A15005 Business Heritage

Referring to actual business cases, the Student will develop the skills to:

• Understand if a company possesses the capability/opportunity/advantage to pursue a heritage-based strategy
• Distinguish the elements of a corporate narrative which reflect the Present's vision from  the ones more pertinent to the Past's perspective
• Suggest some tools and strategies aiming to accomplish a heritage-conscious strategy

The Student will be able to understand and explain to his/her peers:

• The meaning of "heritage" in an academic and business context
• How different companies or industries approach the topic of their Past
• The differences among issues such as history, heritage, nostalgia, authenticity.

The course will present the topic of the firm as an entity which endures across time and, then, creates a heritage. Is this a resource on which the company could leverage, making its unique Past a source of competitive advantage.

A short theoretical introduction will present the main issues in the recent academic debate and the basic terminology needed to frame the topic.

The central part of the course will be concentrated on the analysis of actual cases of strategies based on a re-functionalization of remains from the Past. The main - but not unique - focus will be the typical small-medium Italian family business.

Main topics:

• The evaluation of the "Heritage Quotient"
• Heritage management: the company dealing with the legacy of the past
• The Nostalgia effect: heritage across times, countries and generations
• Leveraging Heritage as a communication tool
• Heritage, family business and local community
• "Difficult" Heritage: denying the Past, forging the Past, borrowing Heritage

IMPORTANT: the course will encompass some visits, as a mandatory part of the learning process. The University will provide transportation for the visits 12/03/20 and 16/04/2020. For the other visits held in the Milan metropolitan area, the attending Students are committed to organising themselves to reach the designed locations by the beginning of the activities.

The central idea underlying the module is to reduce as much as possible traditional lecturing.

The instructors will invite the Students to take part in visits, to interact with practitioners, to analyse original documents, and to debate among themselves.

The e-learning environment Moodle will offer further opportunities for intercommunication, evaluation, and self-evaluation. 

Online course evaluation - COVID-19 emergency

The primary evaluation tool remains the continuous assessment provided during the whole course to the attending students. No further evaluation is required to the students coping with the online activities scheduled via Moodle during the course.

Students willing to take the course as a not-attending must plan a research paper with the instructors. To correctly calculate your schedule, please take into account that the deadline will be 15-20 days (depending on the difficulty of the report) after agreeing on the research project, plus 7-10 days for grading. The instructors will register the grade on the first available exam session after this date.

ATTENDING STUDENTS

The course intends assessment as a tool to continually check the learning, instead than as a mechanism to stamp a final grade on every Student.

Therefore, the instructors will invite the Students to challenge themselves with a plurality of tests during all the duration of the module.

Further details will be communicated at the beginning of the course and will be available on the platform Moodle. The final mark will be the result of:

• 35% final evaluation > Individual written test (multiple choice), aiming to check some basic knowledge.

• 15% final evaluation > Short quizzes provided during the lessons through Moodle.

• 15% EXTRA POINT > Active participation evaluation (individual).

• 20% final evaluation > Application of a theoretical model to the cases presented during the lessons (short group reports).

• 30% final evaluation > Final group analysis/presentation of an original case + assessment of the cases presented by the other groups. 

NON-ATTENDING STUDENTS

Students not attending the activities or failing to achieve a “pass” evaluation (18/30) after attending the lessons will have to demonstrate to be able to cope with the contents of the course trough self-studing. They will present a research paper on a case selected with the instructors, applying to it the theory provided by the reading list designed for non-attending students,