Riccardo Valente, MA

I am born and brought up in Rome and I don’t have any Polish ancestors. Living in Krakow since 2011, however, I have learnt Polish, at the best possible level achievable according to me, even though I still have an accent and some language difficulties can show up as I consider normal to happen to any foreigner trying to learn such a tough language as Polish is. Nevertheless other than Polish and Italian, I speak as well in English and Spanish with a similar proficiency, although lately I am getting quite often some language interferences between them and Polish. On top of that I have an average knowledge of French as well, in particular in written form, while not practicing in for the last 20 years my speaking and listening abilities worsened through time probably should be considered rather basic, on the contrary, however, I still have quite solid knowledge of Latin, which I studied during high school.

My economic education started at the Political Economy Department of Economy Faculty at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. There I discussed my bachelor thesis “Aggregate demand and income distribution in the General Theory” under the supervision of Professor Antonia Campus, who had been a researcher at Cambridge University and among the historical disciples of Pierangelo Garegnani and Piero Sraffa. Remembering her dearly as the most dedicated scholar and lecturer, I had the occasion to meet during my whole education, as well as an economist and specialist in the history of economic thought greater that I will be ever able to become, I still consider this very first research work I had the pleasure and honor to realize under her supervision, as the single most significant event, that has led me to attempt the academic career myself and it has in many respect shaped my main research interests until today. After her retirement I continued my studies in Economic at the same Faculty of “La Sapienza” discussing in July 2011 my final M.A. dissertation “Regional disparities and policies for their reduction: the Polish case”, written under Professor Annamaria Simonazzi supervision.

Although the formal impossibility to formally enroll in two different tertiary education programs at once in Italy at the time, moreover, during my last three years of studies in Economics I attended as well the lectures and classes of Polish language provided by Lector Agnieszka Srtyjecka and Professor Luigi Marinelli for bachelor students at the Institute of Slavic Languages Philology of the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, to whom I am still very thankful for providing me such a knowledge of the Polish language in such a short time, that I was able to apply for Ph.D. studies in Economics in Polish after their classes. During the summer term 2010, moreover, I visited as a free mover Krakow University of Economics realizing here some of the subjects, that my study program back in Rome required.

After ending my education in Rome, in October 2011 in coincidence with the showing-up of the effects of 2011 euro-area crisis on Italian economy, I started my Ph.D. studies in Economics at the International Relations and Economics Department of Krakow University of Economics, which I ended in 2015, being hired as Assistant since March 2017 in Organizational Behavior Chair.

Research Interests

My quite untypical education shaped as well my unusual research interests, which at the moment are in extreme synthesis focused on the interconnections existing among the emergence of different economic phenomena on a global scale in market economies, the parallel evolution of economic theory and of management theory and practice at firm level.

Among my earliest macroeconomic interests in the field of applied economics there are, then, income distribution analysis, the inquiry of its influence on capital accumulation and economic growth and the mechanisms explaining the transmission of business cycle fluctuations and demand shocks on the long-run dynamic of GDP growth and accumulation though multiplicative, path-dependency and acceleration effects.

On the economic theory front, instead, I focus mostly on business cycle theory, growth theory, income distribution and capital accumulation ones. Due to my interest for those particular areas, already since my bachelor thesis, I started considering the works of Keynesian, Post-Keynesian, Kaleckian, Classical and Neoricardian authors as particularly significant and relevant for my researches. That led me to be an economist, who is quite critical toward the Neoclassical approach to the explanation of economic systems functioning, supported by mainstream authors. This, moreover, led to the extension of my research interests toward management science.

I started, indeed, to progressively find in the study of the management methods and techniques evolution the possibility to provide an alternative way of explaining and modeling the connections between aggregate macroeconomic phenomena and the individual decisions undertaken at firm level in reaction to them. The analysis of the tendencies emerging in management science, then, allowed me to partially replace the typical role, which the strongly dependent on Neoclassical thought, microeconomic has in connecting those to parts of economic reasoning, that are crucial to provide any sound theoretical or practical explanation of market economies functioning. More and more, then, side-by-side to my continuous interest for Economics, started to additionally focus as well on management methods and practices evolution at wide, so that at the moment I can say that I focus as well on such matters as:

• Organization behavior and the modern increased popularity of soft aspects of management science, as for example workers selection, job-design, group and team work, motivation system, organizational culture and climate and change implementation techniques used in firms and organizations;
• Production Engineering and Management and in particular on Fordism, Just-in-Time, Lean Management, techniques used in small firms and services sectors, general tendencies connected with the decreasing popularity of rigid and strictly hierarchical methods based on economies of scale and full utilization of capacity and the rising one of more flexible production methods, supporting production cycle shortening, storages reduction, improvement in products quality, etc.;
• Macroeconomic environment and management practices co-evolution in the so-called Knowledge-Based Economy current phase of market economies development, where I focus mostly on the increased popularity of human capital and innovation in comparison to the decreasing profitability of investing in physical capital, resulting from rising income inequalities, broadly-conceived economic instability, worsening of growth dynamic and the showing up of finacialization, servicization, delocalization, outsourcing, products life-cycle shortening, globalization and glocalization events, as well as the connections all of those trends have with management techniques and methods evolution;
• Commercialization and Knowledge Transfer, where I focus mainly on pro-innovative leadership styles, on criteria allowing to choose the most profitable strategy, method and path of commercialization, on innovative design and prototyping methods as Design Thinking, Minimum Viable Product, etc.

Unsurprisingly, then, I provide regularly classes of Knowledge-Based Economy, Commercialization and Knowledge Transfer, Production and Services Management in Polish, and Organizational Behavior both in Polish and English. In the past, moreover, I have conducted Knowledge Management and Communication Techniques classes and Macroeconomics lectures in Polish, as well as International Economic Comparison one in English as well.

Other

I  was author of different publications both in English and Polish in the fields of both Management and Macroeconomics. Since 2013 I took part in many different conferences and until 2017 I actively participated in organizing some of them as well. During my Ph.D. studies, moreover, I was awarded:

• Krakow University of Economics quality support scholarship in 2015-2016 academic year;
• Krakow University of Economics best Ph.D. students scholarship in 2015-2016 academic year;
• BUWiWM scholarship recognized trough Polish Institute and Polish Republic Embassy in Rome with the Italian Republic Ministry of Foreign Affairs support basing on the research project “Influence of income distribution on physical capital accumulation in OECD European countries” in 2014-2015 academic year;
• BUWiWM scholarship recognized trough Polish Institute and Polish Republic Embassy in Rome with the Italian Republic Ministry of Foreign Affairs support basing on the research project “Keynes’s General Theory, accelerator concept and income distribution among different social classes and their influences on the long-run dynamic, both in theory and basing on practical examples of European Union countries” in 2012-2013 academic year;
• Krakow University of Economics Ph.D. scholarship basing on the average from M.A. studies in 2011-2012 academic year.