Knowledge Drivers for Resilience and Transformation - IFKAD 2022 (Lugano, Switzerland)

Attività scientifica di sviluppo della track 11 e suo coordinamento: Description In these last decades, black swans -rare, unpredictable, and high-impacting events- are becoming more frequent than ever, challenging companies, institutions, and decision makers. Among these events, COVID-19 pandemic has again proven the complex nature of the society we inhabit: a rhizomatic network of interdependent relationships, where any point may be connected to any other according to an emerging path. However, although labelled as a black swan, COVID-19 only acted as a catalyst for megatrends already underway for long time: i.e., the global ageing and the growth of social inequalities, the vulnerability of economic growth, the digitization and platformization of society, the climate change, the exponential growth of urbanization. Those megatrends are all distributed on a wider Kondratiev wave and consequently they all have dramatically deeper antecedents than their alleged cause. This is posing new issues to companies, institutions, and decision makers: resilience thinking has (re)gained all its centrality. But which type of resilience is really needed to face a black swan? Is it absorptive, adaptive, or transformative resilience? In fact, resilience is a multifaceted phenomenon. It can be understood both as the ability to “bounce back” (i.e., absorbing and adapting) in response to sudden changes and as the ability to “bounce forward” by exploring knowledge to lead a transformation in response to shocks as windows of opportunities. And in unpredictable, emerging, and complex environments – as dramatically we are seeing during the COVID-19 pandemic – a crucial aspect is to be able to “bounce forward” (instead of “bouncing back”). In answering to this challenge, knowledge asset and its dynamics play a crucial role. This clearly emerges from the exploration-exploitation dilemma. In fact, when dealing with a changing scenario where a whole reconfiguration of the environment is needed and consolidated schemes appear no longer useful, exploring knowledge is an effective way to enabling a transformative and viable resilience at socio-economic and institutional level. With the aim to provide insightful contributions, we welcome submissions, both conceptual and empirical, from a variety of disciplines, perspectives, methodological approaches. We also encourage submissions that can craft an open interdisciplinary conversation with other socio-cultural and managerial approaches. Topics of this track include (but are not restricted to) the following: - historical antecedents in the interplay between knowledge, resilience and socio-economic transformation; - black swans, knowledge asset dynamic and resilience; - interplay between dynamic capabilities and transformative resilience; - knowledge exploration, social innovation, and resilience; - knowledge-building processes and sensemaking; - designing resilience during systemic shocks; - role of companies, institutions and decision makers in reinforcing and/or balancing systems’ resilient behaviors; - resilience as capability for knowledge exploration; - resilience between exploitation and exploration of knowledge; - implementing resilient policies and intervention strategies to address first-order and second-order change. Keywords Knowledge; exploration; exploitation; resilience, black swans