Scientific Staff
lourim | Louvain-la-Neuve, Mons
Postdoctoral researchers
Economic, social & environmental sustainability, Digital transformation, Human management, Social inclusion, Nonprofit sport organisations, Democratic participation
Working with Géraldine Zeimers & Mégane Tedde
Organization studies, Leadership, Education in management, Economic, social & environmental sustainability, Communities of practice for sustainability, Teaching and learning sustainability
Working with Valérie Swaen & Pauline de Montpellier
Grand challenges, entrepreneurship, strategy, decision-making, change management
Thesis supervisor: Frank Janssen
Institutional Entrepreneurship and Grand Challenges: the Enabling Role of Institutional Logics in the Emergence of Change Agents and their Strategies
Organization scholars have recently highlighted the complex, uncertain and evaluative nature of those grand challenges (Ferraro et al., 2015) which pose main threats to common understanding of organizing at individual, organizational, field or societal level. In particular, grand challenges call upon new ways to think our institutions as “the fundamental principles underlying a grand challenge are the pursuit of bold ideas and the adoption of less conventional approaches to tackling large, unresolved problems.” (Colquitt & George, 2011, p. 432). In this context, the institutional theory has shown to be a relevant theoretical framework to uncover taken-for-granted behaviors, norms and beliefs and untap the great creativity potential of change agents to find new solutions. In particular, the concept of institutional entrepreneurship has proved to be a promising one to study actors who diverge from old institutional templates and build new solutions (Battilana et al., 2009). Our research adds to the study of the enabling conditions of institutional entrepreneurship and of the strategies institutional entrepreneurs use to successfully implement institutional change. Our main contribution is to proliferate and elaborate the institutional logics perspective by showing which institutional logics enable institutional entrepreneurship and how. We plan to run organizational-level analysis in two contexts related to the grand challenges. First, we will analyze the decision-making process of strategy definition at the sub-national level in Italy during the Covid-19 crisis. Second, we will run an in-depth longitudinal case study of the strategies an Oil & Gas major has implemented to leverage its competitive advantage in a declining sector. Finally, we intend to complement our research with a conceptual paper at the intersection of institutional entrepreneurship, grand challenges and institutional logics.
Innovation management, Business Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Open-innovation, Corporate venturing, Entrepreneurial ecosystem, Innovation ecosystem
Thesis supervisor: Benoit Gailly
Thesis title : Corporate entrepreneurial ecosystem, an incumbent’s perspective on engagement with startups
Education in management, Economic, social & environmental sustainability, Corporate social responsibility (CSR), Education for sustainability, online courses, MOOC
Working with Valérie Swaen & Sabrina Courtois
Critical Management Studies, Human management, Organization studies, Ethics, Humanism, Humanisation, Practice theory, Management tools, Ethnography
Working with Laurent Taskin
Information systems, Data-drive decision making, Responsible Artificial, Intelligence, Fairness, Explainability, Machine Learning
Thesis supervisors: François Fouss, Marco Saerens
Thesis Title: Trustworthy AI: Developing and Evaluating Risk Mitigation Methods in Supervised Learning
PhD students and researchers
Entrepreneurship, Education in management, sustainability, social entrepreneurship, Sustainable entrepreneurship education in primary schools
Thesis supervisor: Amélie Jacquemin
Integrating sustainability into entrepreneurship programs? The use of new teaching models in higher education institutions for sustainable entrepreneurship education and its value for organizations
The first entrepreneurship course was born in 1947 at Harvard Business School (Nabi & al., 2017). Since this time, education for entrepreneurship evolved and adapted itself to the international changing environment (Grindsted, 2016 ; Ballereau & al., 2020). In order to respond to the worldwide focus on sustainability, sustainable entrepreneurship education is a topic present in a growing number of higher education institutions even if this transition is only at the beginning stage (Fichter & Tiemann, 2018 ; Ploum & al. 2018 ; Ballereau & al., 2020). This context leads academics to question themselves about the construction of sustainable entrepreneurship programs in higher education institutions (Ballereau & al., 2020).
First, more studies addressing competencies for sustainable entrepreneurs are needed. Ploum & al. (2018) notice that mostly conceptual research has been made recently to identify the knowledge, attitudes and skills for change agents in sustainability. Moreover, the framework of Lans & al. (2014) is the only one that addresses competencies for sustainable entrepreneurship. Secondly, a gap of reviews in sustainable entrepreneurship education can be identified in terms of pedagogies used. Consequently, Nabi & al. (2017) and Klapper & Farber (2016) are asking for future research to better understand the impact of pedagogical designs and methods. Impact research that focuses on emotion and motivation indicators are also recommended (Nabi & al., 2017). Finally, Nabi & al. (2017) consider education for entrepreneurship as an underresearched phenomenon in other school contexts than higher education institutions.
In this thesis, a 3 steps-research will be leading:
- to catch information about the actual state of literature on sustainable entrepreneurship learning outcomes in terms of competences in higher education institutions ;
- about the pedagogical methods permitting to enhance students’ passion for sustainable entrepreneurship ;
- and lastly, about the exploration of sustainable entrepreneurship course implementation at the level of primary schools while understanding the sensibilization effect on sustainability issues and entrepreneurship on children.
To achieve these goals, qualitative and quantitative methodologies will be used on the project around two research fields. The first concerns the selection of a university offering a sustainable entrepreneurship program to their students with different pedagogical means and the second consists of the program “Futur Défi” attended by children from 10 to 12 years old, in Belgium.
Marketing, Digital sensory marketing
Thesis supervisor: Ingrid Poncin
Online Sensory Activation: The Role of Crossmodal Interaction in the Customer experience
In a growing e-commerce landscape, delivering sensory experiences in online environments that approximate the richness and engagement of physical store interactions is a challenge. Physical stores use direct sensory cues, such as scent, touch, and sound, to enhance customer engagement, while online platforms rely primarily on visual and auditory stimuli, which inherently limit the multisensory stimulation that more deeply engages consumers. As a result, online consumer interactions may suffer from a "sensory deficit" that impacts experience, engagement, satisfaction, and purchase behavior. Given this context, this thesis project aims to comprehensively analyze the online customer experience, focusing on the sensory dimension. It is divided into three articles. The first article presents a qualitative study examining potential sensory deficits and mechanisms used to mitigate them. The second will develop a measurement scale for online sensory richness. The third will explore the boundary effects of sensory enhancement to better understand the limits of stimulation that should not be exceeded. This project provides theoretical and managerial insights, highlighting the importance of strategies based on mental imagery and crossmodal interactions to reinforce sensory engagement in online environments.
Financial Accounting, Corporate Reporting, Entrepreneurial Finance, Textual Analysis, FinTech, Information asymmetry Corporate disclosure, NLP
Thesis supervisor: James Thewissen
The value of visual displays in financial disclosures − the case of initial coin offerings
This project investigates the impact of visual displays in financial reporting on investors’ decision-making. Financial disclosures aim to provide useful information to stakeholders and investors, thereby mitigating information asymmetry and increasing a firm’s value. However, ESMA and SEC authorities are concerned about how to provide and design clear disclosures to investors as they rely on ill-specified proxies focusing on the average number of words per sentence or the frequency of words with more than two syllables (e.g., the FOG index). We depart from previous literature by arguing that these traditional readability proxies are inadequate and therefore focusing on the effectiveness of visual displays in enhancing investors' comprehension and decision-making. By leveraging the Dual Coding Theory (Paivio, 1990), we argue whether visual displays (e.g. infographics, images, bullet points) are informative signals in mitigating information asymmetry and enhancing outcomes during financing campaigns, focusing particularly on Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). ICOs are a popular and alternative funding practice for entrepreneurs, which allow them to sell blockchain-based digital assets called tokens directly to investors. The ICO market exhibits high levels of information asymmetry (Fisch, 2019; Momtaz, 2020; Thewissen, Shrestha, et al., 2022). ICO white papers, which serve as the main source of information about ICOs, often suffer from quality issues, leading to inadequate disclosure (Momtaz, 2021a; Florysiak & Schandlbauer, 2022; Thewissen, Thewissen, et al., 2022). Therefore, examining how visual displays impact information asymmetry within the ICO context could offer valuable insights.
This research project encompasses three main research questions, each respectfully addressed as follow. The first paper provides evidence of the use of images and infographics in ventures’ financial disclosures and how their use impact investors’ decision-making. The second one explores the effect of an alternative form of visual, bullet points and the third one examines the use of visual displays in the context of fraudulent ICOs (scams). We innovate by accounting for the multi-modal nature of financial communication and therefore identifying new signals mitigating information asymmetry. We also contribute to the understanding of ICOs and token offerings, addressing concerns about scams and information quality in the ICO market. The methodology used involves manual counting of visual cues and bullet points in ICO white papers, followed by regression analyses to examine their impact on investors’ behaviors and ICO funding success and random forest methodology for the scam projects prediction. Overall, this research project has practical implications for entrepreneurs, regulators, and investors by providing new insights into how to design and provide clear disclosures to investors, reducing information asymmetry and improving decision-making processes.
Strategy, Innovation, Urban sociology, Geographic economics, Urban development, Interstitial spaces, Innovation management, Cultural and creative industries, music, movie, cinema, creative cities, culture, creativity
Thesis supervisor: Guilhem Bascle
How organizations from large European cities benefit from Big-C culture: the particular ripple effects of the movie and music industries for organizations
Proposing creative and innovative solutions is today critical for organizations, not just for improving their productivity. From a micro perspective, creativity and innovation provide key elements of differentiation to compete: « innovation is the key to organizational survival and therefore the study of processes that support innovation should be of interest to researchers and practitioners alike » (Hogan & Coote, 2014). From a macro perspective, creativity and innovation appear as key resources to face huge societal and environmental challenges and crisis. To answer this constant need of creativity and innovation, for twenty years, researchers have been paying attention to drivers of innovation (Carlino & Kerr, 2015). It appears organizations’ internal factors foster innovation, like for instance R&D expenditures (François, Favre, & Negassi, 2002). Moreover, it stands out external factors also stimulate organizational creativity and innovation (Porter & Stern, 2001). This is what agglomeration theory investigates. Policymakers and researchers have paid particular attention to now well-known examples of (high)-technological agglomerations – like the Silicon Valley. It appears such agglomerations achieve strong economic performance among others thanks to the cohabitation of innovative clusters from related industries (Delgado, Porter, & Stern, 2014).
However, this study questions whether and how cultural agglomerations – instead of much more investigated (high)-technological agglomerations – offer particular ingredients to stimulate creativity and drive innovation, whose organizations could strategically take advantage of. It aims at determining organizations’ strategic benefits of Big-C culture to boost their creativity and innovation capacity. Whereas organizations develop little-c culture, they absorb Big-C culture (Gibbons, Siegel, & Weber, 2021). Consequently, the focus is on Big-C culture instead of little-c culture, namely presented as the organizational culture and extensively studied into management researches (Büschgens, Bausch, & Balkin, 2013).
Concretely, this research investigates if and how Big-C culture may act as strategic source of creativity and innovation for organizations through CCIs’ ripple effects. The most of data has already been collected across cities from UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN) and European Capitals of Culture (ECOC). It is planned to determine at the urban level the existence and magnitude of causality relationship between Big-C Culture – through the movie and music industries’ urban development – and the creativity and innovation capacity of organizations located in such cities.
Fiscality, Tax, Data-drive decision making, Digital transformation, Use of algorithms for tax determination purposes
Thesis supervisor: Marie Lamensch
Marketing, Consumer behaviour, Information systems, Data-drive decision making, Recommender systems, Multi-stakeholder recommender systems, Customer experience, Biased product recommendation agents
Thesis supervisor: Corentin Vande Kerchove
The main objective of my research is to study and develop recommender systems that take into account different stakeholders of this technology. We will therefore move away from traditional recommender systems that only focus on the needs and interests of the consumers by exploring recommender algorithms that incorporate the utility functions of the consumers but also of the sellers and the owners of web applications. In particular, this project focuses on consumer behaviors when they are faced with biased recommendations from this type of system. The research will thus mobilize many tools and aspects of management research such as the analysis of data, the development of various algorithms, mathematical modelling and multi-objective optimization as well as marketing and the study of consumer behaviors (loyalty, trust, retention, etc.).
Human management, Hybrid work, productivity, Re-regulation of performance management in universities
Thesis supervisor: Laurent Taskin
Hybrid work and the re-regulation of performance: A university’s perspective
At its core, the thesis aims to understand how hybrid work ‘re-regulates’ performance within institutions of higher education. To do so, research objectives are:
To establish a comprehensive understanding of what is meant by hybrid work, what are its specificities and how does it contrast with other alternative work arrangements. Indeed, so far literature about hybrid work is both scarce and ambiguous hence the need to start by establishing a good and unequivocal understanding of the concept.
To contextualize both hybrid work and performance management within universities. As both concepts can have multiple declinations, this characterization work is essential to highlight the peculiarities of the university context.
To understand changes in the norms of performance for universities’ hybrid working employees and what drives them. More specifically, shedding the light on how hybrid work practices re-regulate performance management processes within universities.
Human ressource management & Critical Management Studies, Organization studies, Work and Organizational Psychology, Workplace friendships, Social inequalities
Thesis supervisor: Edina Dóci
Workplace friendships through the lens of psychological capital: Insights from minoritized employees
There is a fundamental need in people to form and maintain strong interpersonal relationships with others. Individuals thrive when they feel a sense of belonging and relatedness to others, and social connections at work are no exception. Yet, we don’t connect to each other in the same way at work nor do we face the same barriers to build these connections. Minoritized workers face discrimination in the workplace, whether its sexism, racism, ableism or else, they don’t have the same access to social capital as others. Because of that, they must find strength in other types of relationships and social behaviors.
Simultaneously, our psychological capital (PsyCap) remains another determining aspect of our evolution within (and outside) organizations. But PsyCap is unequally distributed between individuals. People from low-status backgrounds don’t benefit from the same opportunities to develop and maintain it and sometimes even face situations that deplete it at a higher rate compared to their higher-status peers.
In the face of this necessity to build strong connections and maintain a high psychological capital, this thesis aims to understand how these two mutually influence each other. It also seeks to comprehend the organizational conditions that allow such inequalities to persist, and the levers organizations can use to “level the field” of inequalities in the workplace.
To achieve these goals, this thesis mobilizes two ethnographic studies in middle-sized organizations to build a comprehensive, nuanced, contextualized and critical understanding of the situation while ensuring an ethical rapport with the field and its subjects.
Marketing, Consumer psychology, Cross-modal correspondences, Sensory marketing, Consumer perceptions
Thesis supervisors: Gordy Pleyers, Jean Vanderdonckt
Sensory Webdesign: Cross-Modal Correspondences to Convey Sensory Perceptions Through Web Interfaces
Human management, New ways of working, PWD integration, Disability, Diversity, Inclusion
Thesis supervisors: Laurent Taskin, Eline Jammaers
Disability in the new ways of working
This project aims to explore how the new ways of working (NWOW) impact the inclusion of people with disabilities (PWD) at work. The NWOW are a set of work practices characterized by flexibility and collaboration. They include the use of telework, activity-based offices, participative management, hotdesking, among others. Although the NWOW are intended to bring benefits such as increased creativity, knowledge sharing, and employee engagement, several studies have identified downsides. For instance, scholars have associated the NWOW with blurring work-life boundaries, work intensification, uncontrolled interaction, and dehumanization. However, it is still not clear how the NWOW can impact diversity and inclusion in organizations, especially the inclusion of PWD. To fill this gap, this PhD project is composed of three studies. The first study reviews the literatures on NWOW and disability and builds a conceptual framework of how NWOW practices can affect PWD’s disadvantages in work-related outcomes (e.g. performance, job satisfaction, psychological well-being). The second study uses a multiple-case research design to understand how disability is experienced in the NWOW from the perspectives of different stakeholders. These stakeholders include PWD, their colleagues and supervisors, HR workers responsible for diversity and inclusion, and those responsible for the implementation of the NWOW. Finally, the third study will use an ethnographic approach to gather an in-depth understanding of the processes through which the NWOW affect the lived experiences of PWD.
Information systems, Data-drive decision making, Algorithmic fairness, Machine learning models
Tax, Accounting, Economic, social & environmental sustainability, Corporate pro-environmental behaviors, Circular economy, Environmental tax policy, Plastic packaging taxation,Plastic levy, Food packaging
Thesis supervisors: Marie Lamensch, Valérie Swaen
Can tax policies prompt corporate behaviors with diminished environmental impact?
Grégory De Boe is a teaching assistant and researcher at UCLouvain, working on his Ph.D. under the guidance of Professors Marie Lamensch and Valérie Swaen. His doctoral research is structured in three essays, with a primary focus on unraveling the intricate ways in which environmental taxes and subsidies shape the decision-making processes of companies subjected to these policies, specifically in the context of adopting pro-environmental behaviors.
Essay 1: "Greening Corporate Practices: A Review of Tax and Subsidy Influence on Pro-Environmental Behaviors Across Industries" This essay undertakes a comprehensive examination of the influence of taxes and subsidies on corporate pro-environmental behaviors across various industries. By conducting a systematic review of existing literature, the study aims to uncover industry-specific variations in outcomes. The research delves into factors such as the level of taxation or subsidy, the economic agents affected, subsidy sources, external factors, and conflicting environmental objectives in tax policy. The overarching goal is to provide policymakers with valuable insights for designing effective tax and subsidy mechanisms and to propose avenues for further scholarly exploration of the intricate interactions between tax policies and corporate pro-environmental behaviors.
Essay 2: " Examining the Role of Plastic Packaging Taxes in Decision-Making Processes for Circular Practices in the Food Packaging Industry: A Case Study of the UK, Spain, and Portugal" This essay examines the role that plastic packaging taxes implemented in the UK, Spain, and Portugal play within the decision-making processes for circular practices in the food packaging industry. By conducting in-depth interviews with producers and importers in the food packaging industry, an industry heavily reliant on plastic, the essay aims to uncover the motivations and obstacles, especially those tied to taxation, behind the adoption of circular practices. Additionally, it examines the interplay between tax-related considerations and other motivations or obstacles behind the adoption of circular practices in the food packaging industry and determines to what extent plastic packaging taxes serve to eliminate some barriers in the implementation of circular practices. The essay finally compares these results according to different designs of plastic packaging taxes. This essay significantly advances the discourse on environmental policy by delivering detailed insights into circular practices within the food packaging sector. It enhances our comprehension of decision-making processes related to circular practices, shedding light on the motivations and obstacles faced by producers and importers in this industry. The paper highlights the role of plastic packaging taxes in encouraging circular practices within private industries, emphasizing key aspects of tax design that support circular approaches. Additionally, it explores contextual elements beyond the taxes, revealing how these factors interact with and either facilitate or impede circularity among food packaging stakeholders. The contribution extends to outlining the capabilities and limitations of state actors in promoting circularity through tax policies. By delving into complexities of the decision-making processes for circular practices, the paper contributes to a comprehensive understanding of how public interventions interact with and within businesses, shaping their engagement in circular practices.
Essay 3: "Impact of Plastic Packaging Taxes on Packaging Choices and Circular Practices in the Take-Away and Home Delivery Food Industries in the UK, Spain, and Portugal" Building upon the insights gained from the previous essays, the third essay narrows its focus to the take-away and home delivery food industries in the UK, Spain, and Portugal. This research investigates how businesses in this sector respond to plastic packaging taxes and examines their choices regarding packaging and circular practices. By analyzing the downstream effects on businesses involved in food take-away or home delivery, the study aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the overall impact and processes resulting from the implementation of plastic packaging taxes throughout the entire value chain of the food industry. This approach contributes significantly to the evaluation of the effectiveness of plastic packaging taxes in promoting circular practices within this specific industry context.
Together, these three essays form a cohesive and multi-faceted exploration of the complex relationships between taxation, corporate pro-environmental behaviors, and the circular practices within the food packaging industry.
Marketing, Smart Retailing, Customer Engagement, Consumer behavior in the face of new technologies
Thesis supervisors: Ingrid Poncin, Marion Garnier
Smart retail technologies: influence of consumers’ experience on consumer engagement
My research in marketing focuses on problematics related to the retail industry and new technologies. More specifically, the goal of my research is to study the impact of smart technologies in the retail environment on customers’ experience and, as a result of that, the impact on their engagement towards a retailer. This project aims at employing experimental research methods in a controlled laboratory environment that takes the form of a store with many technologies at hand.
Marketing, Consumer behaviour, Omnichannel retailing, Channel-based promotion differentiation, Channel-based price differentiation, Price fairness perceptions, Deal duration and time pressure, Communication strategies
Customer journey management, Marketing mix strategies
Thesis supervisors: Caroline Ducarroz, Simon Hazée
Strategies and omnichannel retail cues to influence customer experience
In today’s connected world, retailers need to rethink their strategies and effectively execute across online and offline channels (Jindal et al., 2021). Embracing an omnichannel strategy would not only allow retailers to get low-cost access to new markets, but also leverage synergies between touchpoints and build a strong competitive advantage (e.g., Chen et al., 2018). While omnichannel strategies offer several potential benefits to retailers and customers alike, managing customer experience across all touchpoints remains challenging (Kuehnl et al., 2019). Against this backdrop, practitioners have started investing in customer journey design to differentiate and provide customer value (De Keyser et al., 2020).
Prior research on customer journey design is relatively scant and provides mixed results. On one hand, research suggests that a customer journey design is effective when consumers perceive multiple brand-owned touchpoints as designed in a thematically consistent or standardized way (Kuehnl et al., 2019). Some authors, on the other hand, argue that inconsistency may also positively influence customer experience by improving experiential involvement over time (e.g., Siebert et al., 2020).
Addressing the customer journey design challenge, this doctoral project builds upon congruity theory (Fiske & Taylor, 1991) and uses a multi-level approach to investigate the effects of (in)consistency on customer experience. Specifically, the first objective is to examine when (in)consistency, at the journey-level, positively influence customer experience. The second objective is to investigate the role of omnichannel consistency between the offering-related stimuli – namely Design-Ambient-Social-Trialability (DAST) retail cues (Roggeveen et al., 2020) – that reside within firm-controlled touchpoints in influencing customer experience.
To address these research objectives, this doctoral project uses a mixed-method approach, including econometric models and experiments to analyze the effects of omnichannel (in)consistency on customer experience. By so doing, this research aims to contribute to the customer experience and retailing literatures and to provide retailers with relevant insights on how to best design customer omnichannel journeys and, ultimately, to enhance customer experience.
Strategy, Organization studies, Human management, Sustainability strategies, Responsible Management, Practice theories, Posthumanism
Information systems
Thesis supervisor: Manuel Kolp
A Comparison of Machine Learning-based Approaches for Adapting Graphical User Interfaces to their Context of Use: Application to Information Visualization
Entrepreneurship, Strategy, Innovation, Economic, social & environmental sustainability, Construction industry, Framing, Resonance, Future-making Entrepreneurship-as-design, Practices
Thesis supervisor: Julie Hermans
Can stories transform reality? A study of the performative effect of narratives and their potential for the impact scaling of sustainable ventures
In the context of the climate and environmental crisis, sustainable entrepreneurs contribute to bringing into the present a sustainable future that is still in-the-making. The development and use of organization narratives by sustainable entrepreneurs are part of the answer to this challenge. Organizational narratives, as “temporal, discursive constructions that provide a means for individual, social and organizational sensemaking and sense giving” (Vaara et al., 2016, p. 3), are a powerful tool to support the legitimacy of a sustainable venture through their performative effects, i.e. their capacity to bring upon the narrated future (Garud et al., 2014).
But how do sustainable entrepreneurs come to envision and narrate such futures? How do they deal with the multiplicity of actors and their diverse – sometime conflicting – visions of a desired future? The literature calls for in-depth study of the performative effects of entrepreneurial framing for the development of new meanings in the answer to the environmental crisis (Snihur et al., 2021). Some mechanisms of the performative process still need to be better understood.
Thus, the goal of this research is to better understand the way sustainable entrepreneurs narrate their desired future as well as the way it contributes to performatively bring upon changes for them and their stakeholders. We study this performativity process longitudinally through a case study in the eco-construction sector. In order to study this phenomenon, we build on the narrative perspective of entrepreneurial innovation by Garud et al. (2014) in which entrepreneurs contextualize innovation through their relational, temporal and performative effort. We adopt the Entrepreneurship as Practice (or EaP hereafter) lens, focusing on the “doing” and “saying” of entrepreneurs and other members of their ecosystems (Champenois et al., 2020).
In this context, we will address the following questions, looking at several narrative complications and tools: How can sustainable entrepreneurs legitimize their ventures through the co-constitution of new meanings? How are narrative practices developed within sustainable ventures? What is the role of artefacts in the performativity process of entrepreneurial narratives across audiences?
Entrepreneurship, Legitimacy of new technological ventures, Hybridity, Artificial intelligence
Thesis supervisor: Frank Janssen
L’Impact de l’Intégration des Nouvelles Technologies sur les Dynamiques d’Hybridité et de Légitimité des Start-ups
In a world where technology is a key driver of transformation, my research explores how technological companies build, maintain, and transform their legitimacy with their stakeholders. Each part of my thesis is connected by a central theme: understanding the interplay between technological innovation, stakeholder perceptions, and strategic balance.
The first part lays the foundation by examining how new technological ventures establish legitimacy. Through the pragmatic, moral, and cognitive dimensions, it identifies the factors influencing stakeholder perceptions and how these perceptions drive their engagement.
The second part deepens this analysis by studying the impact of technological acceptance on the legitimacy of new technological ventures. It investigates the extent to which the adoption of innovative technologies strengthens (or weakens) their legitimacy, depending on stakeholder expectations and perceptions.
Finally, the third part broadens the scope to analyze the long-term effects of technology integration on business strategy. It focuses particularly on hybridity and the risks of mission drift, exploring how companies can balance innovation, commercial objectives, and societal values without compromising their legitimacy.
Economic, social & environmental sustainability, Organization studies, Governance, Consumer behaviour, Innovation, Adoption process, Cleaner Technology, Household, Renewable Energy Communities (REC), Citizen Energy Communities (CEC), Energy Cooperative, Organizational democracy and participation, Brand acculturation, Eco-citizenship and Consumer empowerment, Global North and Global South
Thesis supervisors: Valérie Swaen, Kadia Georges Aka
How do managers and entrepreneurs operating in different environments use innovation and digital technology to influence sustainability? My research focuses on the SCOT. It examines the relationships between sustainability, the innovation process and digitalisation in the context of SMEs in their environment. My aim is to analyse the social and technological constructs that lead to the commercialisation of an innovative product or service that takes account of SDGs, from the reflection, design, creation (prototype) and experimentation phases to its technological dissemination, known as 'Sustainable Digital Innovation', without losing or reducing its added value in terms of wealth creation.
Marketing, Consumer Behavior, Tourism, Branding, Destination branding, Image management
Thesis supervisor: Nicolas Kervyn
Destination anthropomorphism: How does it shape tourists’ behavior?
Destinations, whether they are cities, regions, or whole countries, are promoted by destination management organizations (Avraham, 2021a; Mair et al., 2016). Both managers and scholars mention that these destinations can be considered and managed like brands (Cai et al., 2007), brands around which marketing strategies are built (Morgan & Pritchard, 1998). This led to the concept of destination branding.
Like other brands, destination brands seek to raise potential customers (i.e. tourists) awareness and interest by differentiating themselves from other destinations brands (Kotler & Gertner, 2002 in Morgan & Pritchard, 1998). In addition, marketing tools such as logos, symbols, or slogans can be instrumental for destination brands by enhancing the destination's image and attracting tourists.
Simultaneously, research on product and brand anthropomorphism has gained substantial traction (Aggarwal & McGill, 2007, 2012; Epley et al., 2007; Fournier, 1998). However, when it comes to integrating anthropomorphism into destination branding, there is a limited amount of research available.
This thesis aims to combine these two concepts and by doing so, offer an additional marketing tool for destination management organizations. Indeed, anthropomorphism has started to be used in destination branding sector (Lin et al., 2024). Specifically, our research will seek to understand the impact of destination anthropomorphism on potential tourists, consumers, and their travel behavior. Therefore, our research has the potential to be relevant for both destination management organizations and consumers.
In practice, based on the existing literature such as the three-factor theory of anthropomorphism (Epley et al., 2007), we will formulate hypotheses and test them using both qualitative and quantitative experimental methods. To do this, we plan to create experimental material that will be tested and used for data collection. Innovative concepts such as destination stereotypes (Herz & Diamantopoulos, 2013; Micevski et al., 2020; Motsi & Park, 2020), destination gender (Hamdy et al., 2023; Ren & Pan, 2024) and the multi-step model for altering place image (Avraham, 2021c) will be integrated into our research.
Thesis supervisor: Amélie Jacquemin
Marketing, Consumer behaviour, Reduce Meat Consumption
Organization studies, Organizational Behaviour, corporate social (ir)responsibility, Corporate Political Activity
Thesis supervisor: Corentin Hericher
Her research investigates Corporate Social Irresponsibility (CSiR). The exploration includes understanding employees’ behavioural and emotional reactions to CSiR, identifying factors contributing to weaker employee responses, and examining the detrimental effects on employees witnessing CSiR.
Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Strategy, Organization studies, Social entrepreneurship in emerging countries, Social startups & impact incubators, Business support programs, Innovative entrepreneurial ecosystems, Economic, social & environmental sustainability
Thesis supervisor: Frank Janssen
Towards an integrative model for open social innovation capabilities and entrepreneurial metaorganizations' performance
Despite the promising growth of the Tunisian entrepreneurial ecosystem over the past decade, little research has attempted to explore the role of social incubation programs in supporting Tunisian early-stage social startups. This research addresses this gap by exploring the role of those programs in supporting social startups, particularly in overcoming and managing their hybridity tensions. The study will make original and innovative contributions to existing knowledge on the relationship between social incubation programs and hybridity tensions of social startups, which has yet to be widely examined. Given the topic's novelty, we used an exploratory qualitative methodology involving several case studies of Tunisian social incubators and their incubated startups. Furthermore, at the beginning of our research, our interest was directed toward understanding the types of hybrid tensions that social startups may face. From this, we sought to analyze and interpret the innovative incubation programs' contribution to managing these tensions.
Consequently, this research results offer several contributions. Concerning the theoretical one, our research help understands the role of social impact incubators in enabling social startups to manage hybridity tensions, achieve social and financial goals and create social impact. For the managerial one, the study provides a guideline for incubation program managers to improve their programs by having a new strategic vision of social startups' hybridity tensions. Finally, it also helps social startups understand how to overcome and manage their hybridity tensions and be aware of social incubators' crucial role in doing it.
Thesis supervisor: Jean Vanderdonckt
Economic, social & environmental sustainability, Sport management, CSR, Sport environmental sustainability, Sport ecology, Non-Profit Sports Organizations, Environmental sustainability in Non-profit sports organizations
Thesis supervisors: Jeroen Scheerder, Géraldine Zeimers
Sport Environmental Sustainability (SES): An Investigation into Non-Profit Sport Organisations from a Stakeholders Perspective
Sport has an impact on the natural environment, and in turn is affected by the natural environment. It is critical to study environmental sustainability in sport because of this mutual relationship between sport and the environment. Sport Environmental Sustainability (SES) is an underdeveloped research field that is dominated by international professional sport organisations, sport facilities and major sporting events. Given their social role and reach, non-profit sport organisations (NPSOs) are powerful avenues to influence their stakeholders’ behaviour (e.g., participants, consumers, employees, investors, suppliers, communities). However, little is known about how NPSOs manage their stakeholders’ expectations to implement environmental sustainability actions. Therefore, it is vital to gain a better understanding and assist in the successful deployment of pro-environmental changes by NPSOs. In this context, the purpose of this research project is to capture how NPSOs and their stakeholders engage toward environmental sustainability. Three research questions will be examined: 1) What are the expectations of NPSOs’ multiple stakeholders regarding SES? 2) Are there SES paradoxes in NPSOs and how do managers manage these paradoxes?, and 3) How do NPSOs manage their stakeholders’ expectations when engaging toward environmental sustainability? The project is grounded on stakeholder theory for which the interconnectedness between the central organisation and its stakeholders is key in the quest for sustainability progresses. A mixed-method and multilevel empirical research design including document analysis, survey, a social network analysis, and in-depth interviews will be used. This project will contribute to develop knowledge on SES and future policy-making processes.
Sport Management, Governance, Sustainability, Ecological transition, participatory processes, sport organizations
Working with Géraldine Zeimers
Entrepreneurship, sustainability practices; informal sector; informal institutions; informal entrepreneurs; entrepreneurs' motivation; source of sustainability knowledge; resource constraints; case study; developing countries, Informal entrepreneurship in developing countries
Thesis supervisor: Valérie Swaen
Sustainability Implementation in the Informal Sector: Processes, Challenges and Outcomes
The world is facing global economic, social, and environmental challenges. To tackle these challenges, different programs, frameworks, and initiatives (such as UNGC, GRI, ISO, B Corp Certification, etc.) are developed to engage and guide enterprises in the pursuit of sustainable development but they focus on the formal sector, ignoring the informal sector. In addition, in sustainability research, economic, social, and environmental practices of formal firms, either large or small, have been largely explored with little attention given to informal businesses. However, sustainability cannot be achieved if the informal sector, which represents an important part of the global economy (accounting for almost 51,9% of the global employed population), is neglected. Therefore, the informal sector has a role to play in achieving sustainable development and this research investigates the links between the informal sector and sustainability, particularly from the perspective of informal entrepreneurs. The purpose of this study is to understand how sustainability is understood and implemented in the informal sector and why. To address this question, we will identify and analyze sustainability practices in the informal sector to characterized informal entrepreneurs who engage in these practices; we will describe and analyze the processes developed by informal entrepreneurs to implement sustainability practices; we will analyze the specificities of sustainability practices implemented in informal businesses to understand the challenges, drivers and motivations behind informal entrepreneurs' sustainability engagement, in order to suggest strategies to improve their contribution to the achievement of sustainable development.
Entrepreneurship, Female entrepreneurship within the french speaking African diaspora regarding culture and religion
Thesis supervisor: Amélie Jacquemin
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Researcher working on projet Interreg T2D2-PME
Thesis supervisor: Alain Vas
Entrepreneurship, Governance, Economic, social & environmental sustainability, Environmental justice, Innovation, Waste management companies
Thesis supervisors: Julie Hermans, Tom Dedeurwaerdere
Information systems, Data-drive decision making, Human-computer interactions
Thesis supervisor: Jean Vanderdonckt
The Extra-User Interface as a User Interface for Controlling other User Interfaces: Concept, Method, and Application in Information Visualization
Context-aware Interactive applications are those interactive software that have parts or whole changing depending on the constraints imposed by a dynamically-changing context. The context of use covers the user and the associated tasks, the computing platform and devices, and the physical environment. Therefore, any significant change of any of these three dimensions, i.e., the user, the platform, and the environment, may trigger a change of the software, including the user interface. Until now, such changes have been managed by the system, thus leading to a system-controlled context-awareness. Instead, we want to pursue the goal of letting the end user control the changes, thus leading to a user-controlled context awareness. To enable the end user to have this control facility, there is a need for another user interface than the one of the original software. This is the Extra-User Interface, which is hereby referred to as the user interface to control the user interface of another interactive application to support context awareness. This concept can be applied in principle to any domain of computer science (e.g., ambient intelligence, smart rooms, ubiquitous computing, multimedia). We will instantiate this approach to the area of information visualization.
Gender diversity, LGBTQIA+ issues
Information systems, Filter bubbles, Recommender systems
Thesis supervisor: Corentin Vande Kerckhove
Filter Bubbles in Recommender Systems:Metric, Algorithmic Mitigation, and Societal Implications
His thesis investigates the issue of filter bubbles in online recommendation systems —situations where users are repeatedly exposed to similar content, limiting their access to diverse perspectives. First, it introduces quantitative measures to detect and evaluate the extent of these bubbles. To counteract them, this thesis proposes a feedback-based recommendation algorithm that dynamically adapts to user behavior, promoting content diversity while preserving engagement. His thesis also explores the link between filter bubbles and broader societal problems such as misinformation and polarization, highlighting how algorithms can influence public discourse
Strategy, Governance, Accounting, CEO hubris, Earnings pressure
Thesis supervisor: Guilhem Bascle
Accounting, Finance, Economic, social & environmental sustainability, Textual analysis, Circular economy, Organisational change, Financial disclosures, Financial impact
Thesis supervisor: James Thewissen
Organizational Changes and corporate reporting
My research examines how firms adapt the language and qualitative characteristics of corporate disclosures during periods of major transition. I focus on how managers adjust tone, readability, and thematic emphasis when firms face organizational restructuring (e.g., takeover threats, mergers and acquisitions, layoffs), strategic business model shifts such as the transition toward circular economy practices, and technological disruption driven by generative AI.
A central aspect of my work is the analysis of disclosure language. For instance, I study how the use of circularity-related terms in corporate reports is associated with subsequent firm outcomes. I also investigate how generative AI may reshape corporate communication practices, either by influencing the production of disclosures or by altering their stylistic and linguistic features.
More broadly, my research contributes to the literature on corporate disclosure by highlighting how new narratives and technological tools transform the way firms frame performance, strategy, and uncertainty.