Matilde Messina

Matilde has always had a strong interest in technology and innovation, a passion that began during her bachelor’s studies when she first encountered blockchain through the lens of economics and finance, focusing on its earliest disruptive applications. This interest deepened during her master’s program, where she explored digital business models and emerging technologies, including blockchain and artificial intelligence. Her current doctoral dissertation continues this trajectory by concentrating specifically on blockchain technology, analyzed through the lens of institutional theory with a particular emphasis on the constructs of decoupling and legitimacy. Adopting a multilevel perspective, her research investigates blockchain technology adoption and implementation within organizations driven by external institutional pressures. Her research interests center on digital technologies, innovation, and organization theory. Her current research examines the institutional adoption and implementation of blockchain technology in large, established organizations, with a particular focus on decoupling, legitimacy, conflicts in legitimacy judgments, and multi-level institutional processes.

She is a qualitative researcher, primarily collecting data through interviews, observations, and secondary sources such as company reports, industry reports, and documentation shared by participants. In addition to qualitative methods, she has also employed computational techniques in her work, including bibliometric network analysis, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis, all conducted in RStudio. Throughout her doctoral studies, she has actively participated in the academic community by attending major conferences such as CiNet, EGOS, and AOM, as well as international workshops, and has published a literature review paper. She is currently continuing data collection for further research studies and has experience approaching and working with large, established multinational organizations for research purposes.

Her background is in economics. She obtained a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Padua in 2019, followed by a master’s degree in accounting and finance, earned with honors in 2021 from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She then briefly served as a junior consultant at Ca’ Foscari University’s spin-off, working with companies in the north-eastern Italian territory, while simultaneously holding teaching and research assistant positions at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. During this period, she also contributed extensively to the writing of a book and a book chapter.