IEM Researchers at the 42nd IMP Conference 2026 in Ancona, Italy

Researchers from the Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM) Unit at Tampere University participated in the 42nd IMP Conference, held at Università Politecnica delle Marche in Ancona, Italy, on 1–4 September 2026. The conference brought together researchers working on industrial marketing, business relationships, networks, sustainability, resilience, digitalization, and artificial intelligence.

The theme of the 2026 conference was “Building a Sustainable World Through Business Relationships and Networks.” The conference focused particularly on how interaction between organizations, business relationships, and wider networks can contribute to sustainability and help organizations respond to technological, environmental, and societal changes.

The IEM Unit was represented at the conference by Aki Jääskeläinen, Matin Taheriruh, Ella Koivisto, Leo Mulari, and Olga Dziubaniuk. Research involving IEM researchers covered several connected topics, ranging from the use of artificial intelligence in supply chain risk management to public buyer-supplier relationships, antifragility, digital technologies for sustainability, and new AI-based methods for researching business networks.

One of the studies presented at the conference was Artificial Intelligence in Supply Chain Risk Identification: Performance and Sustainability Implications, authored by Leo Mulari, Ella Koivisto, Aki Jääskeläinen, and Tommi Mahlamäki. The study examines whether the use of artificial intelligence in supply chain risk identification can improve risk management performance, supply chain resilience, and environmental performance.

The study draws on survey data from 109 Finnish firms and applies Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling. The findings indicate that the use of AI in risk identification is positively associated with both risk management performance and environmental performance. However, AI was not found to directly improve supply chain resilience. Instead, its contribution to resilience operated through improved risk management performance. The findings therefore suggest that the value of AI depends considerably on how it becomes integrated into existing risk management practices rather than on the technology alone.

Matin Taheriruh contributed to four papers presented during the conference, three of which he presented himself. These studies addressed public procurement relationships, antifragility, AI-supported research methods, and the role of digital technologies in sustainability-oriented business networks.

In Interaction Within Constraints: A Systematic Literature Review of Public Buyer–Supplier Relationships, Matin Taheriruh, Hannu Torvinen, Zsuzsanna Szalkai, and Carolina Belotti Pedroso examined how relationships between public buyers and suppliers develop within the specific institutional conditions of public procurement. Based on a systematic review of 81 peer-reviewed articles, the study distinguishes structural characteristics of these relationships, including continuity, complexity, symmetry, and informality, from more dynamic characteristics such as adaptation, cooperation, conflict, social interaction, and routinization.

The study shows that public procurement regulations and accountability requirements can restrict interaction between buyers and suppliers. At the same time, relationships continue to develop within these institutional boundaries. This creates an interesting tension in which public organizations and suppliers must maintain formal procurement requirements while still developing the relational practices needed for effective interaction.

A second study presented by Matin, Bouncing Forward Together: Antifragility and the Evolution of Buyer-Supplier Relationships Through Disruption, was co-authored with Helen Mcgrath and Carolina Belotti Pedroso. The paper moves beyond the traditional focus on restoring supply networks after disruptions and examines whether buyer-supplier relationships can develop in ways that allow organizations to become stronger through disruption.

The study proposes three possible relationship trajectories following disruption: relationships may become damaged, remain unchanged, or become transformed. The transformation trajectory is particularly important because it may create the conditions for antifragility. According to the paper, this depends partly on relational infrastructure and network capabilities that buyers and suppliers have developed through their previous interaction.

Artificial intelligence was also addressed from a methodological perspective. In AI-Enabled Interaction Simulators for Researching Business Networks, Matin Taheriruh, Elisa Carloni, Aleksandra Hauke-Lopes, and Tuukka Ahoniemi explored how AI-based interaction simulators could be used to study future business relationships and networks.

The working paper presents the development of a case-based simulator in which participants interact with AI personas representing customers. Through these interactions, participants can develop and test proposals for new business models and relationship configurations. The approach provides a possible new way of studying how actors think about value creation, customer relationships, and future business networks in situations that are difficult to observe directly.

Matin also co-authored Digital Tools and Resource Interaction Processes for Sustainability with Elisa Carloni, who presented the study at the conference. The paper examines how digital technologies become connected with existing organizational, physical, relational, and technological resources in business networks.

Rather than approaching digitalization only as the introduction of new technologies, the study considers how digital resources change existing resource relationships. Digital tools such as platforms, monitoring systems, databases, analytics, Internet of Things technologies, blockchain, and cloud-based solutions can support sustainability, but their effects depend on how they become connected with other resources and actors. The study therefore focuses on how digitalization may change resource interaction and network connectedness in areas such as food waste, circular material flows, and supply chain transparency.

Beyond the research sessions, the conference also provided opportunities to meet researchers working in different areas of business and network research. Ella Koivisto described Ancona and the university environment positively, with sunny weather and temperatures of around 30°C during the conference. She also noted that the conference was well organized and that the presentations offered opportunities to learn about research areas that were less familiar to her.

The social program provided another setting for interaction among participants. The welcome reception included dinner and wine, while the conference dinner was organized near the beach, combining the coastal scenery of Ancona with local cuisine, particularly seafood. According to Ella, many participants approached the conference more strongly from the business and industrial marketing perspective than from a traditional Industrial Engineering and Management perspective. This made the conference particularly useful for meeting new researchers and becoming familiar with different research traditions. She also observed that AI-related papers were still relatively limited within the conference program.

Participation in IMP 2026 gave IEM researchers an opportunity to present and discuss research across several connected areas, including AI, supply chain risk management, sustainability, public procurement, buyer-supplier relationships, antifragility, digitalization, and business networks. The contributions by Aki Jääskeläinen, Matin Taheriruh, Ella Koivisto, Leo Mulari, and the participation of Olga Dziubaniuk also reflect the diversity of research currently conducted within the IEM Unit and its engagement with international research communities studying business relationships, networks, technological change, and sustainability.