AFTER AN EXPERIENCE IN CHICAGO, THE BOCCONI RESEARCHER PRESENTS FILMS INSTEAD OF PAPERS AS SCIENTIFIC CONTRIBUTIONS AT ACADEMIC CONFERENCES. NEXT SUMMER, BOCCONI WILL HOST EUROPE’S SECOND SCIENTIFIC FILM FESTIVAL

In August 2005 a film about trade fairs, “Same Place, Next Year”, gave the three directors, Stefania Borghini, Francesca Golfetto and Diego Rinallo, great satisfaction. The directors, in reality three Bocconi University lecturers, presented their film not at a film festival, but at the scientific congress of the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Group in Rotterdam, paving the way for using audio-visual aids in research into industrial marketing. The authors were asked to show their nine-minute film again and the organisers commented that it was one of the major contributions of the meeting.

The driving force behind the initiative was Stefania Borghini, a 35-year old researcher and lecturer in consumer theory at Bocconi who already had experience in making a short scientific film, produced in 2003 in Chicago at the Kellogg School of Management, where the use of such tools in analysing consumer behaviour had been introduced for some while.

“Since 2000, thanks to the input of Russell Belk from the University of Utah and Robert Kozinets now at York University, scientific films have become accepted at American congresses with the same respect as written articles,” explains Borghini. It is so well-established in the US, and recently also in Latin America and Europe, that teams of technicians give researchers advice and provide equipment during workshops. American consumer behaviour congresses now always include films in their programmes. Europe’s first scientific film festival was in 2005 at the Association for Consumer Research congress in Goteborg. The association’s congress in Bocconi in 2007 will be the second structured screening in Europe, and the first in Italy.

Stefania Borghini

Returning as a researcher to Bocconi, where she had taken her PhD in management, Borghini managed to transmit her enthusiasm for this new form to Diego Rinallo, another young PhD graduate, and to Francesca Golfetto, a marketing professor. Borghini and Rinello attended an intensive technical course at the University of Utah and then the three started the trade fair project, working on a paper and a film in parallel. They visited and observed 13 trade fairs in the wood and fashion industries, observing the behaviour of visitors. “The film proved to be an extremely efficient method of explaining an experiential and social phenomenon such as a trade fair. We provided proof of the standardised behaviour of visitors. The first port of call is always at the market leader’s stand; next are the regular suppliers and, time permitting, everyone else, to get an idea of all the new ideas”.

The first stage of creating an academic film is the shooting. “To get 9 minutes of film on the trade fairs, we shot 40 hours”, estimates Borghini. The next stage is transcribing the content (which was more than 400 pages). The third stage, the most difficult scientifically, is selecting the most important and significant data. This means deciding what to say, bearing in mind that the main aim is not to achieve excellent films, but scientific progress. The next step is the script, selecting the clips, editing and adding any special effects.

“To do scientifically valid work, you need to consider certain things”, explains Borghini, “such as always showing the context of the interviews. But the most important thing is choosing the scientific content which can best be explained through the use of images and voices.” What led Borghini to this innovative approach was not a special interest in cinema but “the desire to create knowledge by experimenting creatively with alternative methods. It is something which enriches, but does not substitute, writing”.