A83222 Heritage and Competition

The student will be able to recognize how companies rely on their historical heritage referring to communication, strategy and identity.

By the end of the course, he or she will learn to analyze critically different actual cases of use of heritage and to suggest hypothesis of intervention based on corporate history.

The course will present the evolution on the long run of the Italian economy, underlying the path of development of the Made in Italy model.

The student will consider the complexity behind the relation between this model and its historical roots, analysing – from a critical perspective, and using some specific research tools – how companies understand and manage their heritage.

The student will be required to understand how heritage could be relevant for present and future strategies and how it would be possible to approach this topic from different perspectives. 

Some basic notions of international business history and good knowledge of the Italian case will be required as essential at the end of the course.

The course develops 4 different interrelated modules:

1) Corporate heritage: theory and application

The module will explain how the knowledge of the past is useful to understand the firm and how heritage is a component of corporate identity with peculiar features (unique, not imitable, time-related). This part will show also some cases of companies which encompass heritage in their strategies.

2) Italy: from Industrial revolution to Made in Italy

Italy is a good case study to understand how production models differ among countries and over the time. The module will show the evolution of Italian economy presenting different paradigms of industrialization and their application in the country: First Industrial revolution model, Fordism, SMEs...

3) Made in Italy debucked

Very often the relationship between made in Italy and Italian productive tradition is presented in a very simplistic way: aim of the third module is to underly the complexity behind the bond – very relevant – between Made in Italy and heritage. The lesson will guide the students to consider topics such as innovation VS tradition,continuity VS discontinuity, authenticity, taking into account actual cases.

4) Case of the year

Every year the course will devote a relevant amount of hours to the study of a single corporate case in deep. The company choose for the year 2013-14 will be communicated at the beginning of the lessons. The student will be invited to consider the story of the company, its context, how it manages and uses its heritage. The module is designed, as much as possible, as an activity 'on the field'.

The course asks to the student a serious commitment toward active learning. Participation to the lessons is mandatory and students who would miss some class are required to catch up autonomously with the topics presented (the instructor is always available for suggestions).

During the lessons, lecturing is kept to a minimum and students are invited to participate to group activities and debates. At the beginning of the course, readings used in each lesson will be scheduled.

A very important feature of the course is the direct contact with corporate heritage: original documents (written, video, pictures) will be therefore presented during the activities, guest speakers will be invited and field trips will be part of the course.

Due to the need of a direct contact with original documents, part of the material used during the activities will be in Italian only: to overcome linguistic problems, student will work in groups composed by both native Italian speakers and international students (multi-cultural experience is encouraged also for a better understanding of the topic).

Many details will be presented during the introductory lesson of the course: attendance to it is WARMLY recommended.

Group activities are planned in many classes: to easy the organization, students will belong to the same group during the whole of the course and for the final paper (groups will be sorted, 3-5 persons). It is very important to form the groups at the very beginning of the course (anyway, by the 4th lesson) and to maintain them stable all along its duration. Students who take the course as an elective, must therefore join the class - and a group - by October the 3rd.

Some other courtesy rules:

• Arrive in class on time; do not leave early without prior explicit instructor’s approval

• Please switch-off mobiles, tablets and laptops: if you need to take notes, please use pen & paper, it is very important that you would participate to the in-class activities without any element of distraction (for you and for your classmates).

• Students need to read assigned material BEFORE the lesson when it is scheduled (if not diversely specified).

• After 2 warnings, instructor has the right to ask to leave to students who – in his opinion – are disturbing class.

• Uncooperative attitude (refuse to take part to the work, unacceptable behavior towards fellow students etc.) inside the group will be sanctioned in the final score.

• Attempt of cheating or plagiarism during assessment will be severely sanctioned, following the LIUC University's ethic code.

A complete list of readings (scheduled) will be presented at the beginning of the lessons. This material will be available at the Library or through the Internet.

The readings and the documents distributed to the students during classes are required for the assessment.

Some sources of the material used during the course (list provisional and not exhaustive, pages indication will follow):

• F. Amatori and A. Colli, Business History: Complexities and Comparisons (Routledge, 2011)
• S. Brown, Marketing: The Retro Revolution (SAGE, 2001)
• M. Montemaggi and F. Severino, Heritage marketing. La storia dell'impresa italiana come vantaggio competitivo (Franco Angeli, 2007)
• A. Colli and A. Rinaldi, Institutions, Politics and the Corporate Economy, University of Siena, Dep. of Economics and Statistics, WP n. 664 (Nov 2012); available at: http://www.econ-pol.unisi.it/quaderni/664.pdf
• G. Ferré, Lessons in Fashion (Marsilio, 2009)
• D. Weinberger, Authenticity: Is It Real or Is It Marketing?, in «Harvard Business Review», 29:9 (March 2008).

Students are invited to consider assessment as a tool to check their learning all along the course rather than as a system to assign grades. The final result will be the sum of individual and group tests:

• Module 1-2: individual written test, from 0 to 10 points. The exam will be a multiple choice test, aiming to check the comprehension of the basis of the course (theory and Italian business history)
• Module 3-4: group final paper (1500-2000 words), from 0 to 15 points. Every group will present a report concerning the case analyzed in Module 4. It is required to students to put the case into its context and to compare it with other experiences presented during the course (mostly Module 3), producing original comments and suggestion (an evaluation grid and examples will be presented during the course).
• During the whole duration of the course, some short unexpected individual flash-quizzes (1 written open question each one) will reward attendance and will check key points about reading or previous lessons. They will award from 0 to 5 points.

Points awarded for the elective Laboratory (-2 to +4) will be sum up to in the final grade. See Laboratory web-page for further information.

Points exceeding 30 will be considered for “distinction” (30 e lode)

Students who will fail to reach the minimum of 18 on 30 in the assessments during the course, will be allow to present an individual research paper to recover the result (it is required to plan topic and deadline with the instructor, the grade awarded for the paper – from 0 to 30 – will substitute EVERY previous score).