Competitive projects

Principal Investigator: Jonathan Wareham
Research group: IIK
Funding body: European Commission Framework Programme (HORIZON) Elevating the scalability potential of European business (2021) (HORIZON-EIE-2021-SCALEUP-01)
Funding: 163.375,00 €
Duration: 27 months

The ATTRACT Phase-1(B) project delivers an important new angle to the already established and highly regarded ATTRACT Model which created a European eco-system for breakthrough detection & imaging (D&I) technology development based on coinnovation. The precursor H2020 ATTRACT Phase-1(A) and Phase-2 projects have already proven that - in principle - the development of breakthrough innovation from basic science towards market applications does not need to be a matter of chance. It can lead to much faster results if managed and supported consistently through the creation of an trusted ecosystem between research, academia, industry and public/private investment communities. In neither precursor projects, however, the ATTRACT Consortium specified topics to be funded and opted for a bottom up approach.

In light of the societal challenges that Europe faces, the ATTRACT Consortium now feels compelled to explore whether such approach remains valid, or whether ATTRACT - as an instrument - can work equally well when an element of research pre-determination is introduced. In the ATTRACT Phase-1(B) project, the pre-determining factor is 'D&I for Earth observation and monitoring', as such technologies directly contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics of nature-human interaction, environmental changes and Climate Change. The ATTRACT Consortium will fund 30 breakthrough D&I concepts at €100.000 each. Third Party Open Call applicant consortia will have 12 months to investigate the scientific merits, technical feasibility, and potential game-changing applicability potential of their concept up to TRL level 3-5. Technologies should be capable of collecting data (physical, chemical, biological, etc., characteristics) with high specificity and extreme sensitivity whilst offering high spatial and temporal resolution and massive parallelism. They should be suitable for seamless integration into pervasive, low cost, and low-power ICT systems (incl. portable, wearable, IoT).

Ref.: 2022-1-FR01-KA220-HED-000089236
Principal Investigator: Lisa Hehenberger
Research group: Centre for Social Impact
Funding body: European Commission – Erasmus +
Funding: 74.600,00 €
Duration: 36 months

Over the last twenty years climate change has revealed the need for alternatives to the current ways of organising our societal and entrepreneurial models. Social innovation and entrepreneurship are more than ever relevant to take up this challenge and the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE hereafter) has been a growing economy which now represents a large part of EU countries’ workforce (e.g. 16% of jobs in France and 12.5% in Spain) and is being encouraged by the EU and the OECD through the Global Action Promoting the SSE initiative (which ESSEC is part of). By teaching about new models of social enterprises, HEIs will foster more Inclusion and diversity in all fields of education, training and beyond, leading their students to discover different business models for their future organisations. While ‘the global crisis has given rise to critical voices that call for business schools to accept their responsibility as social institutions and become better attuned to public interests’, research in the Journal of Business Ethics has shown ‘the need for introducing more critical thinking and ethical debate in the classroom, as well as training executive leaders to question the current state of affairs’ (extracts from an article by by Esade Professor David Murillo and Steen Vallentin from Copenhagen Business School in DoBetter by ESADE). Andrew J. Hoffman states in a Stanford Social Innovation Review article that research found that 88 percent of business school students think that learning about social and environmental issues in business is a priority, and 67 percent want to incorporate environmental sustainability into their future jobs. To meet this demand, the percentage of business schools that require students to take a course dedicated to business and society increased from 34 percent in 2001 to 79 percent in 2011. ‘Environmental sustainability’ mentioned above and the fight against climate change are also relevant to a large extent to social entrepreneurship insofar as social and environmental issues are closely intertwined, best embodied by the French civil movement of the Gilets Jaunes as the ‘end of the month, end of the world’ slogan. Social X-Change will most notably enable the five consortium partners to promote the internationalisation of teaching and learning on the subject of social entrepreneurship in HEIs through the creation of this network of Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Centres with a strong connection to practitioners. Indeed, while all HEIs of the consortium have initiated research on the subject in their own countries with local practitioners, there is a gap in international knowledge exchange and transfer of good practice that can be filled by an international network of Centres strongly connected with an international practitioner base.

Ref.: PID2021-128099NA-I00
Principal Investigator: Kate Barasz / Ioannis Evangelidis
Research group: JUICE – ESADE D3
Funding body: Generación de Conocimiento 2021 Ministerio Ciencia e Innovación
Funding: 30.033,00 €
Duration: 36 months

People constantly and effortlessly acquire information about one another’s decisions. By simply observing a stranger on the street, a colleague in the office, or a consumer in a shop, one can deduce any number of implicit choices others previously made: the cars they apparently decided to drive, the clothes they chose to wear, the food they selected to order. From all of this information, observers form impressions (and judgments) of fellow consumers.

However, it is also true that choice may not reveal preferences or, at least, may obscure a more nuanced and multifaceted reality. As behavioral scientists have well established, decision-making is complex; actors face difficult trade-offs between attributes and options, and are susceptible to any number of contextual factors that influence decisions.

These mistaken inferences can have a range of implications. At the most basic (and perhaps benign) level, they may lead to systematic interpersonal misperceptions and mispredictions with implications for both interpersonal relationships and business contexts. But beyond the benign, mistaken inferences can also have more menacing effects, such as inciting fundamental misinterpretations of the motives underlying others choices with the potential to trigger or exacerbate deep-seated resentment and misunderstanding. Simply put, when predicting others preferences, there are many situations in which people have incentive to be right but are often predictably wrong.

Our research seeks to expand the corpus of knowledge investigating the inferences observers make about other consumers choices. This research project will focus on developing the literature on choice perception, or how people come to make sense of what others choose. We aim to (1) identify the heuristics people use when evaluating others choices, (2) enumerate the ways in which this may lead us to systematically incorrect conclusions, and (3) investigate opportunities for intervention.

Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades

Ref.: PID2021-128762NB-I00
Principal Investigator: Joaquim Castañer / Rebeca Carpi
Research group: Derecho Patromonial
Funding body: Generación de Conocimiento 2021 Ministerio Ciencia e Innovación
Funding: 25.410,00 €
Duration: 36 months

Within the context of the EU, Spain is one of the countries with the lowest rate of start-ups per capita. Among the reasons for this lower volume of emerging companies are the financial difficulties they face, especially in the area of bank financing. Although in recent years alternative financing mechanisms have been developed for start-ups in the form of investment, which have been very useful, these mechanisms do not cover the total needs of the sector. There is evidence that shows the limited use made of other debt financing systems that our legal system allows, and that can complement the set of non-bank financing mechanisms of these emerging companies. In this project we consider that a financing system for start-ups will be more complete and balanced the better it incorporates all the possible ways of obtaining economic resources that our legal system allows, and that to facilitate access to all those financing possibilities outside the banking system requires a complete and comprehensive study of the non-bank financial legal architecture and its potential.

The matter is of undoubted interest for legal science, either from contractual and credit law, with regard to the contractual configuration of legal financing relationships, as well as in relation to the protection and reinforcement mechanisms (guarantees) that these agreements need in order to be accepted by the financial and credit market. The clarification of the entire aforementioned legal framework is essential to specify the financial functionality of each option according to the type of start-up.

Under these premises, the general objective of the project is to review forms of credit other than those usual in banking practice, including both traditional non-bank financing contracts and new credit categories, such as project financing contracts, convertible loans, loan crowdfunding (or crowdlending) and Venture debt. The guarantee rights, typical or atypical, that can reinforce the right of return of the financier and their confidence in the operation will also be analysed.

Investigating these contractual formulas, their characteristic and differential elements, and the disadvantages and advantages (risks and remedies) that they present, will clarify the legal regime of the various options, and will allow the construction of a comprehensive and complete financing system for start-ups that enhances the development of the sector.

Ref.: PID2021-123748NB-I00
Principal Investigator: Ariadna Dumitrescu
Research group: GREF
Funding body: Generación de Conocimiento 2021 Ministerio Ciencia e Innovación
Funding: 34.303,50 €
Duration: 36 months

Information disclosure is a central issue in the recent policy and regulatory debate, as it is generally considered to play a fundamental role in promoting market efficiency. Disclosure represents the extent to which all relevant information regarding the firm is made public and available to all economic agents in a timely manner. The information disclosed can be information impounded in the trading process in the financial market (stock prices, transaction prices, the volume of those transactions and the identity of the order flow) or information about fundamental value of financial assets (financial, accounting and auditing reports, information on shareholders, corporate governance or Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) information). Both these types of disclosure are essential in the corporate and financial world because it ensures market transparency, reduces information asymmetry, reduces market manipulation, allows investors to make informed decisions and permits more efficient allocation of capital. The main objective of the project is to provide novel theoretical and empirical evidence on the economic and financial effects of market transparency and firms information disclosure.

Our aim is to provide a better understanding of how information disclosure shapes the structure of financial markets, their efficiency, and the welfare impact on market participants. We explore these problems from a microeconomic perspective looking at different types of information disclosure both from the firms and from the investors point of view. In particular, we plan to structure our analysis into two lines of research: one in which we study the information produced in the trading process and one in which we study the information disclosed by firms. These two lines of research have a common goal of analysing the effects of information disclosure on market performance and welfare of market participants.

Ref.: PID2021-128460NA-I00
Principal Investigator: George Chondrakis
Research group: EEI - GRIE
Funding body: Generación de Conocimiento 2021 Ministerio Ciencia e Innovación
Funding: 60.066,00 €
Duration: 36 months

The process of creative destruction is a defining characteristic of market-based economies. This consists of the continuous foundation of entrepreneurial ventures that often challenge incumbent firms by providing novel and better solutions to customer needs. The ever-increasing rate of technological change has accelerated this process and affords a variety of technology-enabled business models. Such innovations contribute to economic growth, employment, and the broader upscaling of production capacity. It is therefore important for managers and policymakers to understand the process of formation and growth of innovative ventures.

Of course, this process is far from straightforward as there is compelling evidence documenting the high failure rates of startups. Startups often fail to attract financial, technological, human, and other types of resources that allow them to test their business model and scale up successfully. Our goal is to develop a coherent framework that documents the frictions startups face when acquiring resources as well as potential solutions to these.

This project will focus on three important aspects that can impact resource acquisition. First, we will focus on the role of entrepreneurial education and training to examine how it influences entrepreneurs in their decisions to target specific types of resources. Related to that, we also want to examine how different types of entrepreneurial decision-making impact firm performance and survival. Second, we will study how different communication strategies, in particular the type and tone of the language entrepreneurs use when promoting their products, influences scaling up and survival. Third, we will focus on a particular type of technological resource, that is artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies. We want to understand how entrepreneurial firms adopt this general-purpose technology and whether it impacts their ability to scale up successfully. Based on these broad questions, we develop a set of interrelated sub-projects that aim to enhance our knowledge of startup resource acquisition strategies and their relationship with firm performance and survival.

Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades

Ref.: PID2021-128333NB-I00
Principal Investigator: Josep Bisbe / Petya Platikanova
Research group: GREF
Funding body: Generación de Conocimiento 2021 Ministerio Ciencia e Innovación
Funding: 84.700,00 €
Duration: 48 months

In recent years, we have witnessed an unprecedented interest in sustainability-related issues: governments, households, regulators, media, and corporations all face an increasing pressure to operate with social and environmental responsibility. Corporations are now required to meet competing demands from stakeholders with diverse sustainability-related needs. Starting from the common belief that corporate sustainability creates long-term value for all stakeholders, in this proposal we argue that sustainability practices, along with information flows regarding such practices, are shaped by internal management systems and by disclosure policies. We seek to develop and integrate inside-out and outside-in accounting perspectives on sustainability (Maas et al., 2016; Grewal and Serafeim, 2020), and so adopt a holistic accounting-based view of ESG management and reporting. Inside-out perspectives consider a performance improvement-oriented management view and focus on internal management processes and decisions regarding ESG practices, as well as on their implications. Outside-in perspectives on sustainability in contrast consider a disclosure-oriented view and focus on the ESG information publicly communicated to external stakeholders and its implications. The integration of both perspectives entails the examination of whether and how internal management processes and decisions regarding ESG practices and ESG public disclosure in corporate communications are associated.

The project is organised in three main parts. In Part 1, we adopt an inside-out perspective that focuses on management accounting practices. More specifically, we examine the conditions under which management control systems can contribute to improve internal decision-making around ESG performance and, hence, contribute to a more effective management of sustainability issues. We examine what are the broader-scope configurations of management control practices that companies use to manage different sustainability strategies. We further examine how top management teams use management control systems to deal with the complex information processing activities that result from the multiple and diverging objectives associated with sustainability.

In Part 2, we adopt an outside-in perspective from a financial accounting angle that focuses on the demand for sustainability information in corporate disclosure to external stakeholders and the effects of such disclosure. In this part, we examine how ESG practices are presented in corporate communication, with a focus on the use of alternative disclosure channels and the real effect of ESG disclosure on the ESG achievements. In this part, we are interested in financial analysts and their expectation regarding sustainability performance, creditors and their willingness to offer better lending conditions to ESG-intensive borrowers, and investors with their effect on compensation contracts.

Finally, in Part 3, we integrate the inside-out and outside-in perspectives with a close examination of the relationships between internal management control practices and external reporting on ESG-related topics. In this part, we explore a unique setting, where Spanish public and private companies disclose ESG indicators as mandated by accounting standards (i.e., non-financial disclosure required since 2018).

Ref.: PID2021-124282NB-I00
Principal Investigator: Jordi Trullén
Research group: BUNED
Funding body: Generación de Conocimiento 2021 Ministerio Ciencia e Innovación
Funding: 101.640,00 €
Duration: 48 months

Talent management (TM), typically understood as the set of activities and processes that involve the systematic attraction, identification, development, engagement, retention, and deployment of those talents which are of particular value to an organisation to create sustainable strategic success has become a critical issue in current organizations. Rapid technological change coupled with broader socioeconomic and demographic trends have created an increasing need for companies to face fierce competition in attracting, developing, and retaining the best talent. Despite the internationalization of TM ideas, its main principles and exemplary cases remain Anglo-Saxon, and little is known about how such ideas translate in other contextual settings. As such, this project pursues the following research goals:

Improve our understanding of talent management (TM) strategies adopted by large Spanish organizations. Specifically, what practices do these organizations implement to attract, develop, and retain their talent?
Analyze in further depth the TM strategies in place in two critical industries of the Spanish economy: hospitality and automotive.
Explore the barriers and facilitators, at a workplace level, concerning the effective implementation of TM practices.

In the first stage, the project will collect data from a stratified and representative sample of large Spanish organizations (with more than 250 employees) on the TM policies and practices that are in place in their organizations, as well as how the COVID19 pandemic has impacted them. The second stage of the project will carry out comparative case studies to capture the rich and complex realities about which we are enquiring. Cases will be equally drawn from the hospitality and automotive industries, both critical in the Spanish economy.

Finally, in the last stage of the project, we will design a multi-level model of effective TM practices implementation, which can be tested in a selected number of firms in the hospitality or automotive industries. Data will be collected both at the individual and group level, asking employees and middle managers. Through these actions we intend to map the reality of TM practice in large Spanish firms and critical industries, as well as to understand key success factors in putting TM strategies to work.

Ref.: PID2021-127560NB-I00
Principal Investigator: François Collet / Daniel Arenas
Research group: IIS-GRRSE
Funding body: Generación de Conocimiento 2021 Ministerio Ciencia e Innovación
Funding: 25.410,00 €
Duration: 36 months

Environmental management research shows that governance and regulatory organizations can be very slow at engaging with a new biophysical issue, losing precious time to fight key issues such as climate change. This is surprising given that experts working in these organizations are exposed to scientific research and responsible for developing the frameworks and plans that guide the management of natural resources and ecosystems. Deliberations within and around these organizations are a necessary and vital step in the development of strategies and action plans to address environmental problems. Our project aims to explain how and why new biophysical topics emerge in the deliberations of collaborative environmental governance organizations, and extend prior research on environmental governance.

The project will analyse the emergence of environmental topics in river basin governance organizations and society using topic modeling techniques, and investigate the mechanisms that cause changes in river basin governance organizations discourse using econometrics and word embeddings techniques. More specifically, the project, aims at investigating the following questions:

How and when do new biophysical issues emerge as topics in the deliberations of collaborative governance organizations?
Does discourse at a broader social level precedes or follow deliberations in river basin organizations?
What is the role of participants from different constituencies in the emergence of these topics?
What is the influence of international, national, regional political, economic, social and ecological factors in the evolution of discourse?
What can explain differences in discourse evolution observed across different collaborative governance organizations and countries?

The research results will advance our knowledge of processes that drive environmental topics emergence in collaborative environmental governance organizations; processes which affect whether society can respond in a timely manner to climate change emergencies.

Competitive projects

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Competitive projects

INTERNATIONAL

EUROPEAN UNION

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