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Speakers: Dr. Giovanni Esposito and Dr. Jessica Clement
“Grand challenges” are specific critical barrier(s) that, if removed, would help solve an important societal problem. Grand Challenges, by their very nature, require coordinated and sustained effort from multiple and diverse stakeholders toward a clearly articulated problem or goal. Solutions to Grand Challenges typically involve changes in individual and societal behaviors, changes to how actions are organized and implemented, innovative public policies and public management, and progress in technologies and tools to solve these problems. Thus, tackling Grand Challenges can be seen as a managerial/organizational and scientific problem.
 
As this theme touches the work of numerous researchers, including our own, we propose using the context of Grand Challenges to frame common problems faced by early-career researchers. Thus, focusing on the research process, we show two different research pathways based on one field.
 
This presentation has the double objective of:
  1. Offering a presentation of how two researchers are considering questions of “Grand Challenges of Society” in their work
  2. Providing two different examples of how to anchor your research question or agenda within an overarching theme, which in this case may either be a perspective or topic
 
Part 1:Anchoring the research agenda based on perspective

Dr. Giovanni Esposito presents the evolution of his research as it relates to one perspective: strategic public management. He will discuss the conceptual approaches and research lines which he has elaborated during his doctoral and postdoctoral studies at HEC Management School – University of Liège (Belgium) and at the Department of Human and Social Sciences - University of Naples “L’Orientale” (Italy). In particular, adopting a strategic public management perspective inspired by a mix of organization and public management studies approaches, he has explored organizational and institutional change in the EU’s public sectors along four main axes of inquiry: (1) the reform of public sector organizations in the EU, with a focus on the role played by the New Public Management (NPM) paradigm of reform (Esposito et al., 2018) and the socio-economic conditions that have led national reformers to embrace the NPM paradigm as a viable solution to reorganize national public administrations (Esposito et al., 2017); (2) the impact of NPM reforms on the performance and governance of the EU’s rail sectors, with a focus on the impact of these reforms on investments, prices and quality (Esposito et al., 2017) as well as on the effects of these reforms on important modal shift objectives to reduce transport-related CO2 emissions (Esposito et al., 2020a); (3) the public governance of high-speed railway megaprojects funded by the EU to strengthen the socio-economic cohesion of the Members States and to mitigate climate change, with a main focus on the diversity of actors, behavioral logics, organizational levels and formal institutions involved in the governance process (Esposito et al., 2020b); and, (4) the public governance of strategic change in complex processes of urban innovation, with a main focus on the development of smart city programs involving different actors – i.e. governments, businesses and civil society organizations – with different understandings of technological innovations deployed in the city (Margherita et al., 2020). 
 
 
Part 2: Anchoring the research agenda based on topic.

Dr. Jessica Clement presents the evolution of her research as it relates to one topic, sustainable urban transitions. In her presentation, Jessica will share how she built up her research agenda at HEC Liège based on her previous work as a PhD (Clement, 2016, 2020)  and from one year of a post-doc in Switzerland (IRP, 2019; IRP, 2020; Merino-Saum et al., 2020). Her presentation will move from a general interest (sustainable development studies) to targeted research questions that fall in line with the scope of her institute, the Smart City Institute, at HEC. This presentation will tackle problems like: coherency across research papers, finding a place for your passion in your research question/project, and strategizing for finding positions at research institutes (life after the PhD).

Details

Start: February 26, 2021
11:00 AM (UTC/GMT +01:00 - Europe / Brussels)
End: February 26, 2021
12:15 PM (UTC/GMT +01:00 - Europe / Brussels)
HEC Liège

Online event

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