News

with Flavia Cau/Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

Presenter symposium at AOM for: Addressing grand societal challenges through unconventional leadership styles and novel organizing mechanisms

with Prof. Amos Witzthum/London School of Economics

Commons are increasingly at the center of public and scientific interest. Such communal forms of management of scarce resources are increasingly being attributed potential for solving current problems, for example under the keywords knowledge commons, global commons, common heritage or urban commons. In the context of this symposium, Dr. Anja Niedworok presented the project “Cooperatives in a changing world” as well as thoughts about resilience of cooperatives and mission drift.

As part of a two-day state visit to Switzerland, the Italian President stopped off at ETH Zurich on 30th of November in the company of President of the Swiss Confederation Ignazio Cassis. After a welcome by ETH President Joël Mesot and some words of greeting from the two guests, Italian researchers and students of the university provided an insight into their work. Prof. Stefano Brusoni presented his work he has done with collaborators on cooperatives in Italy.

In this impact chat, Marco Penazzi presented the social enterprise "Progetto Quid " to the TIM Group. Progetto Quid is a social enterprise that relies on a circular economy model developing new fashion items from textile leftovers of Italian fashion industry players. Likewise, the enterprise employs mainly women having a fragile social background. Thank you so much for this most interesting presentation Marco! 

In this seminar, Prof. Marya Besharov from Oxford Business School presented her work about “THE VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE WORK OF SUSTAINING COUNTER-NORMATIVE LEADERSHIP PRACTICES” to the TIM Group. Counter-normative approaches to leadership can be useful for addressing complex organizational and societal challenges, yet sustaining such approaches is difficult because they often meet with resistance. Drawing on an 8-year qualitative inductive study of a new CEO in a conglomerate social enterprise, they develop theory about how leaders sustain counter-normative practices over time. Thank you so much for this interesting presentation Marya!

How important is participation in cooperatives that left the initial stage and entered a more mature stage? How to design participation when the first wave of participant engagement is over? These were all questions of the workshop hold by Dr Anja Niedworok at the annual General Assembly of SENS. Digitalization offers the opportunity of developing new approaches for cooperative participation, but needs to be implemented properly by clear rules of communication, so the tenor of the participants.

The forum showed how diverse the social economy is in Switzerland. We look back on a day that was shaped and shaped by numerous people, non-profit organizations and social businesses from all language regions and a wide variety of industries. Dr Anja Niedworok was a panelist in the discussion "The future of cooperatives" sharing ideas of how cooperatives can address business and social goals.

Prof. Andreas Scherer, University of Zurich

On 2nd of May, the TIM group could welcome Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Andreas Georg Scherer for a lunch seminar. Prof Scherer is professor and head of the chair of Foundations of Business Administration and Theories of the Firm at University of Zürich. His lecture was about Grand Societal Challenges and Responsible Innovation and aimed to give answer on such questions: Why do we need responsible innovation? What means responsible innovation: concept and implications? What are sector-specific challenges? And what does it imply for responsible education? To achieve progress with the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) innovation is crucial. Business organizations are an important source of innovation and need to be integrated in the discussion of Grand Societal Challenges. Responsible innovation can facilitate this process. The internal governance structures of business firms need to be set up in such a way that it allows reflexivity and participation towards responsible innovation.