Michele Piazzai

• Director of the MSc in Creative Industries at the Edinburgh Futures Institute

I am a computational social scientist interested in problems of organization, strategy, and decision-making, particularly in the context of creative product markets. I joined the University of Edinburgh in January 2025. Before then, I was Assistant Professor of Innovation at the University of Amsterdam (2017–2020) and Assistant Professor of Management at Carlos III University of Madrid (2020–2025).

My background is interdisciplinary, but centered on the creative industries. After studying art history, I earned a BA summa cum laude in Humanities, then moved to social science with a MA cum laude in Cultural Economics, then ventured into computational science with a PhD cum laude in Applied Logic. My doctoral research, funded by the Dutch Research Council, developed mathematical tools for the analysis of human behavior in markets for creative goods. To build on this work, in 2021 I was awarded a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship by the State Research Agency of Spain.

As a faculty member, I taught and directed BSc, MSc, and PhD courses in strategic management, entrepreneurship, innovation, and organizational design. At Carlos III University, I was a recipient of the Business Teaching Award four years in a row, and in 2024, I received an acknowledgment from the Spanish Economic Association for having supervised one of the top three BSc dissertations in economics and business in the country.

I am a member of the Academy of Management, the European Group for Organizational Studies, the Nagymaros Group, and the Theoretical Organizational Models Society. My research has been published in management journals (Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science), as well as practice-oriented and interdisciplinary outlets (CMR Insights, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Poetics, Synthese, Journal of Cultural Heritage).

• Product strategy
• Organization theory
• Market categories
• Artificial intelligence