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Following the triple helix (TH) model and the way knowledge is transferred into the industry domain, this chapter aims to define features interface that should be implemented in order to facilitate the University–Industry (UI) relationship and thus encourage the spin-off creation.

In order to support this relationship, a new business model configuration of an entrepreneurial ecosystem is proposed, aiming at creating a sustainable environment, where business entities can grow. The field of the Governance of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems is also investigated in order to define a framework for launching, developing, and sustaining a company over time.

This chapter presents a case study developed within the University of Salento (Italy). It capitalizes results from three different research analyses, based on questionnaires and interviews with actors of the spin-off network (professors and researchers, graduating students, admin-tech staff of the Technology Transfer Office, spin-offs’ CEOs/Associates, and R&D managers of external companies) and on results coming from scientific publications and regional/national reports in the innovation context.

A research methodology based on semantic network analysis and sentiment analysis has been applied in order to identify which features an interface should implement in order to facilitate the UI relationship and encourage the spin-off creation.

To support the start-up overcoming the “death valley,” the creation of a link between the strategy used to transfer value to the market and the phase of innovation is proposed inside the business model configuration. Some aspects of a governance model of an entrepreneurial ecosystem were also presented in order to support the business evolution of a single business entity and assuring sustainability over time.

A persistent theme throughout the history of the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Section of the American Sociological Association (CITAMS, formerly CITASA) has been that the work of section members has been underrepresented in sociology’s leading journals. This chapter empirically examines that claim, using data from the newly created American Sociological Review (ASR) Digital Archive, a collection of all manuscripts, published and unpublished, submitted to ASR between 1990 and 2010, along with all reviews of these manuscripts. Analyses in the chapter focus on a comparison of CITAMS and Methodology Section members’ participation in the ASR process as a manuscript author or reviewer. The findings of this chapter show that controlling for differences in the gender and age composition of the two sections, CITAMS members are significantly less likely than Methodology Section members to participate in the ASR publication process. This pattern is evident not only in the degree to which CITAMS members are asked to review papers, but also in the frequency with which they submit to ASR. Further analyses in the chapter look at membership in multiple sections and the possibilities for innovative collaboration. Increasing CITAMS involvement in the ASR publication process and amplifying the section’s voice in the discipline’s flagship journal may begin with more CITAMS members submitting manuscripts to ASR and collaborating with sociologists affiliated with other ASA sections.

The need for stakeholder theory has been widely highlighted in the literature to develop solid strategies for a large organization. However, there is still a lack of user-friendly visualization tools and no unique approach exists to identify and engage stakeholders. This paper aims to propose a general methodology to co-design the sustainability ecosystem at the local scale, to explore it and to assess the impact of a large organization within the identified ecosystem.

The methodology consists of two main processes: identifying an ontological map of the sustainability topics network and designing the local sustainability stakeholders ecosystem. Both processes are based on a nodes identification phase and a nodes prioritization phase. The identification phase was achieved by engaging 160 citizens, for the topics network and nearly 40 relevant stakeholders, for the stakeholders’ ecosystem, with a collaborative participatory mapping process. The prioritization phase was conducted because of three indicators, i.e. the closeness, the betweenness and the eigenvector centrality.

Betweenness centrality results to be the best indicator to assess the importance of a stakeholder with respect to the whole network, while eigenvector centrality highlights the quality of the already engaged stakeholders of an organization, as it mainly depends on the number of links of the first order neighbors. On the contrary, the closeness centrality, when applied to a small network, seems to be not appropriate to assess the centrality of a stakeholder.

This approach revealed some criticalities in the mapping process, as in the weighting link procedure. Further investigations are needed to generalize the approach to a dynamic one, to allow real-time mapping and to develop a robust interconnection among centrality degrees and the power, interest and legitimacy concept of stakeholder theory.

Obtained results for a case study, i.e. the position of the University of Turin Green Office within the City of Turin sustainability ecosystem, are discussed showing how social network analysis centrality degrees can be used to quantitatively assess the role of an organization within a stakeholders’ ecosystem.

Centrality analysis allows identifying emergent topics/stakeholders within a network of words/actors that, at a first sight, should not be considered by decision-makers and managers.

A new methodology for stakeholder identification and prioritization is proposed exploiting online data visualization tools, participatory mapping and social network analysis.

In the last few years, information and communication technologies (ICTs) and social media have become increasingly relevant to politicians and political parties alike, often used to issue statements or campaigning, among others. At the same time, many citizens have become more involved in politics, partly due to the highly interactive and social environments that the social networking services (SNS) provide. Political events flow through these networks, influencing their users; such events, however, often start offline (outside the online platform) and are, therefore, hard to track. Event studies, a methodology often used in financial and economic studies, can be translated to social networks to help modeling the effect of external events in the network. In the present case, the event study methodology is applied to two sample cases: the tariff war between the United States and China, with multiple responses and retaliations from both sides, and the Brexit referendum. In both cases, the Twitter social networks that arise from users who discuss the respective subjects are analyzed to examine how political events shape and modify the network. Results show how event studies, combined with the possibilities offered by the ICTs both in data retrieval and analysis, can be applied to understand the effect of external political events, allowing researchers to quantitatively track, observe, and analyze the spread of political information over social network platforms. This is a first step toward obtaining a better understanding on how political messages are diffused over social networks and their effects in the network structures and behaviors.