Prof. Dr. Paola De Bernardi

Department of Management - School of Management and Economics (SME) - University of Turin, Italy

Paola De Bernardi is Professor of Management Control and Performance Measurement Systems at the University of Turin, Department of Management. Her research interests lie in the area of Strategic and Management Systems, performance measurement systems and circular economy management. Her research interests are interdisciplinary, and they are both qualitative and quantitative in nature. Paola’s work explores the role of entrepreneurship & innovation on sustainable and circular business model innovation. She has authored/coauthored several papers in international journals such as Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Journal of Business Research, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal, Environmental Impact Assessment Review. She is currently working on and supervising some research projects on Industry 4.0: Food Digital Monitoring (FDM), Hierarchical Open Manufacturing Europe (HOME) and Nutribev (R&D of active compounds from beer fermentation residues for use in the nutraceutical and cosmetic sectors and use of beer production waste for upcycled products for healthy nutrition). She participates to the Interreg Europe project “Smart Circular Procurement” (CirPRO), and Integrated Thinking for Complementing Accountability and Responsibility within Enterprises (IT4CARE) project.

She is coordinator on behalf of the University of Turin of the EIT Food educational programmes: Global Food Venture and Innovator Fellowship. She is engaged in mentoring start-up or pre-seed programmes in Deloitte Foodtech Accellerator and Eit Food Accelerator Network. She is supervisor of the Smar AgriFood Lab of the Inter-departemental centre of Innovation and Technology (ICxT) of the University of Turin and co-founder of the Smart Commons Lab. She developed a MOOC under EIT Food funding on “Circular business models for sustainable urban food systems” for Future Learn Platform. She is the supervisor of the Turin Digital Education Hackathon a European annual hackathon on the challenge “Cities Go Circular, when Digital Education meets Urban Circular Business Models”.

With her university’s team, she participated to the EUvsVirus hackathon and to the Matchathon supporting teams in the innovation projects aimed to fight the COVID 19 crisis. She is member of a) the Italian Stakeholder Platform on Circular Economy; b) the Sustainable Food System Network and c) the European Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform (ECESP) Leadership Group - Food Waste, Food Systems, Bioeconomy. Paola is the leading coordinator of the “Italian Imagine Circularity” initiative. She is also member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the British Food Journal.