Italian Public Universities Research Articles

Do exploration and exploitation in university research drive early-stage equity financing of university spin-offs?

An emerging theme in the entrepreneurial university (EU) literature is how universities should evolve to best reconcile their different missions, particularly research and commercialization, which often require different sets of resources. This tension is evident in the development of university spin-offs (USOs). In particular, the EU literature has generally overlooked how characteristics of university research affect USO’s early-stage access to external equity. In this study, we embrace the characterization of university research offered by literature in terms of patterns, specifically, exploration and exploitation. Through the lens of the imprinting perspective, we study the effect of exploration and exploitation in university research on the early-stage equity financing of USOs on a unique dataset that covers a sample of 739 USOs from 39 Italian public universities founded from 2011 to 2019. Our results indicate that exploration (exploitation) in research has an overall positive (negative) impact on the likelihood of USOs obtaining early-stage external equity financing. Additionally, this exploratory study offers several conceptual and practical contributions to the EU literature.

The effect of board gender diversity on financial and non-financial performance: evidence from Italian public universities

IMPACT This article focuses on the value of board diversity in the university context, demonstrating the importance of ensuring that women are represented in top management teams and boards to promote good governance and superior financial performance. The findings should be used to promote gender equality and balance at all political and economic decision-making levels and to stimulate the debate on the reasons for female under-representation. Universities should be mandating a gender quota for their boards to improve overall performance.

Gender Equality Plan: An Explorative Analysis of Italian Academia

Since 2015, the European Union, always sensitive to gender issues, has been recommending and actively supporting the implementation of the Gender Equality Plan (GEP) in academic and research organisations: a set of commitments and actions that aim to promote gender equality through a process of structural change. Moreover, the European Commission recognises GEPs as an eligibility criterion for participation in all Horizon Europe calls for research and innovation. Gender issues in academia are particularly topical in Italy. According to the last Global Gender Gap Report, in terms of economic participation and opportunities, Italy ranks 110th out of a total of 146 states, after several developing countries. In the country, even though women outnumber men among graduate students, a strong inequality in superior grades of the academic careers persists. In compliance with Decree No. 2/2019, and in line with EU-COM No.152/2020, Italian universities are required to adopt a GEP, which identifies the strategy of individual universities for gender equality. Consequently, most Italian universities have implemented their first GEP edition in last two years. Despite the growing attention to gender issues in academia, studies on GEP implementation and content are still scarce. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the implementation of GEPs in Italian universities by responding to the following research question: (RQ1) What is the state of the art about GEPs in Italian universities? Content analysis will be employed to identify to what extent universities have disclosed the information related to their GEPs. The study consists of the analysis of the total population of 67 Italian public universities that have been drafted referring to the period 2019-2025 (except for one GEP drawn up for 2015-2021). Results highlight that most universities easily disclose information on goals, actions, beneficiaries and institutional members and that universities seem to have difficulties in identifying the subjects operationally involved in the plan implementation, the financial resources and the expected results of the policies adopted for each action. This paper is original for two reasons. First, it provides insights into GEPs as a novelty strategic tool. Second, it represents the first empirical study that provides an overview of the GEPs’ structure and contents, with a focus on Italian academia.

Online sustainability disclosure practices in the university context. The role of the board of directors

PurposeThe study aims to examine the impact of corporate governance in terms of certain board characteristics on the level of universities’ voluntary sustainability disclosure.Design/methodology/approachA content analysis based on a comprehensive disclosure index – that also accounts for the impact that COVID-19 exerted on the social dimension of university activities – is performed on a sample of Italian public universities’ websites for the year 2020. An ordinary least squares regression model is estimated to test the association between universities’ board characteristics, namely, board size, board independence and board gender diversity (including the presence of a female rector), and online sustainability disclosure.FindingsThis study provides evidence that websites represent a valid tool used by universities to highlight their social performance and demonstrate their commitment to dealing with the pandemic’s social and economic disruption by supporting their stakeholders. Board gender diversity and female Rector’s presence are crucial factors that positively impact voluntary sustainability disclosure levels.Practical implicationsPolicymakers and regulators can benefit from the study’s findings. Using the results of this study, they may reflect on the need to regulate sustainability reporting in universities. In addition, findings may offer policymakers inspiration for regulating the presence of women on university boards.Originality/valueThis study offers novel contributions to existing literature analysing the university’s voluntary sustainability disclosure practices through alternative communication tools such as websites. Moreover, it provides novel insight into the role of the board gender diversity in university sustainability disclosure practices.

Double standards? Co-authorship and gender bias in early-stage academic evaluations

Abstract This article studies gender bias in early-stage academic evaluations in Italy and investigates whether this bias depends on various types of authorship in collaborative work across three academic fields: humanities, economics, and social sciences. We test our hypotheses via a factorial survey (vignette) experiment on a sample from the entire population of associate and full professors employed at Italian public universities in 2019. This is one of the few experiments conducted with university professors to consider hiring propensities in academia. Contrary to our general expectations, we do not find gender bias in relation to co-authorship in our general population of interest. However, the results provide some evidence that when the evaluator is a man, highly collaborative women academics in Italy receive less favourable evaluations of their qualifications compared to male colleagues with identical credentials. This gender bias is found in economics, a field where the conventions of co-authorship allow for greater uncertainty about individual contributions to a joint publication.

Intellectual capital and R&D performance improvement: the case of Italian public universities

This paper aims to develop a model to analyse and improve the performance of R&D activities in Italian public universities through the intellectual capital (IC) perspective. The extant literature includes several models for R&D analysis, but none quantify the link between IC and universities' research activity performance. This research attempts to fill a gap in knowledge by explicitly focusing on the relationship between IC according to its dimensions and universities' research activity performance. To achieve this aim, we develop a theoretical model and test the model using secondary data from all the Italian public universities through the structural equation modelling method. The findings show that small universities with a good level of relations with external organisations, a good level of internationalisation and solid infrastructure have a higher level of scientific productivity than larger universities that are less internationalised and invest less in infrastructure.

Sustainability Reporting at a Crossroads in Italian Universities: Is Web-Based Media Adoption Deinstitutionalising Sustainability Reporting?

Higher education institutions and universities have recently started to publish their sustainability and corporate responsibility reports. Yet, due to digitalisation and the benefits of digital reporting, websites offer organisations novel opportunities to communicate more updated, timely and interactive information than a periodic sustainability report. However, we know little about sustainability reporting practice within universities and their use of online communication. This study examines the relationship between sustainability reporting practices and web-based communication practices in Italian universities. We employed a qualitative enquire and content analysis of the sustainability web pages of Italian public universities by analysing their content and updates and their relationship with their adoption of sustainability reporting. Our results suggest there are risks to web-based media being used to replace sustainability reporting, resulting in a deinstitutionalising effect for sustainability reporting. This study contributes to the literature on sustainability reporting and disclosure in universities by exploring web-based university communication on sustainability issues and stimulating the debate on replacing sustainability reports with more timely and interactive forms of communication.

Social Media for Engaging and Educating: From Universities’ Sustainability Reporting to Dialogic Communication

Traditionally, universities are committed to the missions of conducting research and teaching. Recently, they were also called to contribute to supporting sustainable development in society. Many universities worldwide have experienced sustainability and social reporting practices to demonstrate their commitment to sustainability. However, while sustainability reporting represents the primary means to communicate this commitment externally, research has barely unveiled how universities use other communication technologies, such as social media. This study investigates how universities use social media to engage their stakeholders in their sustainability initiatives and how this is associated with their sustainability reporting practices. We examine some best practices from Italian public universities, which, in addition to their experience in sustainability reporting, use social media (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) to create a dialogue with their stakeholders about sustainability. We find that sustainability reporting is often the seed to instil innovative means for stakeholder engagement through social media. The universities with long-standing and continuous sustainability reporting experience use social media to enhance their communication, engage stakeholders and thereby improve their sustainability reporting practices. More worthily, we find that social media is also used as an educational tool to make people aware and foster a culture of sustainability in society.

Universities’ Social Responsibility through the Lens of Strategic Planning: A Content Analysis

This paper examines the degree of social responsibility integration in Italian public universities’ medium and long-term planning documents. We adopted a qualitative approach, applying the content analysis technique to a selected sample of 20 strategic plans issued by Italian large and mega universities. The coding instrument was developed considering the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) contained in the United Nations 2030 Agenda. Therefore, we identified 17 categories and 103 key symbols. The analysis undertaken showed that to date, Italian public universities still pay little attention in their planning documents to objectives regarding the multiple dimensions of Social Responsibility, mainly in relation to environmental issues, a failure detrimental to University Social Responsibility implementation and achievement. However, there is a greater sensitivity to Social Responsibility issues in some universities’ planning documents, therefore also more mature practices can be identified, showing universities that have institutionalized the concept of sustainability in their planning documents.

The mediating role of relational capital for the academic performance effect of IC: the influence of digital technologies

PurposeDifferent mechanisms allow intellectual capital (IC) to affect performance. This paper aims to analyze the value of relations for the academic performance effect of IC and explore how the university’s reliance on digital technologies facilitates the contribution of IC to the overall academic performance.Design/methodology/approachThe authors develop a model linking elements of IC to academic performance in the form of teaching, research and entrepreneurial activity. The model is centered on relational capital (RC) that is supposed to directly fuel performance and mediate the link between the other two IC dimensions and performance. From a methodological point of view, the authors base the empirical investigation on a sample of Italian public universities and applied structural equation modeling to test the mediation and a group comparison to disentangle the effect of universities’ digitalization.FindingsThe authors find a significant and positive effect of RC on performance. RC fully mediates the relationship between structural capital and academic performance, whereas it only partially mediates the link between human capital and academic performance. The authors also suggest that digital technologies guide the prominence of the relationship in the university’s ability to fulfill teaching, research and entrepreneurship missions through IC.Originality/valueThis study offers a representation of how the relational dimension of IC is the mean through which the stock of knowledge inside IC can be translated into entrepreneurial, education and research achievements and how digital technologies are essential for the exploitation of the performance effect of IC in the digital era.

Unveiling the link between performance and Intellectual Capital disclosure in the context of Italian Public universities

This work aims to explore the relationship between academic performance and voluntary Intellectual Capital (IC) disclosure in the context of Italian Public Universities. This study applies a content analysis to investigate the extent of voluntary Intellectual Capital disclosure (ICD) provided through performance reports by a sample of 59 Italian public universities. Four multivariate regression models are estimated to examine the associations between academic performance and the level of ICD and its sub-components, namely Human Capital, Structural Capital and Relational Capital. The content analysis findings show that Italian public universities place a high value on disclosing human capital information. The results based on the multivariate analysis confirm the view that, in the case of higher performance, Italian Public Universities tend to convey a greater extent of information on both IC and its sub-components. This study broadens the scope of mainstream ICD literature's actions by bringing new expertise about the interconnections between university performance and voluntary ICD provided via performance reports. Connecting university performance to ICD can enhance the practical and theoretical understanding of the role that ICD may exert for universities to signalling their excellence and explain to stakeholders how they create value and achieve superior performance, focusing on their strategic - IC-based resources.

Investigating Web-Based Sustainability Reporting in Italian Public Universities in the Era of Covid-19

Universities are increasingly called to demonstrate to stakeholders their active commitment to responding to social and environmental issues through comprehensive reporting practices. Such expectations were further enhanced by the recent pandemic outbreak unleashed by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which has bolstered social pressures on universities to demonstrate their active engagement in supporting health systems in fighting against the virus as well as in ensuring adequate e-learning paths for students. Therefore, this study aims to investigate to what extent Italian public universities disclose sustainability information on their websites. The study is based on a well-established framework adapted from the literature. The category “Sustainability and COVID-19” has been added to also examine the extent to which universities disclose information regarding policies and strategies adopted to cope with the ongoing pandemic crisis. Results evidence that most of the sampled universities devote a specific section of their websites to disclose information on sustainability issues. Results also highlight a strong commitment to the disclosure of social issues. Particular attention is devoted to disclosing information about “Social Performance”; “Sustainability and COVID-19” and “Society Issues”. The results may be beneficial to both policymakers and university governors in gaining awareness about the potential of websites in engendering insights into the social issues that involve a university and a wider range of stakeholders.

Assessing the Intellectual Capital and Related Performance in the Teaching Process using FES models: first evidence in Italian Universities

Our study provides to define two frameworks of indicators to assess both the Intellectual Capital (IC) employed in the Educational Process in the University sector and the Performance Educational Process reached. The scope is to obtain two tools for measuring, on the one hand, the level and the determinant variables of the IC that represents the input of the Educational Process. On the other hand, the level and the determinant variables of the outcome of the Educational Process. The comparison of the tools scores allows you to understand if at a high level of Educational Performance corresponds to a high level of IC trying to evaluate the ability of the IC to create value. The research questions are answered using a quantitative methodology using the FES models. We define two models to measure the IC Educational Index and Educational Performance. We construct the FES models in compliance with the previous literature on the IC and the theoretical model report of the Intellectual Capital of the Austrian Universities. To define the frameworks of indicators to assess the IC Educational Index and the Educational Performance we use, compliant to the previous literature, the SMA Indicators required by the AVA-MIUR for Italian University Sector. We collected 30 Italian public Universities. Thus, we determined and compared both the IC Educational Index and its determinants and Educational Performance Score and its determinants. Our main result is the construction of two toolboxes to assess the level of IC and the connected Performance of the Educational Process in the University sector. The findings suggest which are the indicators to improve the IC Index or the Educational Performance Score for an in-depth understanding of the value creation process.The paper is novel because it contributes to the literature examining the model to measure both the IC employed in the Educational Process and the Educational Performance. Moreover, comparing the resultant scores, we investigated the relation between input and output in the Educational value creation.

Moving from Social and Sustainability Reporting to Integrated Reporting: Exploring the Potential of Italian Public-Funded Universities’ Reports

Over recent years, the meaning of accountability has evolved and has reshaped what public sector institutions are expected to account for and how. Consequently, a large number of initiatives have emerged promoting non-financial reporting. In this context, public universities have started to experiment with sustainability reporting initiatives, but these efforts are still limited and challenged by the parallel development of multiple forms of reporting, which include integrated reporting (IR). IR has been interpreted as a further step in the reporting journey, suitable for representing the creation of public value and addressing accountability pressures. The current research aims at understanding if and how IR constitutes a feasible next step for improving the reporting practices of public universities. For this purpose, the research carries out a content analysis of social or sustainability reports written by a number of Italian public universities to find out which of the key elements of IR have already been included in such reports. Results show that some of those elements are already included, but often in a fragmented and non-homogeneous way. The findings pave the way for further considerations on how the potential adoption of IR may strengthen the value of social and sustainability reporting by integrating the information reported in different documents, fostering toward a bureaucracy that is more sustainable and providing more opportunities of innovation in reports on public sector organizations’ accountability.

Corporate social responsibility, stakeholder engagement, and universities: New evidence from the Italian scenario

AbstractThis paper aims at analyzing the connection among the corporate social responsibility (CSR), stakeholder engagement and universities, proposing the analysis of universities' financial reporting to draft their third mission and social impact. Particularly, our analysis is based on the sensitivity demonstrated by the Italian public universities in terms of transparency on issues of social responsibility with reference to the heritage assets' reporting and disclosure. We used a qualitative methodology, adopting the content analysis to collect data from the financial reporting of all Italian public universities. Our findings show as heritage assets represent the strategic area for the assessment of the third mission and social impact by the Italian universities even if the level of their disclosure seems low. Evidence of our paper is directed to support the academic community, practitioners, and policymakers proposing a new theoretical and practical advance of the CSR and stakeholders engagement' studies.

The Integrated Plan in Italian public universities: new patterns in intellectual capital disclosure

Purpose The present research aims to analyse the extent to which Italian public universities disclose intellectual capital (IC) information through the Integrated Plan and the main features of IC disclosure (ICD) in terms of form and location in the document. Design/methodology/approach Adopting a qualitative methodology, a content analysis is conducted to examine the level, form and location of ICD provided by a sample of 60 Italian public universities through the 2018-2020 integrated plans. Findings The results show a medium level of ICD in the Integrated Plan, with human capital being the category most disclosed. Information is principally provided in a quantitative form and is mainly found in the first two sections of the document (i.e. relating to the strategic framework and organisational performance). Research limitations/implications The analysis is necessarily limited to a single period (2018-2020), because of the recent introduction of the guidelines of the Integrated Plan. However, the results may be beneficial to policymakers in determining the usefulness of this new tool in detecting information about intangible resources and can help universities’ governors and managers in defining adequate IC strategies to create value for the whole ecosystem. Originality/value The study makes an innovative contribution to the international debate about IC in universities in light of the fourth stage of IC research, exploring an emerging tool to detect whether it is able to convey IC information to the wide range of university stakeholders and to communicate the value universities contribute to society.

15 Years of Stanca Act: Are Italian Public universities websites accessible?

With the increasing spread and usage of Internet technologies, the challenge of ensuring Web accessibility for all, including anyone with a form of disability, has become an hot issue, pursued both by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and by governments in different countries. In particular, W3C has developed technical Web accessibility guidelines (WCAG), while governments have legally addressed the problem, by emanating specific laws and policies. In Italy, the Stanca Act, a law regulating the design and creation of governmental and public sector websites, recently updated according to last WCAG 2.1 was enacted in 2004. To analyze its impact, this paper presents a study about the accessibility of Italian public universities websites, by particularly analyzing their conformance to the Stanca Act. The reported analysis shows that, despite that the Stanca act dates back 15 years ago, Italian public universities are still struggling to satisfy all its requirements.

Accountability through intellectual capital disclosure in Italian Universities

This paper aims to investigate intellectual capital disclosure (ICD) provided by Italian public universities in their annual reports and to identify and examine its drivers. An empirical analysis of annual reports of Italian public universities for the year 2014 is conducted through content analysis. The information retrieved from this forms the basis for regression analysis (OLS model) to relate the disclosure index to its drivers which include governance features, financial performance and control variables. The empirical analysis shows that human and internal (organisational) capital are the most disclosed categories of intellectual capital. The results also show that board independence and university size positively affect ICD in Italian public universities. The methodology adopted in this study could be replicated for other countries to obtain a better understanding of how ICD can help meet stakeholder information needs. The results provide a useful basis for further investigation into ICD drivers and influences and may also enable regulators and standard setters to better understand and regulate IC practices in universities.

Student mobility in higher education: Sicilian outflow network and chain migrations

The Italian public universities are subsidised within a competitive framework that awards excellence, efficiency, and the capacity of universities to attract students from Italian regions other than its own. However, repeated cuts to public spending has increased the well-known Italian North-South divide. The most important student mobility (SM) flow is from the Southern to the Central-Northern regions--a phenomenon that has been magnified by an increasing number of outgoing students from Sicily over the last decade. In this paper, we rely upon micro-data of university enrolment and students' personal records for three cohorts of freshmen, in order to investigate preferential patterns of SM from Sicily toward universities in other regions. Indeed, our main goal is to eventually reveal the existence of chain migrations, through which students from a particular geographical area move towards a particular destination. We consider 38 clusters aggregating the 390 Sicilian municipalities, based on geographical proximity and socio-economic criteria. The data from each cohort is represented as a tripartite network with three sets of nodes, namely, clusters of Sicilian municipalities, students, and universities. The tripartite network is projected in a bipartite weighted network of clusters and universities, which is, then, filtered, in order to obtain a statistically validated bipartite network (SBVN). The SBVNs of the three cohorts suggest the existence and evolution of chain migration patterns over time, which are also gender specific.

Drawing up codes of ethics of higher education institutions: evidence from Italian universities

PurposeHigher education institutions draw up codes of ethics, but in several countries there are no standards to follow. Most universities have autonomy and can freely draw up their codes of ethics in terms of structure and content. The purpose of this paper is to understand the main ethics issues that universities identify in their codes of ethics and what activities they implement to respond to these issues toward appropriate educational management of their institutions in ethical terms.Design/methodology/approachThis study was performed through content analysis of codes of ethics of Italian public universities (64 codes), and may be considered a single in-depth case study. The main ethics issues and related activities were inductively codified in relation to the research purpose. The four constitutive aspects of business ethics (individual, managerial, organizational and societal ethics) proposed by Melé were chosen as the framework to investigate the main ethical needs and related activities implemented by universities to respond to these ethical issues.FindingsThis research has identified nine main ethical issues and related activities that contribute to guarantee the ethical compliance of universities under the four interrelated aspects different individual behaviors, managerial initiatives, organization strategies and responsibilities toward society. The analysis shows some relevant differences among Italian universities that have important implications in the ethical vision of academic communities and of managerial role in universities.Practical implicationsThe research can help managers of higher education institutions to identify the main ethical issues to draw up codes of ethics and to formulate consistent development strategies that are able to improve the conditions of collaboration, work and productive participation in activities for all members of academic communities.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies that connect codes of ethics and higher education. This research brings to light the main ethical issues and related activities that universities can consider to orient their strategic choices toward the public interest as well as educational management improvement.