The paper focuses on the digital transformation that is greatly affecting the insurance industry and forcing radical change upon corporate culture, products and processes, customer relationship and relations with the sector's various competitors. By responding to three research questions, the paper aims to contribute to the academic discussion and proposes to offer useful cues of reflection to the insurance management, since the dissemination of new technologies needs to move towards continuously updated business models.

The paper focuses on the digital transformation that is greatly affecting the insurance industry and forcing radical change upon corporate culture, products and processes, customer relationship and relations with the sector's various competitors. By responding to three research questions, the paper aims to contribute to the academic discussion and proposes to offer useful cues of reflection to the insurance management, since the dissemination of new technologies needs to move towards continuously updated business models.

No abstract

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria are increasingly important in all fields of economics. However, despite increasing interest from policy makers and financial regulators, literature relating to the insurance industry is still scarce. This paper aims to fill this gap by exploring the interaction between a set of financial ratios and environmental social governance scores of 107 large, listed US insurance companies for the period 2010-2018 for the purpose of identifying the determinants of ESG awareness. Larger, more profitable, and more solvent insurance companies show the highest level of ESG awareness. Our model contributes to shed light on the unfolding of ESG practices in the insurance industry.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify, through the preparation of a theoretical framework, the drivers able to highlight the relationships between universities and stakeholders in the area of higher education. It also intends to stress the importance of intellectual capital (IC) regarding its contribution to create the quality of higher education. Design/methodology/approach The method, through the repetition of different “rounds” of interviews with questionnaires, tends therefore to create situations of comparison, verification and discussion of the different hypotheses prefigured, and then come to a convergence of both scenarios and dates of realization. Findings The paper provides a system of indicators for assessing the quality of relationships between stakeholders in the key processes of the universities. Research limitations/implications The paper provides a pilot model that needs further adjustments in itinere, based on rigorous empirical tests conducted to confer on it the characteristics of universal applicability within the university context. Practical implications The major contribution of the model is evident from the resulting interpretative process, which makes it possible to deduce, from the performance indicators, the strategies put in place by the university to achieve their goals, that is, to prepare any interventions for the optimization of the management of IC which can create the quality of higher education institution. Originality/value None of the models presented in the literature details the quality of the relationship between stakeholders in the key processes of the universities and therefore neither investigates the impact produced by them on the performance of the university nor on the way stakeholders perceive the usefulness of the knowledge transmitted or the level of customer satisfaction achieved, as indeed the most recent research on the subject envisages.