FEB researchers receive funding for project on supply chain resilience and sustainability

Researchers Luca Gelsomino, Dirk Pieter van Donk, Stefania Boscari and Thomas Bortolotti, all from the Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), have received funding from the Dutch Institute for Advanced Logistics (TKI Dinalog) for a collaborative research project on supply chain resilience and environmental sustainability. The project, titled “Resilience that Lasts: Bridging Sustainability through Adaptation and Transformation", started recently and will run for three years.

The project aims to bridge supply chain resilience and environmental sustainability, two domains traditionally addressed separately. Environmental disruptions and sustainable regulations increasingly affect conventional supply chain resilience practices, requiring a shift from more conventional persistence and redundancy measures to more innovative adaptation and transformation approaches. The project explores how organizations can align resilience strategies and practices with an evolving regulatory framework and impending slow-onset, long term environmental disruptions, ensuring long-term business continuity while meeting regulatory and societal expectations.

The research identifies two main use cases: resilience as adaptation to evolving environmental regulations and resilience as transformation in the face of slow-onset, long term environmental disruptions. For each use case, the researchers have identified a sample of relevant companies together with whom the project will be executed: “resilience champions” for the first use case and “sustainable champions” for the second use case.

FEB’s role in the project

The project consortia includes 10 partners: the University of Groningen, the University of Applied Sciences Windesheim (which coordinates the consortium) and eight companies in various industries such as logistics, construction, manufacturing and agriculture. This is a 1-million-euro project, with about 190k euros funding for FEB. FEB’s team is headed by Luca Gelsomino, who is an Assistant Professor at FEB’s Department of Operations. The FEB team will work on developing case studies with the project partners, as well as an experiment to validate qualitative results with a broader group of managers.

About TKI Dinalog

TKI Dinalog is a foundation that provides direction and stimulates joint knowledge development for the logistics of the future in the Netherlands. The foundation determines a demand-driven research and innovation agenda in the field of logistics and supply chains, initiates (co-)financing in research and innovation programmes and supervises these programmes. TKI Dinalog also aims to strengthen the knowledge infrastructure by connecting businesses, knowledge institutions, governments and civil society organizations.

For more information, please contact Luca Gelsomino