The Business for Society Doctorate (B4S) is the result of a profitable interaction between the Department of Business and Law (Di.SEA.DE) and the Department of Economics, Management and Statistics (DEMS), which share their research and teaching experiences to build an advanced education perspective characterized by multi-disciplinarity and internationalization.

Di.SEA.DE is an highly interdisciplinary department which integrates faculty from business, law and economics to pursue highly impactful research and teaching. The Department is recognized for its ability to apply academic knowledge into real life interventions relevant for any range of organizations, including businesses, public and civil society organizations. It is also characterized for the high quality of its executive and master programmes, as well as for its research observatories and labs.
The Di.SEA.DE department contributes to the PhD bringing in expertise on key contemporary managerial and legal topics. In particular, the wide experience in strategic management, innovation and social responsibility research provides a relevant contribution to the PhD program. Its constant commitment to the three traditional dimensions - research, training and knowledge transfer – has guaranteed a constant generation of social value towards a vast and relevant range of institutions, public and private, with whom the Department has a long established and privileged relationship.
Scholars in Di.SEA.DE are research active in several fields, such as: corporate finance, management control, innovation management and business organization, national and European standardization and regulation frameworks, public policies, public governance and leadership. All the research undertaken takes a specific attention to the role technological change plays to the generation of new skills and of new forms of entrepreneurship, as well as to its implications on the legal, economic, and socio-cultural contexts and models. 

DEMS is one of the top-rated Italian departments in Economics, Management and Statistics and it is the recipient of a big competitive funding granted by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR) under the Italian Departments of Excellence Program. The Department employs 71 full-time faculty members and 48 postdocs and PhD students. DEMS is a dynamic research environment in which its members conduct high-quality research in marketing and business strategy, theoretical and applied economics and statistics. The Department is committed to provide high-standard teaching activities in the same fields as well. DEMS members regularly publish in top-tier general and field journals. DEMS brings to the PhD program its competences in management, economics and statistics. More specifically, the management group will provide rigorous foundations of strategic management (with specific attention to innovation and technology management and CSR), organizational innovation, performance management and marketing strategies to develop a clear understanding of the main challenges faced by companies operating in national and international contexts. The economics and statistics group will provide a solid foundation in quantitative and empirical methods for data analysis. The competences of the group will help to develop students’ ability to define relevant research questions, to apply the proper tools to economic data and to interpret critically the results together with the economic and social processes behind them.