In a recent California Management Review article we review what impact we shall expect COVID19 will have on Global Value Chains on how to interpret the transformations that are taking place. Here the incipit of the LSE Blog that discuss on it.

“Far from uprooting the system, Covid-19 is bringing in a renaissance period which will result in transformed, and in some areas stronger, value chains which will deepen the roots of globalisation.

Introduction

The relentless onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic has stressed our social and economic institutions in an unprecedently profound and pervasive manner. Who would have thought in the BC (Before COVID) era that globalisation, the core tenet of modern economic structures, would come under such intense scrutiny? Who would have thought that global value chains, which have enabled products made thousands of miles apart flow without interruption to consumers, would come to be viewed as a serious threat to human well-being?

To be sure, concerns about globalisation and global value chains are as old as the phenomena themselves, but these concerns had generally remained confined to the intellectual sphere with occasional seepages into political campaigns. The onset of COVID-19 steeply scaled up the anti-globalisation rhetoric and brought it in the public sphere. Calls for rethinking how countries should organise global value chains to reduce heavy reliance on foreign suppliers became all too common. Some commentators even hastened to write obituaries of global value chains. But are phenomena such as empty toilet paper shelves evidence of globalisation being wiped out?

Our answer to this question is an unequivocal ’No’, though in the same breath we add that globalisation will not be the same in the post-COVID era. Some – nontrivial – changes in global value chains are imminent. As a broad statement, we think that robustness, resilience, and social justice will be three critical pillars of global value chains in the future. Overall, we envision that COVID-19 will result in transformed – and perhaps even stronger – value chains, which will deepen the roots of globalisation rather than uproot it. “

Read the full text of the LSE blog article here: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/gild/2022/05/09/covid-19-will-transform-not-break-global-value-chains/

In the recent years, Global Value Chains became a widely adopted framework by academics and practitioners – providing theoretical concepts and analytical tools to understand and assess patterns of value creation in view of the new international division of labour.

This article offers a comprehensive and systematic review of the literature on GVCs, describing the evolution over time of GVC studies along the four key dimensions of the GVC framework: geographical and industrial scope, governance, upgrading, and institutional context. Additionally it offers insights into how the GVC literature can support the International Business literature, highlighting point of contacts and avenues for future research.

For more info: V De Marchi, E Di Maria, R Golini, A Perri (2020) Nurturing international business research through global value chains literature: A review and discussion of future research opportunities, International Business Review

This paper contributes to the debate on the differences across service and manufacturing firms focusing on two comparable sectors: knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS), and specialized manufacturing suppliers (SSM) and looking at what drives their innovation performance.

Our findings show that the impact of R&D is comparable in the two sectors, whereas cooperation with customers is more important for SSM than for KIBS because the latter are rather more reliant on a larger network of partners (especially knowledge providers). For both sectors, the role of cooperation vanishes when performance is measured in terms of the proportion of sales generated by innovation rather than propensity for innovation.

For more info: Cainelli G., De Marchi V. & Grandinetti R.(2020) Do knowledge-intensive business services innovate differently?, Economics of Innovation and New Technology, 29:1, 48-65

📽 Video Abstract

Online the book chapter “Social Entrepreneurship and Upgrading in Emerging Economies: The Indian Case of Industree and Its Brand Mother Earth”

If we have been used to think to sustainability as leaded by developed countries’ firms, with this case we aim at keeping the discussion going on the increasing role of developing countries firms – rising powers – not just from an economic standpoint but also from a sustainability one. Indeed, we describe how the company successfully managed to implement a socially (and to a lesser extent environmentally) sustainable supply chain, supporting the upgrading of their local suppliers, mostly poor artisans living in the countryside.

More info at: Bettiol M., De Marchi V., Di Maria E. (2018) Social Entrepreneurship and Upgrading in Emerging Economies: The Indian Case of Industree and Its Brand Mother Earth. In: Leal-Millan A., Peris-Ortiz M., Leal-Rodríguez A. (eds) Sustainability in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Innovation, Technology, and Knowledge Management. Springer, Cham

Today the paper “Regional Innovation Systems or Innovative regions? Evidence from Italy“, which I co-authored with Roberto Grandinetti has been released by Tijdschrift.

In this article we delve into the discussion of what drives the innovativeness of regions, studying the performance of all Italian regions via the perspective of the RIS (regional innovation systems) literature.

Why are some districts well on the road to decline, while others have succeeded in evolving and reproducing the district form? In this paper, we seek an answer to this question by studying Italian wine clusters, supporting that the global value analysis perspective is useful in order to see where Italian industrial districts are heading and suggesting the powerful role of “communications machines” played by non-manufacturing intermediaries within what could be named glocal value chains.