A Difficult but Exciting Year for the Audencia RICC

The Audencia IPSERA RICC revolves around the Audencia Sustainable Supply Chain Management Group that is part of our Business & Society Department. The research interests of the group span a wide range of topics related to purchasing and supply chain management, but sustainability is one of our core interests as is the role of purchasing in innovation. Although 2020 was naturally a difficult year due to Covid-19 it was also a very busy year with lots of activity involving the RICC.

Audencia is part of the IPSERA SIG in Purchasing & Innovation and as part of this we have dedicated time to a Special Topic Forum (STF) on Purchasing & Innovation in Journal of Purchasing & Supply Management (JPSM). Manuscripts are currently undergoing review and/or being revised and we look forward to the outcome of this process.

We also organized an online workshop on Purchasing & Supply Management Digitalization. This workshop was organized in collaboration with two other SIGs - ‘Supply Chain Finance’ and ‘Internet of Things’ – and generated a great deal of interests amongst the over 50 participants. Considering the success of this event, we expect that this will not be the last joint SIG event.

We have also been working on our EU ERASMUS+ funded “PERISCOPE” project (http://eu-periscope.essca.fr/), which was launched in 2019 as a follow-up to Project PERFECT, which also counted a number of IPSERA participants. Project PERISCOPE aims to identify PSM skills and key competencies for innovation and sustainability and is undertaken by a consortium of five partner institutions: ESSCA, Copenhagen Business School, Graz University of Technology, the University of Twente and Audencia. During 2020 we held an online World-cafe and launched a Delphi study, which is still ongoing. These events are giving us great insights from senior purchasing professionals that represent multiple industries and we look forward to reporting the results from this work in due course.

Finally, our "Purchasing and Digital Innovation” chair, launched in 2019 in collaboration with French consulting company AXYS, has been busy working on exciting new projects related to purchasing digitalization. The chair engages many of our students as well as French companies in these projects. We held one event on Purchasing and Artificial Intelligence in Nantes in November – a physical event we managed in between lockdowns!

Audencia RICC coordinator Thomas Johnsen