United States (US) Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for human consumption. We find that such practices heighten the risk of social backlash, being undesirable from the perspective of both the organizations involved and society at large. Stakeholder engagement remains necessary in order to gain the minimum social acceptance required for contentious innovative products to enter the market. However, stakeholder engagement must be selective, focused on pragmatic organizations whose aims and interests are sufficiently broad to potentially align with corporate interests. Strategic stakeholder engagement offers a meeting point between the transformative aspirations of RRI framework proponents and legitimate business interests.

Organizational ambidexterity is widely recognized as necessary for the economic sustainability of firms operating in the financial sector. While the management literature has recognized several forms of ambidexterity, the relationship between them and their relative merits remain unclear. By studying a process of implementation of ambidextrous capabilities within a large Scandinavian financial firm, we explore the role of top-down reforms and bottom-up reactions in determining the development of sector-specific innovative capabilities. We find that blended ambidexterity follows naturally from the attempt to correct the tensions arising from harmonic ambidextrous blueprints. The resulting blended practice appears to be closely related to the reciprocal model of ambidexterity, which appears to be a necessity rather than a choice, for large firms attempting to develop innovative capabilities. Consequently, we suggest to re-interpret current taxonomies of ambidexterity not as alternative blueprints, but rather as stages in a long-term process of transition.

Keynes and Schumpeter developed two separate monetary theories of interest, the first arguing for the central role of liquidity and the second underlining the consequences of economic development, both agreeing on the fundamental monetary nature of the phenomenon. It is possible, however, to advance an essentialist interpretation of the two theories, making them consistent and allowing for the development of a unified monetary theory of interest to serve as a stepping stone toward further integration between current post-Keynesian and neo-Schumpeterian debates. Such interpretation relies on the acknowledgement of two shared assumptions: conscious uncertainty, navigated through conventional expectations, and the monetary nature of a decentralised economy. From this perspective, liquidity and the process of economic development follow from the idiosyncratic relationship between money and economic processes characterising capitalism—the common root of all monetary theories of interest.