The main objective of the conference is to support research, teaching and valorization of business studies that is able to enhance even a small part of its public value and in this sense increase its relevance. The conference wants to emphasise the importance of research that is able to impact the way in which academics, companies, managers, institutions and students use and interpret the results that we create, from time to time, with our research.
Sometimes, it is noticeable that among the generational spheres of researchers and also among those involved in research evaluation, great attention is rightly attributed to methodological rigour, which is not always balanced, however, by a similar importance assigned to the relevance of the topics and above all to the capacity of the results to generate real changes among the various actors in society. This is the challenge the conference aims to address: how much public value is research in the economic-business area, especially when conveyed through journals, able to create? Does it interest figures other than academics? And the now customary managerial implications, how much are they really taken into account? How many of our stakeholders are interested in the results of economic-business research and how many take them into account in their own decision-making and managerial processes?
All business studies are necessary to build and foster a constant development of the Society as a whole, of the Country System, an improvement in the competitiveness of businesses and, in general, a better sustainability and well-being of people. In this perspective, the following questions arise:
• When does research become ‘relevant’ to stakeholders?
• How to consider and measure the actual public value generated by business disciplines?
• How to foster value co-creation between academics and stakeholders?
• What factors really make academic research usable by institutional decision-makers (e.g. politicians, managers)? Which socio-economic contexts are most interested in business disciplines?
• What is the relevance of theory development in the corporate environment and how can it be integrated into the strategy implemented by stakeholders?
• With the continuous and increasingly rapid shift from written to visual and sensory representation, how can different tools be used to further enhance the results of corporate research?