Michele Piazzai

Co-director of the MSc in Creative Industries at the Edinburgh Futures Institute

I am a computational social scientist interested in problems of organization, strategy, categorization, and decision-making, especially in the context of creative product markets. I joined the University of Edinburgh Business School 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).

I hold a MA cum laude in Cultural Economics and Entrepreneurship from Erasmus University Rotterdam (2012), where I studied the economics of museums, and a PhD cum laude in Applied Logic from Delft University of Technology (2018), where I worked on a project funded by the Dutch Research Council to develop methods from computer science for the analysis of creative industries. In 2021, I was awarded a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship by the State Research Agency of Spain. My work has been published in management journals (Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science) as well as practice-oriented and interdisciplinary outlets (California Management Review Insights, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Poetics, Journal of Cultural Heritage).

I previously taught and directed BSc, MSc, and PhD modules in strategic management, entrepreneurship, innovation, and organizational design. While at Carlos III, I was a recipient of the Business Teaching Award four years in a row (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024), 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 (formerly Nagymaros Group on Organizational Ecology), and the Theoretical Organizational Models Society.

• Product strategy
• Organization theory
• Market categories
• Artificial intelligence
• Agent-based simulation