Ricerc@Sapienza

This study sheds light on the relationship between business diversification and innovation. A diversification strategy is both a driver of sunk costs and strategic slack. Strategic slack is a valuable reserve of knowledge, usable to foster innovation. Using linear models, we explore the interplay between research and development (R&D) and organisational slack in large and diversified companies listed on the Euronext 100 Index. We consider the diversification pattern over time, and its interactions with the following three categories: sunk costs, slack resources, and R&D.

Analysing the entrepreneurial role of universities discussed by scholars, this paper is directed to investigate diversification and multinationalisation strategy of universities through the proposition of a single case study. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to discover the reasons that led our university case study to develop its strategy and the role of its intellectual capital in supporting the chosen strategy. Our case is investigated through Secundo et al.’s (2016) collective intelligence framework for universities.

Purpose: We investigate why entrepreneurial universities choose a particular business strategy focusing on diversification and multinationalisation, and the role of Intellectual Capital (IC) in supporting such strategies.
Design/methodology/approach: The research question is answered through an exploratory case study of the University of Bari, Italy. Data was collected from strategic plans, annual reports, national evaluation reports and semi-structured interviews with the university’s board members and analysed using Secundo et al.’s (2016) collective intelligence framework .

Phylogenetic turnover quantifies the evolutionary distance among species assemblages and is central to understanding the main drivers shaping biodiversity. It is affected both by geographic and environmental distance between sites. Therefore, analyzing phylogenetic turnover in environmental space requires removing the effect of geographic distance. Here, we apply a novel approach by deciphering phylogenetic turnover of European tetrapods in environmental space after removing geographic land distance effects.

We reconstructed phylogenetic relationships within the diverse parasitoid fly family Tachinidae using four nuclear loci (7800 bp) and including an exceptionally large sample of more than 500 taxa from around the world. The position of the earthworm-parasitizing Polleniinae (Calliphoridae s.l.) as sister to Tachinidae is strongly supported. Our analyses recovered each of the four tachinid subfamilies and most recognized tribes, with some important exceptions in the Dexiinae and Tachininae.