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This paper aims to develop predictive methods, based on recurrent neural networks, useful to support facility managers in building maintenance tasks, by collecting information coming from a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS).

This study applies data-driven and text-mining approaches to a CMMS data set comprising more than 14,500 end-users’ requests for corrective maintenance actions, collected over 14 months. Unidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) and bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM) recurrent neural networks are trained to predict the priority of each maintenance request and the related technical staff assignment. The data set is also used to depict an overview of corrective maintenance needs and related performances and to verify the most relevant elements in the building and how the current facility management (FM) relates to the requests.

The study shows that LSTM and Bi-LSTM recurrent neural networks can properly recognize the words contained in the requests, thus correctly and automatically assigning the priority and predicting the technical staff to assign for each end-user’s maintenance request. The obtained global accuracy is very high, reaching 93.3% for priority identification and 96.7% for technical staff assignment. Results also show the main critical building elements for maintenance requests and the related intervention timings.

This work shows that LSTM and Bi-LSTM recurrent neural networks can automate the assignment process of end-users’ maintenance requests if trained with historical CMMS data. Results are promising; however, the trained LSTM and Bi-LSTM RNN can be applied only to different hospitals adopting similar categorization.

The data-driven and text-mining approaches can be integrated into the CMMS to support corrective maintenance management by facilities management contractors, i.e. to properly and timely identify the actions to be carried out and the technical staff to assign.

The improvement of the maintenance of the health-care system is a key component of improving health service delivery. This work shows how to reduce health-care service interruptions due to maintenance needs through machine learning methods.

This study develops original methods and tools easily integrable into IT workflow systems (i.e. CMMS) in the FM field.

The purpose of this paper is to examine, for a sample of ten corporations in three industries (i.e. automotive suppliers, semiconductors, and computer networks), the different strategies that firms undertake when acquiring patent-protected technologies. In particular, the authors analyze and compare two alternative channels for patent acquisition: markets for technology (MFT) and merger and acquisition (M&A) processes.

The authors implement two types of analyses, at both patent and firm level. First, the authors perform an econometric analysis to evaluate whether acquired patented technologies differ in their patent bibliographic characteristics with respect to patent-protected technologies that have been developed internally by the examined firms. The authors then investigate the presence of differences in the characteristics of transacted patents acquired in the MFT or by means of M&A activities. Second, the authors take a firm-level perspective and examine the technology acquisition strategies adopted by selected companies to identify the presence of common patterns, industry-driven specificities and firm peculiarities.

The authors find that acquired patented technologies are, on average, more complex, of higher technical merit and the corresponding patents show a higher legal robustness. Econometric results reveal the presence of differences between M&A and MFT patents: the latter seem to protect less complex, and thus easier to trade, inventions. The analysis of the patterns of patent acquisitions at the firm level shows the presence of different strategies for the external sourcing of patented technologies, based on whether acquired patents protect core or non-core technology areas of the analyzed firms. Such patterns are discussed in the light of the different streams of the literature on intellectual property (IP) management.

This paper makes use of a new and comprehensive data set of the US patent transactions that took place between 2002 and 2010. The authors added detailed data on the evolution of the corporate trees of analyzed firms. The paper contributes to the literature on technology acquisitions and MFT by examining the different channels for patented technology acquisitions. The issue represents an emerging area of interest in the field of IP management.

In this study, the authors examine the influence of market orientation on small firms' performance. The authors theorize that the association between market orientation and small firm performance provides an incomplete picture in a competitive environment. The application of configuration approach which involves simultaneous consideration of market orientation, strategic flexibility and competition intensity is crucial to examine driver of firm performance.

The sample of the research study consists of 272 small firms from an emerging economy, India. Ordinary least squares regression has been used to investigate the hypothesized relationships.

The authors noted that the three-way interaction between market orientation, strategic flexibility and competition intensity elucidates variance in small firm performance over and above a contingency model and a direct relationship.

The findings contribute to the existing literature by exhibiting the effect of market orientation on firm performance. The configuration model suggests that small firms can outperform competitors in a lower competitive environment if they have high market orientation and high strategic flexibility investment. To leverage market opportunities and achieve better firm performance, small firms’ owners should analyze the usefulness of current capabilities in a changing competitive environment concurrently and align market orientation to those conditions.

The strategic management and marketing literature suggests that relationship between market orientation and performance is ambiguous. The findings offer insights to managers regarding the appropriate use of strategic flexibility in leveraging the benefits of market orientation in a highly competitive environment. Furthermore, by collecting data from the context of an emerging economy, India, the authors attempt to strengthen the applicability of market orientation in different contexts.

Traditional epidemic models, like the classical SIR, are fitted to real data using deterministic optimization techniques. As a consequence, their performances cannot be properly assessed and, more importantly, the estimates of the critical epidemic parameters (which are of dramatic importance in monitoring the epidemic evolution) cannot be complemented with the calculation of confidence intervals. The aim of the present work is to remove such limitations and to compare the results obtained using two stochastic versions of deterministic SIR models. We describe the two alternatives and the associated estimation procedures, and we apply the two methodologies to a set of COVID-19 data observed in Italy in the 2020 pandemic wave. Our estimates of the basic reproduction number are comparable with the official sources, but using our methods uncertainty can also be properly assessed.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how the introduction of a patient-centered model (PCM) in Italian hospitals affects the pre-existent configuration of clinical work and interacts with established intra/inter-professional relationships.

Qualitative multi-phase study based on three main sources: health policy analysis, an exploratory interview study with senior managers of eight Italian hospitals implementing the PCM, and an in-depth case study that involved managerial and clinical staff of one Italian hospital implementing the PCM.

The introduction of the PCM challenges clinical work and professional relationships, but such challenges are interpreted differently by the organisational actors involved, thus giving rise to two different “narratives of change”. The “political narrative” (the views conveyed by formal policies and senior managers) focuses on the power shifts and conflict between nurses and doctors, while the “workplace narrative” (the experiences of frontline clinicians) emphasises the problems linked to the disruption of previous discipline-based inter-professional groups.

Medical disciplines, rather than professional groupings, are the main source of identification of doctors and nurses, and represent a crucial aspect of clinicians’ professional identity. Although the need for collaboration among medical disciplines is acknowledged, creating multi-disciplinary groups in practice requires the sustaining of new aggregators and binding forces.

This study suggests further acknowledgment of the inherent complexity of the political and workplace narratives of change rather than interpreting them as the signal of irreconcilable perspectives between managers and clinicians. By addressing the specific issues regarding which the political and workplace narratives clash, relationship of trust may be developed through which problems can be identified, mutually acknowledged, articulated, and solved.

The purpose of this paper is to understand whether managerial behavior in impairing goodwill arising from M & As has changed after the adoption of IAS/IFRS, searching for evidences of earnings management (EM) practices. Thus, our goal is to provide a response to the following research questions. Are goodwill impairments used by listed firms’ managers to manipulate earnings? If so, what kind of EM practice is mostly used?

In this paper the authors tested the following hypothesis: H1. In the year of the deal’s closure and in the following four years, the management detects impairment of goodwill in difformity with the previous Italian regulations and related accounting practices. Moreover, the authors tried to determine, for each considered firms, potential symptoms of typical DEM practices widely debated in the financial accounting literature (income smoothing, income minimization, income minimization, or big bath accounting).

Our analysis does not prove evidence of certain EM practices, but it highlights very clearly that, after the adoption of IAS/IFRS, managers’ behavior has deeply changed. Moreover, the analysis shows that there is no univocal choice in favor of a specific EM practice and that every firm pursues its own “strategy.”

Considering the importance of the topic from both the perspectives of managerial (with regard to M & As valuation processes) and financial accounting (with regard to intangibles valuation fulfilled by applying the impairment test instead of the amortization), this work aims to provide a multi-dimensional contribution to the current debate.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on how a medium-sized company operating in the food sector should strengthen its business model, thanks to a combination between tradition and innovation.

This research focuses on one case study. The subject of the case study under analysis is Golosità dal 1885, an internationally recognized fine food Italian company.

Golosità dal 1885 is characterized by a strong combination of tradition and innovation, both in products and processes. The company’s competitiveness is the result of a balanced management of innovation, in respect of the family’s values, thanks to the active presence of two family generations.

This study is characterized for some limitations, related to the method and to the choice of a single case study. In terms of theoretical implications, the study emphasizes the importance of the link between the food sector and the region it is rooted in.

Practical implications relate to different groups of stakeholders: for owners and management, for investors, for organizations and institutions working on a territory promotion and in the tourism sector, and for politicians and local authorities.

The originality of the research is represented by a focusing on how a strategy based on an effective combination between tradition and innovation should increase the competitive advantage, especially in a mature sector – as the food one – characterized by the need to offer a differentiated and innovative range of products and services for overcoming the consumptions crisis.

This paper aims to reconstruct the process that led to the appropriation of history – of a particular historical period, the Renaissance – as an intangible asset in the promotion of Italian fashion on the international market after the Second World War.

The paper reconstructs the process that led to the appropriation of history – of a particular historical period, the Renaissance – as an intangible asset in the promotion of Italian fashion on the international market after the Second World War.

The successful debut of Italian fashion in the fifties can be explained through an intelligent marketing campaign which placed it directly in the centre of a well-known, appreciated, not to say indisputable, tradition of “good taste”: that of the Renaissance. Connecting Italian fashion with Renaissance Italy meant in fact introducing a kind of ante litteram guarantee of provenance – a “country branding” - recognized throughout the world, which, at the same time, evoked the splendour of a period in which Italian taste was a model to follow and imitate.

The studies on the history of the Italian fashion business have accepted the association of Italian fashion with Renaissance tradition as an element to be taken for granted, without inquiring into the historical legitimacy of such a coupling (either in the way in which it was produced or why it had such an important role). This paper dismantles the consistent rhetorical sedimentation with which the subject is encrusted and provides a new insight, showing that such continuity did not exist; on the contrary, it was the product of a marketing strategy.