Research Unit in Business Sciences

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Organizational Unit

Publications

Applications of Blockchain Technology to Higher Education Arena: A Bibliometric Analysis

Publication . Reis-Marques, Carlos; Figueiredo, Ronnie; Neto, Miguel de Castro

Research related to blockchain is rapidly gaining importance in the higher education. This opportunity collaborates with a proposal for a review of papers on the main blockchain topic. The bibliometric analysis included 61 peer-reviewed articles published in the Scopus database during the period of 2016 to 2021. This paper offers the identification of gaps in the literature enabling studies on the subject in higher education. The article identifies the main applications of blockchain technology in higher education around the world, as well as suggests future investigations. For further scientific investigation, we propose the operationalization of each of the researched approaches, especially combining the blockchain relationship, artificial intelligence, digital innovation, digital maturity, and customer experience in higher education.

2021-11-10Journal article

Restricted access

The Role of Equity Crowdfunding in the Brazilian Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: An Empirical Analysis

Publication . Figueiredo, Ronnie; Bendelá, Flavia

This research provides the first deep and empirical look into Brazil’s increasing equity crowdfunding, or crowdinvest, market, and examines its peculiarities. It is a pioneering work dedicated to understanding which characteristics most impact the success of offers in the country, and whether there is any representative movement pointing to the inclusion of gender, firm age, and location or participation of small investors. We employ descriptive and quantitative research techniques and analyses all the offerings derived through this mechanism from 1 January 2017 to 31 December 2020—totaling 234 operations, considering successful offers (the ones that received investment) and unsuccessful offers (those that failed in raising funds), registered by 24 platforms in the country according to CVM (Comissão de Valores Mobiliários), the Brazilian SEC, under regulation Instruction 588. Furthermore, we use empirical and publicly available data from several sources. The findings reveal that mutual offers are more attractive to investors than those of equity, impacting the dependent variable of success. Besides this, firm location is the only inclusion aspect with representativeness among the independent variables tested. The main contributions of the research lie in providing the first empirical study that (1) consolidates a consistent database of the equity crowdfunding industry in Brazil, (2) reveals the role of crowdinvest in Brazil, related to bank credit to SMEs, and (3) provides recommendations to the main stakeholders that can improve the whole ecosystem.

2024-09-10Journal article

Open access

Data-driven decisions: Artificial intelligence-based experimental validation of ocean ecosystem services scale

Publication . Figueiredo, Ronnie; Cabral, Pedro

Several studies address the main topic of research, ecosystem services. It is also proven that decision-making in organizations generally involves a decision-maker, who assumes internal responsibility for the results. However, when the decision is collective, we need to think about the context of governance. How can we increase the sustainable decisions of ocean ecosystem services governance? When this decision is applied to ocean ecosystem services, in particular, we need a parameter. Therefore, the proposed scale is an initial guide for support key decision-makers decisions on the governance of ocean services ecosystems. The scale proposal with validation through classical linear regression, and supported by an artificial neural network, demonstrates the main variables that influence the decision and contribute to possible risk mitigations in terms of decisions.

2024-12-01Journal article

Open access