Outliers: Learning from the Exceptional.

On November 9 and 10, 2018, the Research Cluster ‘Innovation and Entrepreneurship’ of the Faculty of Economics and Management at the Free University of Bolzano organizes the third workshop on the concept of organizational and institutional “outliers”.  Come and join a group of social scientists and practitioners from Germany, Italy, Pakistan, and the Ukraine whose research and work distills insights from a systematic analysis of exceptional behaviour.

Whether we think about success in unexpected settings or unexpected performance in common settings, competitiveness despite a disadvantaged starting position or the management of uncommon entities, exceptional phenomena often reveal highly creative and novel ways of addressing societal problems that, despite their idiosyncratic nature, can help us to better understand the common social world we are living in. These “outliers” can be people, firms or institutions who, because of their very idiosyncratic nature, can tell us a generalizable and insightful story that changes the way we look at social phenomena. Far from constituting pesky data points in anotherwise normally distributed set of observations, these “outliers” are sometimes highly influential and capture over proportional power in social settings.

Drawing on the exceptional nature of “outliers”, this workshop will tentatively draw lessons from a wide range of particular phenomena observed by social scientists. From macro to micro, the presentations include: a systematic study of the consequences of the Argentinian debt restructuring for successive sovereign debt restructuring programmes, an overview of the nature of super star firms that dominate the “winner takes all” markets of the new economy, and apractitioners insight into the particular innovation strategies that ultimately drive the exceptional performance of super-star firms. Further presentations will search theoretical solutions for multivariate decision-making problems, develop a simple model for hedging strategies of South Tyrolean apple farmers and reason on the role of outliers in the publication and consumption of scientific papers. Furthermore, the workshop will also deal with the strategic market focus decisions of family firms and provide a systematic case study of disabled entrepreneurs in Italy.

The workshop is a follow-up of last-years conference on the “creation and management of the exceptional” and will specifically address lessons we can draw from a systematic study of exceptional phenomena. While mainly targeted at researchers, doctoral students and university students ingeneral, the format will assure that the invited speaker’s topics are accessible to a wider audience. The conference is addressed to all who are interested in learning from the exceptional!