Michele Piazzai Headshot

Senior Lecturer in Creative Industries

2.02
Personal website

Roles and Responsibilities

  • Director of the at the Edinburgh Futures Institute

Background

I am a computational social scientist interested in problems of organization, strategy, and decision-making, particularly in the context of creative product markets. I joined the University of Edinburgh Business School in January 2025. Before then, I was Assistant Professor of Innovation at the University of Amsterdam (2017–2020) and Assistant Professor of Management at Carlos III University of Madrid (2020–2025).

I hold a MA cum laude in Cultural Economics and Entrepreneurship from Erasmus University Rotterdam (2012), and a PhD cum laude in Applied Logic from Delft University of Technology (2018), where I worked on a project funded by the Dutch Research Council to develop tools from computer science for the analysis of creative industries. To continue this work, in 2021 I was awarded a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship by the Spanish State Research Agency. My research has been published in leading management journals (Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science) as well as practice-oriented and interdisciplinary outlets (California Management Review Insights, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Poetics, Journal of Cultural Heritage, Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology).

I previously taught and directed BSc, MSc, and PhD modules in strategic management, entrepreneurship, innovation, and organizational design. At Carlos III University, I was a recipient of the Business Teaching Award four years in a row, and in 2024 I received an acknowledgment from the Spanish Economic Association for having supervised one of the top three BSc dissertations in economics and business in the country.

I am a member of the Academy of Management, the European Group for Organizational Studies, the Nagymaros Group (formerly Nagymaros Group on Organizational Ecology), and the Theoretical Organizational Models Society.

Research Interests

  • Product strategy
  • Organization theory
  • Market categories
  • Artificial intelligence

Research Area