Hello! I'm Ciro, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Amsterdam, conducting research at the intersection of management and natural language processing (NLP). I am part of the Entrepreneurship & Innovation section, led by Martin Obschonka. My Ph.D. supervisors are Nachoem Wijnberg, Balazs Szatmari, and Jonathan Sitruk. I've also been a visiting scholar at Charles River Laboratories and at the House of Innovation, Stockholm School of Economics, where I collaborated with Holmer Kok. I also collaborated with the Intelligent Data Engineering Lab (INDElab), led by Paul Groth, at the Informatics Institute of the University of Amsterdam.

My research

My research is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme. I explore how emerging areas of knowledge affect key business activities such as venture financing and alliance formation, with a strong focus on applying text analysis. My Ph.D. dissertation, entitled "Emerging Fields: Their Strategic Implications and Identification", was completed in October 2024 and will be defended on the 13th of May 2025. In 2023, I was awarded a research grant by the European Academy of Management to investigate how exaggeration influences venture financing. My work has been presented at leading management conferences and doctoral consortia, including Academy of Management (AOM) and European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS), and published in Small Business Economics.

My teaching

Over the years, I have been actively involved in several courses within the Business Administration track at the University of Amsterdam. These include "Innovation Management," "Entrepreneurship in Science and Technology," "Digital Innovation and Entrepreneurship," and "Digital Business Models." For more details on these courses, you can visit here.

My supervision

I’ve mentored 35 master's and bachelor's students on a wide range of topics that extend beyond my own Ph.D. focus, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and innovation, hype, social entrepreneurship, and sustainability. Many of these students have engaged in thesis projects in collaboration with both the university and corporate partners, often leading to employment opportunities within the companies involved. Several of my students have also earned significant recognition, including a master's student who was named a top three finalist for the ASF Thesis Prize (€1500) in 2024. Furthermore, two of my master's students were finalists for the George Molenkamp Sustainability Thesis Award (€1000) in both 2022 and 2023, sponsored by KPMG and the University of Amsterdam. For more details on the theses, you can visit here.

My background

I earned both my master's degree in Economics, Finance and International Integration and my bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Pavia, Department of Economics and Management. My master's thesis, entitled "Empirical Testing of One-Factor Capital Asset Pricing Model and Arbitrage Pricing Theory: Evidence from the Italian Stock Market", was supervised by Enrico Cotta Ramusino. During my studies, I worked as a private tutor in Mathematics and Physics, an academic tutor, a student guidance counsellor, and an assistant in the university's secretarial office. I also gained professional experience through an internship in public administration.