Laura Illia, Assistant Professor and Academic Director of the Master in Corporate Communication at IE, won the 2013 Business Schools’ Research project Funding competition launched by UniCredit & Universities Foundation with the research project entitled: “Building a new reputation indicator for UniCredit. Listening methods to close the gap between perception and reality”.
The competition is aimed to fund one research project from top worldwide business schools. This year the topic was on Corporate Reputation and was finalized to help UniCredit Stakeholder and Service Intelligence Department in handling the wide survey databases on group reputation. Business schools involved in the competition in 2013 were: London Business School, INSEAD, IE Business School (IE University), Kellog School of Management (Northwestern University), Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) and Said Business School (University of Oxford).
As Dr. Laura Illia specifies, “it is relevant to work on a new reputation indicator for UniCredit right now for two main reasons. First, as any other bank UniCredit is part of an industry –i.e. the financial industry- that is living a reputation crisis. It is thus interesting to study this phenomenon right now. Second, with the boost of social media and the rise of globalization it is necessary to find new ways to assess a corporate reputation. Companies have lost the agency on their reputation and cannot merely align behaviours toward predefined reputation dimensions. Companies need to build their reputation around their relational network (online and offline) by engaging and dialoguing constantly with their stakeholders”.
The project will be lead by Dr. Laura Illia at IE Business School and IE School of Communication in collaboration with other researchers and specialist such as statisticians, experts in the financial industry and experts in communication and key performance indicators.
About the author
With an Engineering background and experience in consulting, Sergio Negri completed his MBA in 2004, after which he joined Metro News as a Business Development Manager. Since 2008 he has been the Manager for IE in Italy, finding new job opportunities for IE alumni and advising potential candidates. He’s also Adjunct professor at IE, in the field of IT management.