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This paper aims to present an additive manufacturing-based approach in which a new strategy for a thermally activated local melting and material flow, which results in densification of printed structures, is introduced.

For enabling this self-organized relaxation of printed objects by the viscous flow of material, two interconnected structures are printed simultaneously in one printing process, namely, Structure A actually representing the three dimensional object to be built and Structure B acting as a material reservoir for infiltrating Structure A. In an additional process step, subsequent to the printing job, an increase in the objects’ temperature results in the melting of the material reservoir B and infiltration of structure A.

A thermally activated local melting of the polymethylsilsesquioxane results in densification of the printed structures and the local formation of structures with minimum surface area.

The present work introduces an approach for the local relaxation of printed three-dimensional structures by the viscous flow of the printed material, without the loss of structural integrity of the structure itself. This approach is not restricted only to the materials used, but also offers a more general strategy for printing dense structures with a surface finish far beyond the volumetric resolution of the 3D printing process.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can engage in collaborations with universities in different phases of the new product development process, taking into account the peculiarities of SMEs.

This paper combines a qualitative methodology (five SME case studies) with a quantitative one (a survey of 28 SMEs). The quantitative data are used to support the preliminary results obtained through the qualitative analysis.

SMEs engage in collaborations with universities following a progressive model; from the easiest collaborations during the testing phase to more complex collaborations during the research phase. In this way, SMEs establish a trust-based relationship with universities. Furthermore, technology management capabilities and project management capabilities are crucial prerequisites for managing complex forms of collaboration with universities.

SME managers should be aware of the difficulties associated with complex collaborations. They can overcome such problems by adopting a progressive collaboration model as well by as developing project management and technology management capabilities.

The paper offers new insights on how to deepen the important topic of how SMEs can manage and develop their relationships with universities.

This paper contributes to the literature on overeducation by empirically investigating the wage penalty of job–education mismatch among PhD holders who completed their studies in Italy; a country where the number of new doctoral recipients has dramatically increased over recent years while personnel employed in R&D activities is still below the European average. We use cross-sectional micro-data collected in 2009 and rely on different definitions of education–job mismatch such as, overeducation, overskilling, and dissatisfaction with the use of skills. We find that overeducation and skills dissatisfaction are associated with significantly lower wages but there is no wage penalty from overskilling. Furthermore, those who simultaneously report overeducation and skills dissatisfaction experience a particularly high wage penalty.

Few of the spaces of Milan are so strongly loaded with cultural and political baggage as “Chinatown” – the ethnic neighborhood on Paolo Sarpi Street – where a handful of roads, the global flow of Chinese goods, and the daily routines of elderly people and families are merged. The complexity of the “Sarpi Question” is precisely determined by the discussion of social dimensions, space and ethnoracial, economic and political, all at once.

In order to come to a deeper understanding of the economic mechanism of development of a city, this chapter begins by examining the causes that led to the break of an apparent balance in the practices of local cohabitation of the Chinese District in Milan. This chapter will also examine the relationship of power and conflict between the local government and the social groups, from the point of view of an urban change process. This framework deals with reclaiming urban space and the requalification processes aimed at improving the physical context of the Sarpi area, and especially at starting up processes of financial revitalization.

“No buses, no taxis, no cars and no trading. Why don't you just build a wall around us?” reads a banner displayed by traders on Sarpi Street in the 2008 Christmas season, the first month of controlled traffic flow. Ethnographic research attempts to explain how this result was reached.

The voice of Italian residents is only one of those emerging from the results of this research, along with those of business owners, city users, and local politicians. It is an interplay between antagonism and juxtaposition in which I have tried to highlight the existing conflict with the aim of understanding and explaining the tension in this urban space. Most importantly, this case demonstrates that the problem of cohabitation in a socially mixed neighborhood is a problem of representation and perception, which is essentially political.

The opening conclusions deal with the paradox of the urban safety policies promoted by the Milan local government as a place of decompression in the face of strong social pressure on immigration, precariousness, and insecurity. Strategies aimed at places to act on people.

In fast urbanizing economies such as Sri Lanka, the construction industry tends to fragment into almost separate spheres of production with little or no reciprocal connection in training, know‐how and career development paths, and consequent limitations in internal knowledge dissemination and technology transfer. This type of industrial compartmentalization is detrimental to the social acquisition of skills, and restricts the operational frameworks of given technologies, especially in low‐cost sectors. Against this backdrop, this paper sets out to speculate on how design can act as an engine of social and economic growth for those involved in its production.

Based on government statistics and building output analysis, the paper argues that architects can build labour policy‐making into the design of their buildings, provided that such an agenda is developed strategically, by examining the industrial base of the region, and by defining a design and technological vocabulary that feeds off the analysis of place‐specific conditions, limitations, and ambitions.

The integration of technological development and broad socio‐economic growth can be facilitated by “open” (or “incremental”) industrial design strategies aimed at connecting construction markets rather than keeping them separate. To this end, it is posited that technological contamination and compromise can help the labour force to increase its own skills progressively.

In practical terms, this objective translates in the definition of building implementation techniques that can adapt to the level of complexity required and the level of expenditure possible without penalizing the expected performance of the building – i.e. they must be inherently “robust” as opposed to precise and therefore more “sensitive”.

The paper is the first result of a thesis‐in‐progress that, on the basis of a technical review carried out on a small sample of ideal‐type projects in Sri Lanka, is considering ways to create and link labour development opportunities through architectural design.

The purpose of this study is aimed at analysing the contributors of consumer confusion from the perspective of both information providers and recipients.

Using Sri Lanka as a case study, this study demonstrates views of consumer confusion in terms of information and its contributors in light of the framework adopted by Lu and Gursoy (2015).

The results ascertain that too much, too similar and too ambiguous information from information providers’ perspective have a significant impact on consumer confusion in the context of the inbound tourist industry in Sri Lanka. Most importantly, it is evident that the information recipients’ knowledge and behaviour attributes, namely, internet experience, learning orientation, tolerance for ambiguity, price consciousness and requirement for cognition have no significant impact on consumer confusion. Furthermore, the quality and quantity of information provided are crucial for the minimisation or avoidance of consumer confusion.

The practical implications drawn from this study could influence all stakeholders of the inbound online tourism trade including managers, advertising executives and marketing experts in providing good quality information to promote tourism.

The contribution of this research is related to the analysis from a theoretical and an empirical perspective of both the information providers’ and decision-making of recipients.

这项研究旨在从信息提供者和接受者的角度分析造成消费者困惑的因素。

以鲁和古尔索伊（2015）所采用的框架为基础, 本研究以斯里兰卡为例, 就有关信息及其贡献因素方面展示了消费者困惑的观点

调查结果确定, 就斯里兰卡入境旅游业而言, 从信息提供者的角度来看, 太多, 太相似和太含糊的信息会对消费者混乱产生重大影响。最重要的是, 很明显, 信息接收者的知识和行为属性, 即互联网体验, 学习倾向, 对歧义的容忍度, 价格意识和认知需求, 对消费者的困惑没有显着影响。此外, 所提供信息的质量和数量对于最小化或避免消费者混淆至关重要。

这项研究得出的实际意义可能会影响入境在线旅游业的所有利益相关者, 包括管理人员, 广告主管和营销专家, 以提供高质量的信息来促进旅游业。

此项研究贡献与从信息提供者和接收者的决策的理论和经验角度进行的分析相关。

este estudio tiene como objetivo analizar a los contribuyentes de la confusión del consumidor desde la perspectiva de los proveedores de información y los destinatarios.

utilizando Sri Lanka como el caso, esta investigación demuestra puntos de vista de la confusión del consumidor en términos de información y sus contribuyentes a la luz del marco adoptado por Lu y Gursoy (2015).

los hallazgos determinan que demasiada información, muy similar y demasiado ambigua desde la perspectiva de los proveedores de información tiene un impacto significativo en la confusión del consumidor en el contexto de la industria turística entrante en Sri Lanka. Lo más importante es que es evidente que los atributos de conocimiento y comportamiento de los destinatarios de la información, a saber, la experiencia de Internet, la orientación al aprendizaje, la tolerancia a la ambigüedad, la conciencia del precio y la necesidad de cognición no tienen un impacto significativo en la confusión del consumidor. Además, la calidad y la cantidad de información proporcionada son cruciales para minimizar o evitar la confusión del consumidor.

las implicaciones prácticas derivadas de este estudio podrían influir en todas las partes interesadas del comercio de turismo en línea entrante, que incluyen gerentes, ejecutivos de publicidad y expertos en marketing para proporcionar información de buena calidad para promover el turismo.

la contribución de esta investigación está relacionada con el análisis desde una perspectiva teórica y empírica tanto de los proveedores de información como de la toma de decisiones de los destinatarios.

Purpose – This chapter revisits an archive of life-story interviews of immigrant care workers in Italy in order to map the underlying placements, meanings and emotional connotations of the word ‘home’ (casa). The discursive ways of using this word are connected to the respondents’ shifting life milieus and orientations towards receiving and sending societies.

Methodology – The chapter builds on the content analysis of a subset of biographical interviews of immigrant women employed in live-in care work in Italy.

Findings – Three categories emerge across respondents’ narratives. Their everyday life experience is based in Home_here-and-now (the present dwelling place) and thus depends on its often limited inclusive potential. However, their everyday life experience is also affected by the home conditions in their country of origin (Home_there-and-now) and by their recollections, understandings and revisits of the past home experience prior to migration (Home_there-and-then). These immigrant women are engaged in an ongoing balancing act between different spatial and temporal dimensions of what they frame as home. Critical to their wellbeing is the ability to keep cultivating meaningful connections with Home_there-and-now and to reproduce some patterns of Home_there-and-then.

Originality/Value – As my study suggests, their present dwelling and living conditions remain the central arena for immigrants negotiating a more inclusive sense of home. Reconstructing home-related views and practices is a good heuristic strategy for researchers to illuminate ‘biographies of belonging’ as a whole. An analytical focus on the ways of using the word ‘home’ reveals broader patterns of integration and transnational participation.

This chapter presents an interpretation of gentrification and touristification as gender-related issues. The underlying question driving this discussion is: How can we envision feminist cities when certain forms of feminism today are strongly intertwined with consumerism? In the context of ghost cities or neighborhoods, Airbnb and digital nomads dominate, skyrocketing prices make life unaffordable, support structures vanish in favor of place branding, and oppressive security practices are normalized. The chapter examines the history of neoliberal deactivation in Rome’s Ostiense neighborhood. It explores the resistance by places of liberation, such as the occupied former barracks of Porto Fluviale, which serves as a residence for homeless families. It delves into the genuine transformation of the area into an open-air museum exploited for tourism and the occupation of a former nightclub turned into a meeting space for marginalized individuals to ensure their safety through acts of resistance. The territorial appropriation dynamics driven by neoliberal forces have altered geographies, resulting in an emotional detachment that renders the city unlivable. The chapter touches upon the transformation of soulful places into sites of emotional resistance, illustrated through Sara Ventroni’s poem dedicated to the Gasometer. This suburban colossus has indelibly shaped the area’s cityscape since the early 20th century, constantly caught between branding and resistance. Drawing from these experiences and insights, a new theory of the city is proposed, one rooted in the principle of care.

Prior research highlights the vital role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for innovation in response to environmental conditions. However, there is a lack of studies that analyse the determinants of ICT investments on the innovation activities of firms in relation with their impacts on the industrial and competitive dynamics using large data sets. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In this paper, the authors investigate the effects of ICT investments on the industrial and competitive dynamics for a large and representative panel data set. All the industries are included, and lagged effects of ICT investments are studied. The model is tested on a seven-year panel (2008–2014) of 231 Italian industries using two-stage least squares instrumental-variables estimators with industry time and fixed effects.

The results indicate that munificent industries and higher ICT spending are interrelated facts, showing that in sectors with more growth opportunities firms invest more in ICT and this leads to higher industry concentration, greater profit dispersion and higher competitive turbulence in the sector. Also, the paper shows that SMEs can rarely take advantage of their ICT-based innovation to start high-growth phenomena.

The results suggest that ICT-based innovation may create competitive advantages that are hard to sustain over the long-term raising important implications for managers involved in ICT-enabled innovations and policy-makers involved in building programs to foster innovation.

Against the backdrop of today’s digital transformation, the paper enriches our understanding on the disruptive effects exerted by the digitalization of the innovation process and provides a base to continue the investigation of industrial changes and competitive dynamics.

The present paper aims to demonstrate the potential of integration between industrial robotics and Lean Manufacturing (LM) approach to increase the efficiency of an assembly line.

Based on a case study performed in an Italian company, this paper reports a comparative analysis of the results produced on a line balancing study involving a semi-automated production line, aided by an industrial robot.

The results suggest the possibility of implementing industrial robotics in line balancing studies highlighting efficiency gains and idle reduction. Further, it also addresses some concepts directly related to industry 4.0, such as collaborative robotics, artificial intelligence, and lean automation.

Line balancing studies may include advanced robotics in order to extend traditional lean practices toward Digital LM.

This study adds contributions to the operational excellence literature, demonstrating the symbiosis between industrial robotics and LM practices.