Abstract
Premise: Both scientific literature (Kalaitzi et al., 2018; 2019) and outlooks by Institutional agencies (European Commission, 2020) hint that the World Economy will likely face a serious issue of resource scarcity – particularly, critical raw materials (CRM) scarcity – over the next few years, which will pose challenges to value chains’ fundamental role of ensuring continuous supply. The Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the recent geopolitical crisis, further exacerbated the issue – in the form of substantial commodity price increase and shortages of critical supplies (e.g., semiconductors). With the aim to strengthen its economic competitiveness and secure its strategic autonomy, the EU has identified a list of industries that are key to these objectives, and it has started to delineate a strategy to ensure access to CRM, which are often essential to such industries. Yet it is still unclear (a) how National Governments, including the Italian one, should adopt and support these general guidelines; (b) which managerial strategies and practices, including circular economy-related practices, could be more effective in tackling the scarcity-driven issues and ensuring supply continuity. Main objectives: Again this backdrop, the CASCADE project – in addition to contribute to advance knowledge and scholarly management literature on scarcity-driven issues within value chains – will pursue three main objectives. First, it will develop an original methodology for the identification, among the strategic supply chains/industries, of the associated raw materials that are considered “critical” for a given country in a given period, as well as of other possible sources of criticalities/scarcity. Second, it will contribute to increase the awareness of firms, industrial associations and governments about the risks raised by CRM and other sources of scarcity in strategic supply chains, to support their decision-making process. On top of that, it will provide managerial and policy suggestions on how to enhance competitiveness and reduce external dependencies in one selected strategic product value chain (PVC) belonging to one of the industries listed as “strategic” by the EU. Third, it will contribute to foster the sustainability of the production ecosystem, by analysing how the shift towards the circular economy paradigm allows not only to decrease the dependency of the strategic supply chain from critical raw materials, but also to improve the efficiency of the whole production system. Structure: CASCADE is organized into 7 phases, sequenced in order to ensure the achievement of the project’s goals. Each phase will enable the accomplishment of a particular project milestone. Empirically, CASCADE will investigate a specific PVC, selected through the methodology developed in the project’s initial phases. The empirical analysis will consist of a delphi study, a value chain mapping, and case studies on the selected PVC.
Dettagli del progetto
Responsabile scientifico: Paolo Barbieri
Strutture Unibo coinvolte:
Dipartimento di Scienze Aziendali
Coordinatore:
ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - Università di Bologna(Italy)
Contributo totale di progetto: Euro (EUR) 268.013,00
Contributo totale Unibo: Euro (EUR) 112.388,00
Durata del progetto in mesi: 24
Data di inizio
30/11/2023
Data di fine:
28/02/2026
