Research grants

• Ref: Offer number 146034
• Principal investigator: Eva Jané
• Research group: IIS-GRRSE
• Funding body: European Union
• Funding: 141.375,00€ (Total 1.399.014,00€)
• Duration: 30 months

This research study was funded as response to the Call for Tenders Chafea/2019/Health/05 concerning support to Member States in studies and capacity building activities to reduce alcohol related harm. The tender proposes an overarching integrating task that ensures a horizontal and practical approach throughout the project to continuously address alcohol within the frame of Health In All Policies and build the findings of the project on the broader framework of the Sustainable Development Goals. This approach will illustrate how we involve, leverage and develop expertise "outside the health sector" for the policy areas intrinsically linked with advancing reductions in alcohol related harm, and thus essential to have an effective member state capacity to deliver it. This overarching task is built in to ensure it answers and focuses on understand the complexity of the health in all policies approach in case of alcohol related harm and help them to implement integrated and effective harm reduction alcohol policies.

• Ref: GA 101004462
• Principal investigator: Jonathan Wareham
• Research group: Institute for Innovation and Knowledge Management (IIK)
• Funding body: European Commission
• Funding: 631.375€ (Esade)
• Total project funding: 35.000.000€
• Duration: 48 months

PROJECT DETAILS

• Ref: GA 962533
• Principal Investigator: Angel Saz
• Research group: EsadeGeo
• Funding body: European Union
• Funding: 198.072,42€ (Total 2.999.973,75€)
• Duration: 42 months

The ENGAGE (“Envisioning a New Governance Architecture for a Global Europe”) project advances the goals that are aligned with the European Commission’s push to have a stronger and more united European voice in the world.

The project aims to provide policymakers with a toolbox to improve the capabilities and capacities of the EU’s external action. More specifically, ENGAGE pursues the following 5 general objectives:

1. Analyse the main contextual challenges that the EU’s external action is facing, arising from the diversification of international relations and global governance, and those originating from the acceptability of EU external action from the perspective of citizens and national decisionmakers.
2. Assess existing governance structures and policy processes, those that are foreseen in the Treaties but are yet to come into fruition and those that should be devised in relation to the multiple domains of the EU’s external action.
3. Examine the ways in which the EU can more effectively achieve a set of key goals, including a successful engagement with strategic partners, neighbouring regions, and conflict and crisis scenarios.
4. Formulate recommendations, presented via a White Paper, on how to accommodate multiple action domains, including traditionally internal policy areas, in a joined-up, coherent, sustainable, and effective external action. Furthermore, ENGAGE will produce suggestions on how to coordinate EU Member States’ foreign policies on the basis of common EU positions.
5. Inform policymakers on the governance structures needed to ensure joined-up and sustainable EU diplomatic action and international cooperation. ENGAGE will also reach out to other key stakeholders and elaborate on how the EU can devise and ultimately achieve certain key goals in light of the current international and domestic context.

The collaborative research project is coordinated by Esade, with 13 partners from across Europe.

• Principal investigator: Lisa Hehenberger
• Research group: Esade Entrepreneur Institute (EEI)
• Funding body: European Union
• Funding: 127.085,00€ (Total 812.875,00€)
• Duration: 36 months

PROJECT DETAILS

• Ref: N/A
• Principal investigator: Carolina Villegas
• Research group: Group for Research in Economics and Finance (GREF)
• Funding body: EIBURS – European Investment Bank University Research Sponsorship
• Funding: €299,001.00 (Total)
• Duration: 36 months

PROJECT DETAILS

• Ref: EUOSHA/2021/0146/L0 – FWC
• Principal investigator: Annachiara Longoni
• Research group: Business Network Dynamics (BuNeD)
• Funding body: European Agency for Safety and Health at the Workplace (EU-OSHA)
• Funding: 52.990€
• Duration: 30 months

PROJECT DETAILS

• Ref: Grant agreement SRM #: 300004486
• Principal investigator: Ignasi Martí
• Research group: Institute for Social Innovation (IIS)
• Funding body: OECD Tender for Peer Learning Partnerships to promote SSE Ecosystems (RFQ 496)
• Funding: €31,500.00 Esade – 360.000€
• Total duration: 9 months

PROJECT DETAILS

• Ref: PID2020-116103GB-I00
• Principal investigators: Marc Esteve and Tamyko Ysa
• Research group: EsadeGov
• Ref: Funding body: Generación del Conocimiento 2020 - Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
• Funding: €64,493.00
• Duration: 36 months

PROJECT DETAILS

• Ref: PID2020-117315GB-I00
• Principal investigators: Marco Bertini and Oriol Iglesias
• Research group: Research Group on Judgements & Decisions in Marketplace (JUICE)
• Funding body: Generación del Conocimiento 2020 - Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
• Funding: €34,061.50
• Duration: 48 months

PROJECT DETAILS

• Ref: IN[21]_ECC_PSI_0104
• Principal investigator: Jordi Quoidbach
• Research group: Leadership Development Research Center (GLEAD)
• Funding body: BBVA Becas Leonardo 2021
• Funding: €40,000.00
• Duration: 18 months

PROJECT DETAILS

• Ref: PID2020-120013GB-I00
• Principal investigators: Calin Arcalean and Ioana Schiopu
• Research group: Group for Research in Economics and Finance (GREF)
• Funding body: Generación del Conocimiento 2020 - Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
• Funding: €36,300.00
• Duration: 36 months

PROJECT DETAILS

• Ref: ACM2020_15
• Principal investigator: Elia Marzal
• Research group: Patrimonial Law Group
• Funding body: Aristos Campus Mundus
• Funding: €2.800.00 €
• Duration: 12 months

PROJECT DETAILS

• Ref: PID2020-114247GB-I00
• Principal investigators:
• Research group:
• Funding body: Generación del Conocimiento 2020 - Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
• Funding: €26,862.00
• Duration: 36 months

PROJECT DETAILS

• Ref: PID2020-120428GB-I00
• Principal investigators: Tobias Hahn and Maja Tampe
• Research group: Institute for Social Innovation (IIS)
• Funding body: Generación del Conocimiento 2020 - Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
• Funding: €19,154.30
• Duration: 36 months

PROJECT DETAILS

• Ref: PID2020-112648GA-I00
• Principal Investigator: María José Parada & Jan Hohberger
• Other researchers: Xavier Mendoza, Alberto Gimeno, Paula Infantes, Mario Lara, Lina Eze, Cristina Alvarado (UAB), Mattias Nordqvist (Stockholm School of Economics), Leif Melin (Jönköping Univ.), Timo Pihkala (Lappeenrata-Lahti Univ.), Marita Rautiainen (Lut Univ.), Naveed Akhter (Jönköping Univ.) & Allan Discua (Univ. Of Lancaster)
• Funding body: Generación del Conocimiento 2020 - Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
• Funding: €27,757.40
• Duration: 36 months

Family businesses are considered engines of most economies, given their capacity to contribute to job creation and the development of their communities. Family businesses represented 90% of commercial companies in Spain and were responsible for 60% of gross added value and 70% of employment generated by the Spanish private sector as a whole (FBI, 2013). Despite the growing evidence of the importance of this type of organizations, we still have a long way to go to understand how they develop, grow, innovate

and use strategies to achieve long-term sustainability. One important caveat about the study of family businesses is that they are usually treated as single units.

However, many of them have grown over time and have developed several businesses, under the organizational form of Family Business Groups (FBGs). We define business groups as a set of firms linked together by formal ties such as ownership links- or informal ties such as family kinship- whose main aim is the shared use of common resources, both nationally and across countries. Although there have been advances on the understanding of FBGs, the area of FBGs offer some interesting avenues to explore. What is still unclear is the extent to which FBGs exist; the internal complexity they must manage in order to thrive; their growth strategies or how they innovate to transform their business models leading to sustainable performance.

We see the need to study more how FBGs overcome challenges that allow them to grow. In other words, how they develop their growth strategies to allow them to survive over time, cope with crises and create value for society. The project follows four main lines of research:

1. Unveiling FBGs and their complexity: aims at filling this knowledge gap by mapping FBGs in Spain and their growth strategies and exploring how do owners of FBGs manage their internal complexity.
2. Innovation strategies of FBGs. Understanding how these firms grow via internationalization and diversification strategies and analysing how these firms innovate is critical for understanding where they create value, how they create value and how they make it possible to survive in the long term.
3. Corporate governance in FBGs. Four main research questions regarding ownership and governance structures of FBGs are included in this research line: (1) analyzing the heterogeneity of different ownership structures of business groups, (2) understanding how business groups invest in foreign subsidiaries and the role of pyramidal ownership structures in entering new markets, (3) understanding the development of governance structures over time, and (4) studying the engagement of family members in the process of institutionalization of governance structures.
4. Understanding their sources and transmission of resilience for long-term Sustainability. We aim at expanding this important line of research by studying how resilience is transmitted across generations, understanding narratives as an important source for values transmission and resilience capacity.

• Ref: PID2020-114785GA-I00
• Principal investigator: Bilgehan Uzunca
• Research group: Esade Entrepreneurship Institute (EEI)
• Funding body: Generación del Conocimiento 2020 - Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
• Funding: €20,013.40
• Duration: 36 months

PROJECT DETAILS

• Ref: ACM2020_15
• Principal investigator: Teresa Duplá
• Research group: Conflict Management
• Funding body: Aristos Campus Mundus
• Funding: €3,700.00 €
• Duration: 12 months

PROJECT DETAILS

• Ref: 2021-URL-Proj-067
• Principal Investigator: Luca del Viva
• Funding body: Ajuts a l'activitat de recerca PDI 2021- URL
• Funding: €20,000.00
• Duration: 12 months

Firm's environmental impact has been at the center of the debates of policymakers, consumers, non-profit organization and central banks over the last five years after the 2015 Paris agreement. While many countries, also pushed by a growing concern and pressure of their local population, agreed on reducing the enviromental impact of their industries it is still not clear how such agreements will be indeed respected and how policies will be enforced in each country. In this regard, in order to guarantee a successful implementation of the proposals it appears of fundamental importance that the signed agreements and the proposed policies have the highest consensus among firms and consumers.

This project aims to study what are the effects on firm's profitability and catastrophic risk of being less environmently "costly". We measure the environmental impact of firms by using data from the Impact-Weighted Accounts Project website of Harvard Business School (Freiberg, Park, Serafeim and Zochowski (2021)). The dataset contains the environmental cost of 2,585 firms around the world from 2010 to 2019. The Environemntal costs dataset is combined with accounting and financial data obtained from Bloomberg, EIKON, COMPUSTAT and CRSP. Our preliminary evidence restricted to the US sample, indicates that firms with lower environmental impact have higher profitability (higher return on assets and return on equity), produce better stock return performances and have a lower likelihood of experiencing stock price crashes of -20% or lower.

• Ref: 2021-URL-Proj-068
• Principal Investigator: Anna Bayona
• Funding body: Ajuts a l'activitat de recerca PDI 2021- URL
• Funding: €5,000.00
• Duration: 12 months

How do credit rating agencies affect firm investments? Credit rating agencies have been criticized for playing a critical role in financial crises (e.g., the 2007 global financial crises) since they tend to inflate credit ratings and, as a result, risky investments get funded and this may lead to negative effects for the economy. However, credit rating agencies do provide some valuable information to investors even if credit ratings are inflated. We analyze a setting with feedback effects: the way investors respond to the rating affects the firm’s investment decision which impacts the firm’s credit quality which is in turn reflected in the credit rating. Theoretical studies show that the overall economic effects of credit rating agencies may be positive or negative depending on the economic environment and on the relationship between information and strategic effects.

However, real-market evidence of this mechanism is limited since it is often difficult to isolate the effect of credit ratings on firms’ investments. We plan to conduct a laboratory experiment in order to understand this mechanism. Our experiment will contribute to deepening our understanding of investor behavior and rating inflation in firms’ investments. The experiment consists of several treatments using a between-subject design. In the first treatment, there is no credit rating agency and investors have to take a decision with only private information. In the other treatments, there is a credit rating agency which provides a credit rating (with various degrees of accuracy) to investors. With these treatments we will be able to disentangle the effects of credit rating agencies on firms’ investment decisions and on the overall economy.

This is a joint project with Oana Peia (University College Dublin) and Razvan Vlahu (Central Bank of the Netherlands).

• Ref: 2021-URL-Proj-078
• Principal Investigator: Ivanka Visnjic
• Funding body: Ajuts a l'activitat de recerca PDI 2021- URL
• Funding: €11,000.00
• Duration: 12 months

Over the last two decades, product-service innovations have had a strong impact the competitiveness of manufacturing companies. Manufacturers that became successful in developing product-service innovations achieved sustained competitive advantage based on stronger customer relationships and, consequently, higher growth and profitability. More recently, digital technologies are starting to have a profound impact on this product-service advantage. To maintain their competitiveness based on product-service innovations, manufacturers need to gain access to digital technologies, such as Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. While the need for digital capabilities is evident, the question remains whether manufacturers should atttempt to become digital experts or collaborate to gain access to these capabilities.

The idea of collaborating to gain access to digital capabilities, popularized under the terms "external" or "ecosystem" approach, has been gaining traction recently. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether this is the right way forward for the manufacturers, what are the risks as well as how this ecosystem approach should be implemented. In line with this gap, we identified two specific objectives:

1. Objective 1: Deepen the understanding of the consequences that the internal or external development of the IPS has for organizations.
2. Objective 2: Determine the risk that the decision to develop a specific type of IPS has for organizations from a development perspective (internal, external, and alliance risk) and a service perspective (operational, dynamic and performance risk).

• Ref: 2021-URL-Proj-072
• Principal Investigator: Petya Platikanova
• Funding body: Ajuts a l'activitat de recerca PDI 2021- URL
• Funding: €15,000.00
• Duration: 12 months

Environmental considerations were once seen as tangential pieces of the business world. However, issues such as climate risk, water scarcity, extreme temperatures and carbon emissions are nowadays commonly accepted as a growing threat to the global economic growth and business practices are often scrutinized for their environmental sustainability.

Over the past decade, investors and consumers became more sensitive to topics related to environment, social and governance (ESG) solutions in leading and newly born business models. Despite the increasing level of awareness of ESG practices, we have limited knowledge how managers view, manage, communicate and commit to reduce the negative consequences of business activities in their communication with the investment community.

The objective of this project is to reveal the subtle nuances and cues in management communication with capital markets on topics related to environmental damage and risk management practices. The environmental risk revealed in business communications (i.e., a comprehensive data on questions by major stakeholders and answers from top managements) will be examined in relation to corporate investment and economic regulation for sustainable environmental impacts (e.g., quotas and pricing of carbon emissions). It is difficult to design effective policy responses to environmental risk caused/faced by corporations without precise information about how decision-makers view, manage and respond to those risk factors. The final results of this project will inform investors, policy-makers and the society in general about how business leaders effectively tackle the urgent demand to design, sustain and make dominant environmentally-friendly business practices, thus improving our knowledge which policy and business solutions may produce desirable results at a better pace.

• Ref: 2020-URL-IR2nQ-034
• Principal Investigator: Daniel Arenas
• Research group: IIS - GRRSE
• Funding body: Universitat Ramon Llull
• Funding: 14.045,00€
• Duration: 6 months

• Ref: 2020-URL-IR2nQ-031
• Principal Investigator: Anna Ginès
• Research group: IEL
• Funding body: Universitat Ramon Llull
• Funding: 7.845,00€
• Duration: 6 months

• Ref: 2020-URL-IR2nQ-038
• Principal Investigator: Ignasi Martí
• Research group: IIS - GRRSE
• Funding body: Universitat Ramon Llull
• Funding: 8.250,00€
• Duration: 6 months

• Ref: 2020-URL-IR2nQ-039
• Principal Investigator: Joan Rodon
• Research group: BUNED
• Funding body: Universitat Ramon Llull
• Funding: 5.000,00€
• Duration: 6 months

• Ref: 2020-URL-IR2nQ-043
• Principal Investigator: Vicenta Sierra
• Research group: BUNED
• Funding body: Universitat Ramon Llull
• Funding: 7.440,00€
• Duration: 6 months

• Ref: 2020-URL-IR2nQ-035
• Principal Investigator: Frank Wiengarten
• Research group: BUNED
• Funding body: Universitat Ramon Llull
• Funding: 13.680,00€
• Duration: 6 months

• Ref: 2020 DI 61
• Principal Investigator: Bingjie Ding - Xavier Ferràs
• Research group: JUICE-Esade D3
• Funding body: AGAUR
• Funding: 21.600,00€
• Duration: 38 months

• Ref: PRE2019-091668
• Principal Investigator: Ivanka Visnjic
• Research group: IIK
• Funding body: GENERACION DE CONOCIMIENTO 2019 – MICIU (Ministerio)
• Funding: 98.250,00 €
• Duration: 48 months

Prof. Ivanka Visnjic is joined by a PhD student funded by MICIU’s Formación Personal Investigador (FPI) Programme, to work on her research project SERSITEMICS. This project analyzes the relevance of systemic service innovations (IPS or “servitization”), its impact on the configuration of companies’ production processes organization, the role played by new product-service business models and new value propositions for obtaining competitive advantage, and the achievement of dominance position and greater income generation in the business ecosystems where firms operate.