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Silvestri Daniela

Researcher

Silvestri Daniela

Researcher

Daniela Silvestri is a researcher at the Department of Management, Economics, and Industrial Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, where she is a member of the Entrepreneurship, Finance, and Innovation (EFI) research group.

Her research focuses on the role of knowledge recombination in shaping innovation processes, with particular attention to the automotive and pharmaceutical industries and, more in general, to firms’ growth.

Her work has been presented at leading international conferences, including the Academy of Management Annual Meeting, the DRUID Conference, and the Strategic Management Society, and has been published in journals such as Research Policy.

Daniela earned her PhD through a joint doctoral program between the Faculty of Business and Economics at KU Leuven and IMT Lucca. Her doctoral research investigated measures of technological novelty derived from patent data, exploring how firms’ search strategies and business cycles influence innovation outcomes. She has also been a visiting researcher at Copenhagen Business School (CBS).

At Politecnico di Milano, Daniela is leading teacher of the BSc course Business Economics and also teaches in the MSc courses Economics of Innovation and New Technologies and Business Industrial Economics.

Career

PHD: in Management Science and Business Economics (IMT Lucca and KU Leuven)

Master of Science: Global Economy and Business (Università di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale)

Research

Daniela’s research interests lie in the area of economics of innovation, firm growth, and industrial dynamics. She extensively works with patent data to trace technological development, innovation strategies, and firms’ innovation challenges, particularly in the life science and automotive industries.

During her doctoral studies, she analyzed measures of technological novelty from patent data to better understand changes in firms’ innovation outcomes during business cycles and, more broadly, firms’ search strategies linked to organizational learning.

In earlier projects, she investigated open innovation strategies and startup engagement methods through a research project funded by the Ford’s Research Center of Aachen. Prior to joining Politecnico di Milano, she used patent data to map the evolution of the knowledge base of the global automotive industry through a research project at Ca’ Foscari University (a project funded by the European Patent Office Academic Research Programme).

Currently, her research is tackling topics within the field of high-tech acquisitions and innovation with a specific focus on SMEs’ survival and growth performances, for which she received the Seal of Excellence from the European Commission in 2020 and the MUR Young Researchers grant in 2022.

Selected Publications

  1. Perri, A., Silvestri, D., & Zirpoli, F. (2025). Technological change, incumbent dominance, and knowledge base evolution in multi-technology industries: A patent analysis of the global automotive sector. Research Policy, 54(9), 105304.
  2. Perri, A., Silvestri, D., and Zirpoli, F. (2022). Technological Change, Knowledge Base, and Industry Dynamics: Theory, Methods, and the Case of the Automotive Industry, in Matthias Kipping, Takafumi Kurosawa, and D. Eleanor Westney (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Industry Dynamics.
  3. Silvestri, D., Riccaboni, M., & Della Malva, A. (2018). Sailing in all winds: Technological search over the business cycle. Research Policy, 47(10), 1933-1944.


Grants, awards and Honours

  1. MUR Young Researchers (2022) for the project Acquisitive Growth: when does it pay off? Exploring the European SMEs Acquisitive Strategies in the Life Science Industry.
  2. Premio Galati (2022 )AiIg – Associazione Italiana Ingegneria Gestionale, for the research project Exploring the effect of sponsorship and certification in the Italian market for high-tech SMEs.
  3. Seal of Excellence (2020) by the European Commission for the SMEACQUI-INNO project submitted for the MSCA-IF-2019 Couplings between small: Acquisitions between small firms and innovation.


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