Emilio Paolucci among the winners of the IGL Annual Research Prizes

This set of awards recognizes and celebrates excellent experimental research in the fields of science, innovation, and productivity: these are the IGL Annual Research Prizes, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which promote studies capable of expanding the boundaries of the sector, both through innovative research questions and cutting-edge methodologies. These awards also seek to highlight the potential positive impacts of research on state policies and the importance of the experimental approach in addressing the challenges of our time.

Emilio Paolucci, professor at the Department of Management and Production Engineering-DIGEP, is therefore among this year's winners: his study “A scientific approach to entrepreneurial decision-making: Large-scale replication and extension”, published in the Strategic Management Journal together with Arnaldo Camuffo, Alfonso Gambardella, Danilo Messinese, Elena Novelli, and Chiara Spina, was recognized as the best experimental article for its originality of approach and significance of content.

The presented research, which replicates a previous 2020 study on a large scale, involved 759 companies in four experiments to obtain new and more precise results on the implications of adopting a scientific approach in entrepreneurship. The results thus show how this approach increases the efficiency in the search and selection of ideas in entrepreneurial decisions: the involved companies indeed showed a tendency to discontinue invalid ideas and to moderately address significant and planned changes in the company's direction to adapt to new market information. In general, it was found that the scientific approach can stimulate methodical doubt among company workers, thus leading to more careful and informed final decisions.

“This award testifies to the growing quality of research at PoliTO on innovation processes, particularly entrepreneurship-based ones,” comments Professor Paolucci. “This work shows how a scientific approach allows for the selection of technologies with greater development potential, thanks to a different structure of decision-making processes”.