Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "The Future of Retailing: The Impact of Customer Value Enhancing Initiatives on Firm Value, Customer Perceptions and Shopping Behavior" "Els Breugelmans" "Department of Marketing (main work address Antwerp), Department of Marketing (main work address Leuven)" "A booming e-commerce, new digital channels, shifts in the population’s socio-demographic composition and changes in consumers’ needs, wants and shopping behavior, pose many new challenges for retailers. What is the future of retailing? To survive in this changing retail landscape, retailers have been making numerous investments in their stores as a way to differentiate from competition. This project focuses on customer value enhancing initiatives and whether they translate in improved retailer performance. Our first research question investigates in which initiatives should retailers invest to boost their firm value? In our second research question we investigate the impact of these initiatives on the customer's (a key stakeholder) perception and shopping behavior. We focus in detail on two large-scale upcoming customer value enhancing initiatives that change the role or positioning of the physical store where the initiative got implemented: (i) a store re-invention and (ii) the in-store third-party pick-up facility." "ENPROCI – The value of entropy as a proxy for energy and economic value in view of material circularity." "Pieter Billen" "Intelligence in PRocesses, Advanced Catalysts and Solvents (iPRACS)" "Circular economy strategies are gaining attention within companies to reduce their environmental impact and meet government targets. In this context, companies in different sectors are investigating and implementing different strategies to reuse, repair, refurbish, remanufacture, reuse, recycle and recover end-of-life products, components, parts or materials. Deciding which strategy to choose requires case-specific life cycle and techno-economic assessments, which typically require a lot of data, expertise and time. Furthermore, there is no single quantitative definition of circularity that can be directly used to assess, monitor and optimize the circularity of product designs or value chains. Therefore, there is a need for generic tools/methods that can be used to assess circularity based on generic information that is commonly available. To address this knowledge gap, we present three central hypotheses, in which we argue that energy consumption provides an adequate projection of circularity and that entropy is a valid parameter to move from process-specific assessment methods to more generic state-based assessment methods: Hypothesis 1: The relationship between the embodied energy of materials and products and their carbon footprint is linear. This has already been demonstrated in several studies, Hypothesis 2: The relationship between the embodied energy of materials and their economic value (as raw materials) is linear. This has already been demonstrated by the work of Tim Gutowski and others. Hypothesis 3: The relationship between resource dilution (reciprocal concentration in deposits) and embodied energy of materials is linear. Dilution here can be interpreted directly as entropy, cf. the description above. This has already been demonstrated for metals, while we have calculated a similar relationship for post-consumer packaging waste in preliminary work. Evidence supporting these three hypothesis would for the first time establish a direct and quantitative link between materials circularity and climate change. That way entropy can be used as a proxy for energy expenditure over the life cycle of a material, and in turn for the carbon footprint. We would further provide basic evidence, that can convince companies and policy makers using simple case studies. In this project, we will further demonstrate hypotheses 2 and 3, by focusing on the value versus entropy of waste materials, and by looking at bioresources. As a result, using this framework, waste sorting and (bio-)refining processes can be judged on the performance of individual unit operations rather than only on the end results of a complete plant configuration. The scope for this project will be restricted to different fossil-based polymers and bio-based polymers, to ensure feasibility and complementarity with the group's expertise. The anticipated results will accelerate the deployment and valorization of the novel circularity assessment methodology and make it more accessible to the main target audience, i.e. product and process designers. In this way, the foundations will be laid for a circularity quantification and optimization tool based on generic thermodynamic principles." "Strategic Research Programme: Exchange value and public value of content and communication services in future media ecosystems" "Pieter Ballon" "Brussels Center for Competition Policy, Communication Sciences, Studies in Media, Innovation and Technology" "Focuses on the position of the individual creator in the audiovisual value chain; while being the most fragile part of the value chain and very important in light of the need of high quality content, the individual creator is often ignored in media economics and studies on the changing media ecology. Introducing this track in the SRP adds to the quality and ‘completeness’ of studying different parts of the value chain, including thus creation at the individual and organization level, packaging, distribution and consumption.." "Boosting Value Creation Through Information Technology in Flemish SMEs: On the Implementation of IT Governance to Enable the Creation of Business Value from IT-enabled investments." "Steven De Haes" "Management Information Systems (MIS)" "Contemporary smaller organizations often struggle with IT-enabled value creation. This research project will gain insight in the implementation of IT governance in the SME context. Using these insights, SMEs will find guidance in their quest to IT-enabled value creation." "The Value of Belief: Plato on the Epistemological and Practical Value of doxa" "Jan Opsomer" "De Wulf-Mansion Centre for Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy" "The proposed project aims at a new appraisal of belief (doxa) in Plato, focusing on its role within his concept of knowledge. This requires departing from the viewpoint of most available research on this topic, as the majority of scholarship on Plato’s epistemology still pejoratively conceives of the concept of belief. Knowledge is often seen as being sharply distinguished from belief and the former’s theoretical as well as practical superiority over the latter is regularly stressed. By answering the following five guiding questions, my research aims at providing a more candid systematic study on the value of belief in Plato: In which way are an ontological difference between Forms and sensible objects and the distinction between knowledge and belief related? Which role does belief play in the acquisition of knowledge? Is belief generally inferior to knowledge in the pursuit of a happy life? How well may belief guide individual and collective actions and judgments? May acquiring (true) belief be a goal in itself? The Platonic dialogues Meno, Republic, Theaetetus, Timaeus, and Philebus shall provide the basis for the treatment of these questions, as they seem to paint quite different pictures of belief. A reliable study that, first, accommodates such apparent differences in the depiction of belief and, second, develops a clearer understanding of the value that belief has in Plato’s concept of knowledge is still missing. My project aims at filling this gap in scholarship." "Digital Value (DIVA) - Digital value creations at Flemish SMEs from a diversified ROI perspective" "Wannes Heirman" "Business and law" "Abstract only available in Dutch" "Customer value in Financial services" "Koen VANHOOF" "Business Informatics, Marketing" "The main goal of this project is answer the next question: what is the value of the customers of Cajamar and in which variables does it depend on? In the way that Wiesel, Skiera & Villanueva (2008) have worked, we want to design a permanent methodology (that highlights the value of the customer base and its development over time) based on a stochastic model to estimate the value of customers (e.g. CLV and CE), whose output is a monetary value of each customer which allows us to assess the heterogeneity among customers, explain the results (not neural networks, because their internal calculus are like a black box) and finally segment customers based on their estimated value. The data available are individual level customer transactions of a Spanish financial services company (contractual setting), and certain demographic variables of each individual, so the model will be disaggregated (at individual customer level). We have data for a finite time period, but we want to develop a model to estimate the value of customers for an infinite time period (permanent methodology). Our approach ignores the effect of competition (because there is no such information). It is necessary to recognize a deeper understanding of customers in this contractual setting, that is to obtain the value of customers to optimally manage the resources of the company and actions of marketing (CRM), because the managers of the bank face different type of customers that they should manage in different ways (intuitively they may be some customers with high retention or behavioral loyalty but with little monetary value (e.g. retirees) and some others with lower retention but with high monetary value). Therefore, we want to develop a methodology for assessing customers based on registration of bank transactions, their demographic characteristics and other variables such as cross-buying." "Core lab - Value, Cost & Circularity in Manufacturing (VCCM)." "Steven Van Passel" "Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Hasselt University, Engineering Management" "The Flanders Make core lab VCCM bundles expertise from departments in Business & Economics and Engineering Sciences & Technology at three Universities with a focus on: • The economic (cost and value) aspect throughout the supply chain and over the entire lifecycle; • The circularity and sustainability assessment and optimization; • The modeling and optimization algorithms for multi-criteria decision support." "The (evidential) value of statements by (cooperative) suspects: how to make suspects cooperative?" "Law Enforcement" "The study examines 'the role of the statement by a cooperative suspect (guilty/innocent) in Belgian criminal cases' from a legal perspective (evidential value) as well as a psychology and law and a sociology and law perspective(stimulation of cooperation) . The study concerns (1) a legal analysis and literature screening and (2) a field study consisting of a combination of quantitative (questionnaires, case analysis) and qualitative methods (semi-structured interviews)." "Predicting customer lifetime value based on the financial lifecycle stages" "Customer retention is no guarantee for profits. This project focuses on ""lifetime value"" - that integrates profits (value) and retention (lifetime). This project also aims at measuring the impact of different lifecycle stages on lifetime value since previous research demonstraated that customers' needs, preferences and behavior may strongly depend on a particular stage, as well as the transition to another stage."