Theses

The ubiquitous use of technology has caused a critical dependency on Information Technology. This dependency has shed light on the importance of establishing a high-level IT Governance (ITG) model in organizations. The ultimate goal of such model is to incorporate leadership as well as organizational processes and structures to ensure that the organization’s IT extends and sustains its strategies and objectives. Moreover, ITG interoperability is one of the leading challenges to be addressed in realizing efficient applications. Today, the costs of integration for enterprise applications in the context of ITG are still tremendously high. This is because of the existence of different regulatory processes, requirements, data organization and application interfaces that should be reconciled, typically with manual intervention. A typical process in ITG includes different tangled concerns such as data processing, control flow, event handling, service invocations, human interactions and transactions. The entanglement of these concerns enhances the complexity of the development and the maintenance of process-driven ITG as the number of involved processes and services grow. As such, in the area of interoperability, the main challenge is to get systems to share information which is understandable both semantically and syntactically. This is possible via model transformation and semantic mapping. Conceptual modelling refers to the activity of formal description of some of the aspects of social and physical world around us with the goals of understanding and communicating. It is used to communicate a common view to members of a group – who need to have a shared understanding of relevant aspects of some world – through a variety of linguistic and graphic interfaces. The advantage of conceptual modelling over diagrammatic notations or natural language is the fact that it is derived from a formal notation and thus allows one to capture the application semantics. Moreover, supporting structuring and inferential facilities, is an advantage of conceptual modelling over mathematical or other formal notations which are developed in computer science. Furthermore, a model refers to an abstraction of a system and generally, it represents a simplified and partial view of a system. Using models allows for sharing a common knowledge and vision among technical and non-technical stakeholders and thus facilitates and promotes the communication among them. Considering these models not only as documentation artefacts but also as central artefacts in the process of software engineering is referred to as Model Driven Engineering (MDE). One of the areas in which MDE can be applied is the governance of Information Technology. For that, MDE is established on a more abstract level. Nevertheless, it is not possible to create optimal value from IT without maintaining a balance between optimizing risk levels and resource use, and realizing benefits. Therefore, IT governance should provide good and solid controls to cover the security of information. The core focus of this research will be on developing a model driven ITG framework called InfoSecMoDrIGo which will be the evolution of the MoDrIGo framework in a way that it aims at tackling more ITG challenges and representing how integrating conceptual modelling with ITG ensures information security (InfoSec).

The first entrepreneurship course was born in 1947 at Harvard Business School (Nabi & al., 2017). Since this time, education for entrepreneurship evolved and adapted itself to the international changing environment (Grindsted, 2016 ; Ballereau & al., 2020). In order to respond to the worldwide focus on sustainability, sustainable entrepreneurship education is a topic present in a growing number of higher education institutions even if this transition is only at the beginning stage (Fichter & Tiemann, 2018 ; Ploum & al. 2018 ; Ballereau & al., 2020). This context leads academics to question themselves about the construction of sustainable entrepreneurship programs in higher education institutions (Ballereau & al., 2020).

First, more studies addressing competencies for sustainable entrepreneurs are needed. Ploum & al. (2018) notice that mostly conceptual research has been made recently to identify the knowledge, attitudes and skills for change agents in sustainability. Moreover, the framework of Lans & al. (2014) is the only one that addresses competencies for sustainable entrepreneurship. Secondly, a gap of reviews in sustainable entrepreneurship education can be identified in terms of pedagogies used. Consequently, Nabi & al. (2017) and Klapper & Farber (2016) are asking for future research to better understand the impact of pedagogical designs and methods. Impact research that focuses on emotion and motivation indicators are also recommended (Nabi & al., 2017). Finally, Nabi & al. (2017) consider education for entrepreneurship as an underresearched phenomenon in other school contexts than higher education institutions.

In this thesis, a 3 steps-research will be leading:

- to catch information about the actual state of literature on sustainable entrepreneurship learning outcomes in terms of competences in higher education institutions ;

- about the pedagogical methods permitting to enhance students’ passion for sustainable entrepreneurship ;

- and lastly, about the exploration of sustainable entrepreneurship course implementation at the level of primary schools while understanding the sensibilization effect on sustainability issues and entrepreneurship on children.

To achieve these goals, qualitative and quantitative methodologies will be used on the project around two research fields. The first concerns the selection of a university offering a sustainable entrepreneurship program to their students with different pedagogical means and the second consists of the program “Futur Défi” attended by children from 10 to 12 years old, in Belgium.

This project investigates the impact of visual displays in financial reporting on investors’ decision-making. Financial disclosures aim to provide useful information to stakeholders and investors, thereby mitigating information asymmetry and increasing a firm’s value. However, ESMA and SEC authorities are concerned about how to provide and design clear disclosures to investors as they rely on ill-specified proxies focusing on the average number of words per sentence or the frequency of words with more than two syllables (e.g., the FOG index). We depart from previous literature by arguing that these traditional readability proxies are inadequate and therefore focusing on the effectiveness of visual displays in enhancing investors' comprehension and decision-making. By leveraging the Dual Coding Theory (Paivio, 1990), we argue whether visual displays (e.g. infographics, images, bullet points) are informative signals in mitigating information asymmetry and enhancing outcomes during financing campaigns, focusing particularly on Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). ICOs are a popular and alternative funding practice for entrepreneurs, which allow them to sell blockchain-based digital assets called tokens directly to investors. The ICO market exhibits high levels of information asymmetry (Fisch, 2019; Momtaz, 2020; Thewissen, Shrestha, et al., 2022). ICO white papers, which serve as the main source of information about ICOs, often suffer from quality issues, leading to inadequate disclosure (Momtaz, 2021a; Florysiak & Schandlbauer, 2022; Thewissen, Thewissen, et al., 2022). Therefore, examining how visual displays impact information asymmetry within the ICO context could offer valuable insights.  

This research project encompasses three main research questions, each respectfully addressed as follow. The first paper provides evidence of the use of images and infographics in ventures’ financial disclosures and how their use impact investors’ decision-making. The second one explores the effect of an alternative form of visual, bullet points and the third one examines the use of visual displays in the context of fraudulent ICOs (scams). We innovate by accounting for the multi-modal nature of financial communication and therefore identifying new signals mitigating information asymmetry. We also contribute to the understanding of ICOs and token offerings, addressing concerns about scams and information quality in the ICO market. The methodology used involves manual counting of visual cues and bullet points in ICO white papers, followed by regression analyses to examine their impact on investors’ behaviors and ICO funding success and random forest methodology for the scam projects prediction. Overall, this research project has practical implications for entrepreneurs, regulators, and investors by providing new insights into how to design and provide clear disclosures to investors, reducing information asymmetry and improving decision-making processes.

Proposing creative and innovative solutions is today critical for organizations, not just for improving their productivity. From a micro perspective, creativity and innovation provide key elements of differentiation to compete: « innovation is the key to organizational survival and therefore the study of processes that support innovation should be of interest to researchers and practitioners alike » (Hogan & Coote, 2014). From a macro perspective, creativity and innovation appear as key resources to face huge societal and environmental challenges and crisis. To answer this constant need of creativity and innovation, for twenty years, researchers have been paying attention to drivers of innovation (Carlino & Kerr, 2015). It appears organizations’ internal factors foster innovation, like for instance R&D expenditures (François, Favre, & Negassi, 2002). Moreover, it stands out external factors also stimulate organizational creativity and innovation (Porter & Stern, 2001). This is what agglomeration theory investigates. Policymakers and researchers have paid particular attention to now well-known examples of (high)-technological agglomerations – like the Silicon Valley. It appears such agglomerations achieve strong economic performance among others thanks to the cohabitation of innovative clusters from related industries (Delgado, Porter, & Stern, 2014).

However, this study questions whether and how cultural agglomerations – instead of much more investigated (high)-technological agglomerations – offer particular ingredients to stimulate creativity and drive innovation, whose organizations could strategically take advantage of. It aims at determining organizations’ strategic benefits of Big-C culture to boost their creativity and innovation capacity. Whereas organizations develop little-c culture, they absorb Big-C culture (Gibbons, Siegel, & Weber, 2021). Consequently, the focus is on Big-C culture instead of little-c culture, namely presented as the organizational culture and extensively studied into management researches (Büschgens, Bausch, & Balkin, 2013).

Concretely, this research investigates if and how Big-C culture may act as strategic source of creativity and innovation for organizations through CCIs’ ripple effects. The most of data has already been collected across cities from UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN) and European Capitals of Culture (ECOC). It is planned to determine at the urban level the existence and magnitude of causality relationship between Big-C Culture – through the movie and music industries’ urban development – and the creativity and innovation capacity of organizations located in such cities.

The main goal of this project is to develop recommender systems debiased from historical bias existing in their data. Our objective is to adjust certain technologies in a way to make them fairer towards groups of consumers. As recommendation technologies are frequently used by marketers, this project indirectly aims to stimulate the use of societal marketing techniques, which consider, not only the consumers’ wants and a company’s requirements, but also society’s interests.

The first step of this project is to study through a literature review the functioning of the current information filtering systems in order to readapt those existing systems. Our goal will be thus to enhance these technologies in way to lead to more debiased recommendations while maintaining accurate predictions. Consequently, a major sub-objective of this project is to modify existing recommender systems and to identify how to recommend products effectively while reducing biases between groups of consumers.

From learning to practicing corporate social responsibility: Ethnographic insights of a CSR inter-organizational community of practice.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an essentially contested concept which cannot be defined, for its very core is debated (Mitnick et al., 2021). In order to deal with this complexity and ambiguity, decision-makers are in continuous need of opportunities to renew, transfer, co-construct and craft their knowledge of CSR (Brès et al., 2019), to enable and guide CSR action. This necessity is reinforced by constantly evolving stakeholders’ expectations (Matten & Moon, 2008) and the emergence of hot topics (e.g. new frameworks and regulations with regard to due diligence, extra-financial reporting). A central challenge for decision-makers is thus to be able to expand their CSR knowledge base (Brès et al., 2019), and transfer newly acquired knowledge followingly. Informal environments outside the firm such as communities or alliances are predominant in developing tacit aspects of CSR knowledge (Osagie et al., 2018). However, limited attention has been given to the conditions for inter-organizational CSR knowledge sharing (Fortis et al., 2018). Hence, in this doctoral work, we focus on inter-organizational communities of practice (CoPs) as a locus of CSR knowledge transfers where individuals from different organizations meet based on a shared concern, CSR, and deepen their knowledge and expertise on this domain through regular interactions (Lave & Wenger, 1991).

In order to capture the evolution of knowledge transfers and practices in their context, we follow an ethnographic approach. Through prolonged participant observation and triangulation of data sources, ethnography offers rich insights into how individuals make sense of CSR and enact it in practice (Gond & Moser, 2021). Through this PhD, we aim at exploring how professionals or decision-makers share CSR knowledge and develop CSR practices on that basis, through their participation to groups or communities outside the organization. We analyze what happens at CoP level, i.e. during and around meetings, and how the CoP’s conditions set the ground for its members to share CSR knowledge and develop CSR practices. We also consider the individual as embedded in the CoP, hence how one’s role and identity is socially shaped by and contributes to the CoP’s discussions and practice. Finally, we seek to trace the processes through which CoP’s members are able to develop CSR practices (at individual, organizational or collective level) following their participation to the CoP.

This project aims to explore how the new ways of working (NWOW) impact the inclusion of people with disabilities (PWD) at work. The NWOW are a set of work practices characterized by flexibility and collaboration. They include the use of telework, activity-based offices, participative management, hotdesking, among others. Although the NWOW are intended to bring benefits such as increased creativity, knowledge sharing, and employee engagement, several studies have identified downsides. For instance, scholars have associated the NWOW with blurring work-life boundaries, work intensification, uncontrolled interaction, and dehumanization. However, it is still not clear how the NWOW can impact diversity and inclusion in organizations, especially the inclusion of PWD. To fill this gap, this PhD project is composed of three studies. The first study reviews the literatures on NWOW and disability and builds a conceptual framework of how NWOW practices can affect PWD’s disadvantages in work-related outcomes (e.g. performance, job satisfaction, psychological well-being). The second study uses a multiple-case research design to understand how disability is experienced in the NWOW from the perspectives of different stakeholders. These stakeholders include PWD, their colleagues and supervisors, HR workers responsible for diversity and inclusion, and those responsible for the implementation of the NWOW. Finally, the third study will use an ethnographic approach to gather an in-depth understanding of the processes through which the NWOW affect the lived experiences of PWD.

Grégory De Boe is a teaching assistant and researcher at UCLouvain, working on his Ph.D. under the guidance of Professors Marie Lamensch and Valérie Swaen. His doctoral research is structured in three essays, with a primary focus on unraveling the intricate ways in which environmental taxes and subsidies shape the decision-making processes of companies subjected to these policies, specifically in the context of adopting pro-environmental behaviors.   
Essay 1: "Greening Corporate Practices: A Review of Tax and Subsidy Influence on Pro-Environmental Behaviors Across Industries" 
This essay undertakes a comprehensive examination of the influence of taxes and subsidies on corporate pro-environmental behaviors across various industries. By conducting a systematic review of existing literature, the study aims to uncover industry-specific variations in outcomes. The research delves into factors such as the level of taxation or subsidy, the economic agents affected, subsidy sources, external factors, and conflicting environmental objectives in tax policy. The overarching goal is to provide policymakers with valuable insights for designing effective tax and subsidy mechanisms and to propose avenues for further scholarly exploration of the intricate interactions between tax policies and corporate pro-environmental behaviors.   

Essay 2: " Examining the Role of Plastic Packaging Taxes in Decision-Making Processes for Circular Practices in the Food Packaging Industry: A Case Study of the UK, Spain, and Portugal" 
This essay examines the role that plastic packaging taxes implemented in the UK, Spain, and Portugal play within the decision-making processes for circular practices in the food packaging industry. By conducting in-depth interviews with producers and importers in the food packaging industry, an industry heavily reliant on plastic, the essay aims to uncover the motivations and obstacles, especially those tied to taxation, behind the adoption of circular practices. Additionally, it examines the interplay between tax-related considerations and other motivations or obstacles behind the adoption of circular practices in the food packaging industry and determines to what extent plastic packaging taxes serve to eliminate some barriers in the implementation of circular practices. The essay finally compares these results according to different designs of plastic packaging taxes. This essay significantly advances the discourse on environmental policy by delivering detailed insights into circular practices within the food packaging sector. It enhances our comprehension of decision-making processes related to circular practices, shedding light on the motivations and obstacles faced by producers and importers in this industry. The paper highlights the role of plastic packaging taxes in encouraging circular practices within private industries, emphasizing key aspects of tax design that support circular approaches. Additionally, it explores contextual elements beyond the taxes, revealing how these factors interact with and either facilitate or impede circularity among food packaging stakeholders. The contribution extends to outlining the capabilities and limitations of state actors in promoting circularity through tax policies. By delving into complexities of the decision-making processes for circular practices, the paper contributes to a comprehensive understanding of how public interventions interact with and within businesses, shaping their engagement in circular practices.  

Essay 3: "Impact of Plastic Packaging Taxes on Packaging Choices and Circular Practices in the Take-Away and Home Delivery Food Industries in the UK, Spain, and Portugal" 
Building upon the insights gained from the previous essays, the third essay narrows its focus to the take-away and home delivery food industries in the UK, Spain, and Portugal. This research investigates how businesses in this sector respond to plastic packaging taxes and examines their choices regarding packaging and circular practices. By analyzing the downstream effects on businesses involved in food take-away or home delivery, the study aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the overall impact and processes resulting from the implementation of plastic packaging taxes throughout the entire value chain of the food industry. This approach contributes significantly to the evaluation of the effectiveness of plastic packaging taxes in promoting circular practices within this specific industry context.   

Together, these three essays form a cohesive and multi-faceted exploration of the complex relationships between taxation, corporate pro-environmental behaviors, and the circular practices within the food packaging industry.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been defined as the contribution of companies to sustainable development. As CSR is an essentially contested concept, individuals (i.e., consumers, employees, or leaders) may have a different understanding of its meaning and its applications by companies. This further influences their reactions to corporate actions. In this context, the goals of the project are: first, to identify the different perceptions individuals have about CSR, and analyse how the framing of perceptions vary with their individual and cultural profile; second, to analyse the evolution of individuals’ CSR perceptions while interacting with sustainable development experts and other individuals; and third, to investigate pedagogical mechanisms that foster constructive debate about CSR and allow conceptual learning of the concept by individuals. For this purpose, we focus on micro-CSR literature to analyse the processes by which individuals interpret and evaluate CSR. We put into perspective the development of individuals’ knowledge about CSR by two conceptual learning theories from educational science research - i.e., conceptual change and socio-cognitive conflict theories. To answer our research questions, we analyse the CSR perceptions and learning process of more than 23,000 registered participants (up to now) in a MOOC on CSR through a mixed-method approach. The expected contributions concern first, the development of micro-CSR research with respect to the framing of individuals’ CSR perceptions and conceptual learning of the concept, and second, the potential change of consumers, employees and leaders’ mentalities necessary to trigger the most beneficial actions and decisions for the transition to a more sustainable society.

      Our western society is at a turning point, facing a health crisis, an ecological crisis and an economic crisis. This necessarily impacts consumers and, when it comes to food issues, consumers are faced with even more complex choices to make. The injunctions are multiple, like eating healthy, buying local, or choosing eco-friendly food products; which raises confusion. Plus, these injunctions are sometimes perceived as not very reconcilable with other aspects like tastiness or low prices. Indeed, food has always been associated with pleasure, conviviality, and discovery; consumers, in the tense contexts we know, are not ready to give up on these aspects in their diets. Furthermore, the question of price is also an issue, particularly in the inflationist situation we are in, as sustainable food is associated with higher prices in consumers’ minds. Accordingly, how do consumers deal with all these injunctions, limits and wants?

      This thesis is aimed at developing the concept of Food Consumption Confusion (FCC), determining its causes and consequences, the ways of reducing it, and other potential information about this phenomenon. More precisely, we would investigate the impact of contradictory information on FCC and other following consumers’ behaviours, as contradictory information seems to increase with the proliferation of information on food packaging. Plus, we contemplate answering questions about the concept of Perceived Consumer Effectiveness (a consumer’s perception about his or her ability to contribute to the solution of a problem through specific behaviours (Ellen et al., 1991)), its conceptualization, its relationship with Self-Efficacy (one’s perceived ability to perform the behaviour that will enable him or her to reach desired outcomes (Bandura, 1977; Ajzen, 2002)), its link with FCC etc. PCE is an interesting concept that we would like to include in our research, but it is not defined enough and needs clarification.

In today’s connected world, retailers need to rethink their strategies and effectively execute across online and offline channels (Jindal et al., 2021). Embracing an omnichannel strategy would not only allow retailers to get low-cost access to new markets, but also leverage synergies between touchpoints and build a strong competitive advantage (e.g., Chen et al., 2018). While omnichannel strategies offer several potential benefits to retailers and customers alike, managing customer experience across all touchpoints remains challenging (Kuehnl et al., 2019). Against this backdrop, practitioners have started investing in customer journey design to differentiate and provide customer value (De Keyser et al., 2020).

Prior research on customer journey design is relatively scant and provides mixed results. On one hand, research suggests that a customer journey design is effective when consumers perceive multiple brand-owned touchpoints as designed in a thematically consistent or standardized way (Kuehnl et al., 2019). Some authors, on the other hand, argue that inconsistency may also positively influence customer experience by improving experiential involvement over time (e.g., Siebert et al., 2020).

Addressing the customer journey design challenge, this doctoral project builds upon congruity theory (Fiske & Taylor, 1991) and uses a multi-level approach to investigate the effects of (in)consistency on customer experience. Specifically, the first objective is to examine when (in)consistency, at the journey-level, positively influence customer experience. The second objective is to investigate the role of omnichannel consistency between the offering-related stimuli – namely Design-Ambient-Social-Trialability (DAST) retail cues (Roggeveen et al., 2020) – that reside within firm-controlled touchpoints in influencing customer experience.

To address these research objectives, this doctoral project uses a mixed-method approach, including econometric models and experiments to analyze the effects of omnichannel (in)consistency on customer experience. By so doing, this research aims to contribute to the customer experience and retailing literatures and to provide retailers with relevant insights on how to best design customer omnichannel journeys and, ultimately, to enhance customer experience.

In the context of the climate and environmental crisis, sustainable entrepreneurs contribute to bringing into the present a sustainable future that is still in-the-making. The development and use of organization narratives by sustainable entrepreneurs are part of the answer to this challenge. Organizational narratives, as “temporal, discursive constructions that provide a means for individual, social and organizational sensemaking and sense giving” (Vaara et al., 2016, p. 3), are a powerful tool to support the legitimacy of a sustainable venture through their performative effects, i.e. their capacity to bring upon the narrated future (Garud et al., 2014).

But how do sustainable entrepreneurs come to envision and narrate such futures? How do they deal with the multiplicity of actors and their diverse – sometime conflicting – visions of a desired future? The literature calls for in-depth study of the performative effects of entrepreneurial framing for the development of new meanings in the answer to the environmental crisis (Snihur et al., 2021). Some mechanisms of the performative process still need to be better understood.

Thus, the goal of this research is to better understand the way sustainable entrepreneurs narrate their desired future as well as the way it contributes to performatively bring upon changes for them and their stakeholders. We study this performativity process longitudinally through a case study in the eco-construction sector. In order to study this phenomenon, we build on the narrative perspective of entrepreneurial innovation by Garud et al. (2014) in which entrepreneurs contextualize innovation through their relational, temporal and performative effort. We adopt the Entrepreneurship as Practice (or EaP hereafter) lens, focusing on the “doing” and “saying” of entrepreneurs and other members of their ecosystems (Champenois et al., 2020).

In this context, we will address the following questions, looking at several narrative complications and tools: How can sustainable entrepreneurs legitimize their ventures through the co-constitution of new meanings? How are narrative practices developed within sustainable ventures? What is the role of artefacts in the performativity process of entrepreneurial narratives across audiences?

The concept of the circular economy, which aims to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation and resource depletion, is gaining momentum as an alternative model of production and consumption. However, despite its promises, studies show that the world is just 7.2% circular, indicating the need for further research and understanding of circular business models.

In my PhD thesis, I focus on three key aspects of circular business models' implementation:

The first article delves into identifying innovation patterns in circular business models through an in-depth review of over 60 cases and the identification of specific managerial practices related to the 10R framework, which includes practices aimed at refusing, rethinking, reducing, reusing, repairing, remanufacturing, refurbishing, repurposing, recycling, and recovering.

The second article of my thesis focuses on the identification, examination, and comparison of existing classifications of circular business models through a systematic literature review. This article provides insights into the different ways circular business models are categorized and classified in the academic literature, helping to create a comprehensive understanding of the landscape of circular business model classifications.

Lastly, the third article investigates the impact of implementing circular business models on a firm's value. Using a dictionary of circular economy-related keywords and data from over 1700 US firms, this article offers valuable insights into how different circular economy strategies impact a firm's value differently, providing empirical evidence on this debated and, currently, inconclusive topic. 

Overall, my PhD thesis contributes significantly to the field of management sciences by advancing the understanding of circular business models. It provides novel insights into how companies innovate in their business models to implement circular strategies, the existing classification methods, and the impacts of circular business models on firm value. The findings of my research have practical implications for businesses, policymakers, and scholars interested in sustainability and the circular economy field in the modern business context.

According to Statista (2021), 21% of businesses worldwide already integrated artificial intelligence (AI) to their service activities (e.g., chatbots, virtual assistants, service robots). The market for AI interfaces is projected to grow from $12.9 billion in 2019 to $41.5 billion by 2027 (Fortune Business Insights, 2020). In this context, customers increasingly interact with organizations through various touchpoints and channels powered by AI interfaces (Hoyer et al. 2020).

This shift from human-to-human to human-to-technology interactions is likely to dramatically influence the customer experience (Bolton et al. 2018, Davenport et al. 2020, Larivière et al. 2017). Considered as a unique source of competitive advantage, understanding and managing customer experience along the customer journey has become an imperative for organizations (Lemon & Verhoef 2016). However, research on how customers respond to and experience interactions with AI is at an early stage, making it a top research priority according to the Marketing Science Institute (2020).

Customer experience is by its very nature multidimensional, including emotional and social dimensions (De Keyser et al. 2020). Studies examining customer experience with AI-based interfaces however mainly use a rational-cognitive perspective (Mariani et al. 2022). While the latter provide useful and relevant insights, we argue that they do not capture the complexities of customer experiences with AI interfaces. Responding to calls for research using a more fine-grained experiential perspective (Ameen et al. 2021; De Keyser & Kunz, 2022, Puntoni et al. 2021), this research aims to provide a better understanding of the processes in action by considering the multiple dimensions (e.g., affective, social) of customer experience as well as relevant contextual elements that may dramatically influence customer experience.

By doing so, this research aims to make theoretical contributions to the fields of Customer Experience, human-machine interaction, and service research. It also aims to make managerial contributions for businesses and organizations.

This study investigates the threat of mission drift and mission lock-in faced by sustainable enterprises, and the strategies set up by sustainable entrepreneurs to maintain their hybridity. Sustainable entrepreneurship is a growing research topic in the literature. One of the specificities of social/sustainable enterprises is particularly interesting: their hybrid nature (Battilana & Lee, 2014). They are combining a sustainable mission (social and/ or green) with an economic activity. There is a need to study the fragile equilibrium of these companies that are trying to maintain their hybridity. If they focus on the social/green mission (mission lock-in situation), they may endanger their financial survival. On the contrary, if social enterprises favor the business objectives at the cost of the societal mission, it is called mission drift (Cornforth, 2014; Ebrahim, Battilana, & Mair, 2014). Based on a multilevel review of sustainable and social entrepreneurship research, we identified important gaps in the literature: at the individual level (intentions, orientations and motivations), at the organizational level (strategy, activities, resource allocations, performance, etc. ), and at the societal level (institutions). Responding to the call to investigate the mission drift in African settings (Doherty, Haugh, & Lyon, 2014), we already identified a network of sustainable organizations in the tourism sector in Benin (Africa). The tensions faced by those sustainable enterprises are important, due to several crises in the last years (Boko Haram, Ebola…). We conducted at least 5 rounds of interviews (2017-2020) with the 6 main sustainable entrepreneurs but also some interviews with unsuccessful entrepreneurs from the ecotourism sector in Benin. We investigated how sustainable entrepreneurs manage the tensions between their mission and economic constraints. We identified factors that explain why some entrepreneurs fail to get their economic and social activities off the ground. Then, among those who have been able to launch their activity, we have identified factors that explain why some manage to get out of the NGO logic while others are still stuck in it. We also identified significant differences in the way they manage their human resources. These HR policies enlighten the difficulties facing by some entrepreneurs to find and train potential successors. Finally, we will study the boundary between entrepreneurship and sustainable entrepreneurship through a quantitative research of the motivations along with social and environmental outcomes of entrepreneurs in Belgium.

Despite the promising growth of the Tunisian entrepreneurial ecosystem over the past decade, little research has attempted to explore the role of social incubation programs in supporting Tunisian early-stage social startups. This research addresses this gap by exploring the role of those programs in supporting social startups, particularly in overcoming and managing their hybridity tensions. The study will make original and innovative contributions to existing knowledge on the relationship between social incubation programs and hybridity tensions of social startups, which has yet to be widely examined. Given the topic's novelty, we used an exploratory qualitative methodology involving several case studies of Tunisian social incubators and their incubated startups. Furthermore, at the beginning of our research, our interest was directed toward understanding the types of hybrid tensions that social startups may face. From this, we sought to analyze and interpret the innovative incubation programs' contribution to managing these tensions.

Consequently, this research results offer several contributions. Concerning the theoretical one, our research help understands the role of social impact incubators in enabling social startups to manage hybridity tensions, achieve social and financial goals and create social impact. For the managerial one, the study provides a guideline for incubation program managers to improve their programs by having a new strategic vision of social startups' hybridity tensions. Finally, it also helps social startups understand how to overcome and manage their hybridity tensions and be aware of social incubators' crucial role in doing it.

Sport has an impact on the natural environment, and in turn is affected by the natural environment. It is critical to study environmental sustainability in sport because of this mutual relationship between sport and the environment. Sport Environmental Sustainability (SES) is an underdeveloped research field that is dominated by international professional sport organisations, sport facilities and major sporting events. Given their social role and reach, non-profit sport organisations (NPSOs) are powerful avenues to influence their stakeholders’ behaviour (e.g., participants, consumers, employees, investors, suppliers, communities). However, little is known about how NPSOs manage their stakeholders’ expectations to implement environmental sustainability actions. Therefore, it is vital to gain a better understanding and assist in the successful deployment of pro-environmental changes by NPSOs. In this context, the purpose of this research project is to capture how NPSOs and their stakeholders engage toward environmental sustainability. Three research questions will be examined: 1) What are the expectations of NPSOs’ multiple stakeholders regarding SES? 2) Are there SES paradoxes in NPSOs and how do managers manage these paradoxes?, and 3) How do NPSOs manage their stakeholders’ expectations when engaging toward environmental sustainability? The project is grounded on stakeholder theory for which the interconnectedness between the central organisation and its stakeholders is key in the quest for sustainability progresses. A mixed-method and multilevel empirical research design including document analysis, survey, a social network analysis, and in-depth interviews will be used. This project will contribute to develop knowledge on SES and future policy-making processes.

The world is facing global economic, social, and environmental challenges. To tackle these challenges, different programs, frameworks, and initiatives (such as UNGC, GRI, ISO, B Corp Certification, etc.) are developed to engage and guide enterprises in the pursuit of sustainable development but they focus on the formal sector, ignoring the informal sector. In addition, in sustainability research, economic, social, and environmental practices of formal firms, either large or small, have been largely explored with little attention given to informal businesses. However, sustainability cannot be achieved if the informal sector, which represents an important part of the global economy (accounting for almost 51,9% of the global employed population), is neglected. Therefore, the informal sector has a role to play in achieving sustainable development and this research investigates the links between the informal sector and sustainability, particularly from the perspective of informal entrepreneurs. The purpose of this study is to understand how sustainability is understood and implemented in the informal sector and why. To address this question, we will identify and analyze sustainability practices in the informal sector to characterized informal entrepreneurs who engage in these practices; we will describe and analyze the processes developed by informal entrepreneurs to implement sustainability practices; we will analyze the specificities of sustainability practices implemented in informal businesses to understand the challenges, drivers and motivations behind informal entrepreneurs' sustainability engagement, in order to suggest strategies to improve their contribution to the achievement of sustainable development.

Capturing the human body can be involved in many activities in various application domains ranging from human rehabilitation and motion analysis to avatar animation and robot action or human-robot interaction. Capturing the human body or a part of it is a challenging task requiring to transform raw data acquired by one or many sensors (e.g., a Microsoft Kinect) into a higher level model that then could serve for the intended purpose (e.g., a biomechanical model of the human body). These raw data often consist of physical data measured in a three-dimensional space (e.g., x, y, z, t) along with other data (e.g., speed, acceleration, pressure, jerk), thus posing several challenges in terms of data fusion and interpretation. This thesis will investigate how computational algebra may unify the capture of these data as well as their fusion in order not to lose any information, but also for ensuring computation in the same system.

The increasing awareness around environmental issues has led to a rising interest in the negative impact of our consumption on the environment. It has also been highlighted that different technologies present along the purchase journey of consumers, such as recommender systems, influence consumption. This thesis focuses on how recommender systems could be modified to encourage a more sustainable and responsible consumption. In the first part of this thesis, we explore the use of machine learning techniques to build a model that could easily and quickly identify sustainable products. Next, we analyse different in-processing and post-processing strategies for increasing the representation of sustainable products in product recommendations. The last part of this thesis focuses on whether consumers would be willing to adopt a pro-environmental behaviour by choosing sustainable recommended products.

This thesis focuses on the recognition of 3D gestures (gestures performed with some part(s) of the body) captured with radar-based sensors, with the end-goal of providing better and more intuitive ways to interact with systems such as TVs and computers in challenging environments (for instance, bad lighting conditions). 3D gesture recognition has the potential to impact many facets of our lives, with potential applications such as looking-up patient data in the operating room without any physical contact, thus limiting the risks of contamination, or flipping through the pages of a recipe e-book while cooking without having to talk or touch a screen. However, there are still many challenges left before the generalization of 3D (radar) gesture recognition, which I try to address in my thesis. These challenges include identifying gestures among parasitic movements, dealing with sensor noise, accurately recognizing gestures in as little time as possible, and finding the most appropriate gestures for specific actions.

The objective of this project is to analyse economic growth sustainability reached by the “21st century’s socialism” government in Ecuador through the implementation or maintenance of determined public policies. Specifically, the research project will focus on the evaluation of the agricultural, industrial, trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) public policies applied by these governments to promote the rise of national income through the increase of productivity of the national and foreign enterprises, the diversification level of production and trade structure by attracting FDI or support national champion companies in key economic sectors (primary, secondary and/or tertiary).