Design and Innovation: Riccardo Battaglia's Winning Hand

Riccardo David Battaglia was awarded first place in a competition focused on "Innovation," organized by the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Oslo (UiO), in collaboration with TIK, Technology and Innovation Centre. Riccardo, who currently works as a technology consultant at PwC, graduated from Bocconi with a degree in Economics and Management of Innovation and Technology.
Each year, the University of Oslo chooses an academic theme: innovation was chosen as the main topic for 2013.

Riccardo's work was chosen as the best submission. He conducted an analysis on the topic of dominant design in the smartphone sector, entitled "The Smartphone Industry Towards a Dominant Design: An empirical analysis." The competition, which ended in November, required students to compete by analyzing a specific innovation process: essays focused on topics in the social sciences. Analyzing the dynamics of the processes examined, students demonstrated the reasons and outcomes. Riccardo's analysis took into consideration a dataset that included more than 1,000 smartphone models, regarding which all features, both hardware and software, were taken into account.

Due to the research's findings, and the reported results which were evaluated as convincing and interesting, the international panel, which included Bengt-Åke Lundvall (Department of Business Studies at Aalborg University), Alessandro Nuvolari (Professor of Economic History at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna di Pisa) and Anne Bergek (Institute of Technology at Linköping University), decided to award Riccardo's work.