Summary

Nikolaos (Niko) Stylos is Associate Professor (Reader) in Marketing and Digital Innovation at the University of Bristol Business School, and Honorary Professor of Hospitality Management at Tainan University of Technology, Taiwan, in recognition of his substantial and multi-faceted contributions to the research and teaching of Hospitality Management and Tourism Marketing.

Niko is an internationally recognised and awarded scholar specialising in marketing innovation, and digital transformation in the service industries. This is evidenced through a successful thirteen million-pound UKRI grant (December 2023/announced February 2024), international invited conference keynote speeches (2023), three international best paper awards, certificate of achievement as Associate Editor, several world-leading and internationally excellent journal articles, an honorary professorship (at TUT, Taiwan), and more than 6,000 citations. My specific research expertise is in decision-making science, as influenced by innovative digital technologies and applied in the service industries. I approach real-world challenges by combining interdisciplinary theorisations. I have a rich experiential repository and lead fellow scholars via two Bristol University interdisciplinary research groups across schools/faculties (e.g., through collaborative grant and paper writing), i.e. the Smart Networks-4-Sustainable Futures Faculty Research Group, and the Innovation & Digitalisation Research Group. My mentoring and effective student supervision, as evidenced through a personal tutor award nomination, yields new highly regarded professionals, and awarded PGRs. I focus upon every student emerging from collaborations as life-long, self-directed learners/researchers. In the classroom, I use innovative teaching techniques to elicit my students’ rich intellectual and cultural contributions. My teaching performance is evidenced by excellent student evaluations. Amongst my colleagues, my governance and leadership across research, teaching, and administration are demonstrated in the past six years through my effective service as Post Graduate Research (PGR) Director, Research Groups Lead, and Post Graduate Teaching (PGT) Director.

Personal Profile

Dr Stylos leads the Innovation & Digitalisation Research Group at the University of Bristol Business School, and is also the founder and leader of the Smart Networks for Sustainable Futures Faculty Research Group - Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences & Law.  

He specialises in decision-making modelling as is influenced by new technologies and applied in the service industries, particularly with respect to innovation in tourism & hospitality, as well as in retailing. Niko’s research is interdisciplinary in nature following from his multidisciplinary educational background, i.e. PhD Business Marketing, MBA, and MSc/UG Mechanical Engineering degrees, and his aspiration to dealing with real-world problems and challenges that may require the combination of various managerial, engineering and IT theorizations and applications.

Keywords: decision-making modelling; digital apps; digital service transformation (Industry 4.0 / Society 5.0); innovation; tourism and hospitality; smart retailing; GenZ marketing; sustainability management.

Dr Stylos prioritises for the most current, insightful, and theoretically ground-breaking research in data-driven decision-making for the innovation and sustainability of service industries. His strong research performance and recognition of his interdisciplinary research profile are evidenced by over 6,000 citations (h-index: 35 and i10-index: 51), in addition to keynote speeches, awards, an honorary professorship, associate editor positions, and serving on many editorial review boards. Please check the Google Scholar Profile Link

Qualifications

Dr Stylos is a Senior Fellow of Higher Education Academy (SFHEA). He has a PhD degree in Business Administration (Services Marketing), an MBA degree, an MSc degree in Mechanical Reliability Engineering and a Post Graduate Diploma in Mechanical Engineering. He served as a professional management and technical consultant working out marketing management projects and energy/environmental studies in areas such as Hospitality, Textiles, General Trading, Health (clinics) and Beauty Industry for more than a decade. He has also contributed to new product development (NPD) for the Wineries & Spirits sector. 

Special Awards, Honours, Keynotes, and Distinctions

Dr Stylos has an internationally recognised and awarded interdisciplinary research profile and has given Keynote speeches and invited talks at international academic and industry conferences, and he delivered research seminars at Universities based in the UK, Spain, France, UAE, Greece, Portugal, and Turkey. Niko has been nominated for his cutting-edge and inspirational style of teaching, as well as for his personal tutoring, and he is recognised as a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

He has gained research funding from British research organisations (including British Academy and ESRC-UKRI), worked on EU funded projects and participates in international research consortia.

Here is a list of the most recent awards, nominations, distinctions and honours:

2024: International Visiting Fellow status Award - University of Central Florida (UCF) Rosen College.

2024: Innovation and Knowledge Centre (IKC)- Transforming Net Zero with Ultrawide Bandgap Semiconductor Device Technology (REWIRE), EPSRC/UKRI, (together with the Universities of Cambridge and Warwick), £13,750,000 (£11 mil award + institutional contributions), 2023-27, as Co-PI and formal role as ‘Innovation and Supply Chains Resilience Manager/Lead’.

2023: 22nd Zhejiang Provincial Philosophy and Social Sciences Outstanding Achievement Award for the following publication: Jiang, Y., & Stylos, N. (2021). Triggers of consumers’ enhanced digital engagement and the role of digital technologies in transforming the retail ecosystem during COVID-19 pandemic. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 172, 121029. Provincial award by the Zhejiang Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences (China). 

2023: Keynote Speaker (invited) to the CCA Leaders' Summit 2023 organized by CCA Global (cca-global.com) in Manchester, UK on 13th September, 2023 with the participation of 150 leaders representing brands from around the world. 

2023: Certificate of Achievement as Associate Editor, awarded by the European Academy of Management & Business Economics (EIC Prof Enrique Bigne quoted: "EJM&BE has achieved remarkable recognition in both Clarivate (Q2 in ESCI) and Scimago (Q1) rankings. This year we are publishing 4 issues and upgrading the content quality. As an Associate Editor, you have consistently demonstrated exceptional commitment and expertise in handling the peer review process.")

2023: Visiting Research Scholar (formally invited) in Digital Business and Tourism, at Business and Economics Department, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC), Spain.

2023: Keynote Speaker (invited) to the "Programming and Data Infrastructure in Digital Humanities" International Conference, University of Evora, Portugal, 28th March 2023. Topic: Big Data Empowered Agility for Dynamic, Volatile, and Time-Sensitive Service Industries: The Case of Tourism Sector.  

2023: Nominated for the "Outstanding Personal Tutor" award, University of Bristol Business School.

2022: Nominated for the “Most Cited Article Award”: Jiang, Y., & Stylos, N. (2021). Triggers of consumers’ enhanced digital engagement and the role of digital technologies in transforming the retail ecosystem during COVID-19 pandemic. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 172, 121029.

2021: 3rd Best Paper award in TOURMAN 2021 international academic conference of tourism marketing and hospitality management (for a submision he put together with colleagues from University of Nottingham Ningbo China). The scientific committee selected their paper from a pool of 573 submissions and 521 presentations among 1,109 conference delegates. 

2021: Highly Commended Student Paper Award, 14th Annual Conference of the EuroMed Academy of Business (EMAB) 2021 (based on the work of PhD candidate Mengyun Hu)

2020: Awarded appointment as Honorary Professor at the Department of Hotel Management, College of Tourism, Tainan University of Technology, Tainan City, Taiwan.

2017: Inspirational Teaching Style Award and “Cutting-edge” Teaching Award (nominated)

Research Areas

Decision-making as influenced by new technologies, and cross-cultural consumer behaviour in service industries, digital retailing, 3D Printing (3DP) and other Industry 4.0 appplications, tourism destinations marketing & management, sustainability in tourism & hospitality, management of renewable energy resources.

Dr Stylos has several 4* and 3* CABS publications in top-tier international academic journals, including the top ones in digital marketing, tourism management and marketing, and sustainability, e.g. Tourism Management, Journal of Travel Research, Journal of Business Research, Psychology and Marketing, Journal of Advertising, Computers in Human Behavior, Annals of Operations Research, Journal of Retailing & Consumer Services, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Tourism Recreation Research, International Journal of Hospitality Management, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, Journal of Cleaner Production.

The projects he is currently working on relate to tackling contemporary marketing management challenges with the use of new technologies, thus creating a long pipeline of innovative publications for the next REF, some of which are based on funded projects.

He also acts as advisory board member and reviewer for the leading journals in these fields of research.

Research Grants

Dr Stylos has won a total of ~£16 million in grants so far, as PI and Co-PI.He has been actively involved in bidding for competitive research grants with academics and industry partners from management, engineering, physics, and computer science, via international and interdisciplinary research consortia, and currently preparing new bids for UK research councils, EU Horizon Europe, and other European calls. The following list provides a summary of key successful bids:

• 2025-2027: Age-inclusive retail: reducing shopping barriers for older adults in Europe with in-store technologies', Co-I, Nationaal Regieorgaan Praktijkgericht Onderzoek SIA, together with colleagues from Saxion University of Applied Sciences, University of Bristol, University of Calabria, and Aalto University.
• 2025-2026: ‘Assessing consumer responses to digital communications in immersive Extended Reality (XR) environments’, together with colleagues from the University of Valencia, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Sciences, Innovation and Universities, €62,000 budget.
• 2024, Innovation and Knowledge Centre - Transforming Net Zero with Ultrawide Bandgap Semiconductor Device Technology (REWIRE), EPSRC/UKRI, (together with the Universities of Cambridge and Warwick), £13,750,000 (£11 mil award + institutional contributions), 2023-27, as Co-PI and formal role as ‘Innovation and Supply Chains Resilience Manager/Lead’.
• 2022-23, Title: Smart Technologies in Hospitality for Organizational Resilience: A comparison of Canadian and UK SMEs, School of Business Seed Funding, MacEwan University, CA$ 6,983, as Co-PI, 50%.
• 2022-23, Title: Industry 4.0 applications to boost Organisational Resilience of UK Hospitality SMEs, £3,000, GRF, 100%, PI. 
• 2020-21, Title: Management of travellers' sentiment variations emerging from marketing managers' responses on Twitter during a crisis event, £4,540, GRF, University of Bristol, Lead investigator 50%. 
• 2020-21, Title: The interplay among Environmental and Social Risk (ESG) initiatives, firm management and stock value, University of Bristol, £5,000, as Co-PI, 50% 
• 2019-20, Title: How is 3D Printing changing lives?, The British Academy Summer Showcase 2019, value-in-kind support, as Co-PI, 50%
• 2019-20, Title: Exploring event organizers perceptions on co-creation and co-destruction: the case of Abu Dhabi, £85,000, Research Intensive Fund Zayed University (01/2019 – 12/2020), as Co-I.
• 2019-20, Title: 4D IRIDA Career Pathfinder, ESRC IAA Business Boost grants, £10,000, as PI, 100%
• 2018-20, Title: 3D Printing: Democratisation or Mass Customisation?, British Academy Small Grants / Leverhulme, £10,000, as Co-PI, 50%
• 2017-18, Title: Sustainability modelling and sharing Economy in Hospitality, Research Platform/Dept. Management University of Bristol, £3,356, as PI, 100%
• 2016-17, Title: Exploring the city-circle bus sightseeing experience and its influence on tourists’ intentions to revisit urban tourism destinations, ERAS research scheme University of Wolverhampton, £5,000, as PI, 100%
• 2010-13, Title: HESCAP: New generation, High Energy and power density Supercapacitor based energy storage system, European Union/FP7-Cooperation-Call identifier: FP7-ENERGY-2009-1, €2,298,764, as Co-PI, 20%.

Leadership (Research)

Dr Stylos is the founder and leader of the 'Smart Networks for Sustainable Futures' university-wide Research Group (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/fssl/research/groups/smart-networks-for-sustainable-futures/) since 2017. He also holds the role of Innovation & Digitalisation Interdisciplinary Research Theme Lead (previously being the Champion of it) at the University of Bristol Business School, since June 2019.

Leadership (PGR)

Dr Stylos served as Post Graduate Research Director (PhD and MScRes studies) at School of Management (Business School), University of Bristol from September 2019 to October 2022. His robust strategy and key intitatives on strengthening the PhD in Management programme from educational, training, career and well-being perspectives contributed to the significant advancement of the programme and the increase of PhD scholars' admissions from 5 new (22 in total) in 2019 to 18 new students (50 registered students in total) in 2022-23. Moreover, his leadership during the two difficult years of COVID-19 pandemic secured that all PhD and MScR students would advance with their studies in a seamless way towards completion paying particular attention to their training, wellbeing and career development prospects. As PGR Director, Niko has been managing three members of staff (deputy PGR director, two professional services staff) and a standard budget of £25,000 annually for supporting PGR students research needs, plus leading the annual recruiting cycles of PhD studentships (8 to 10 per cycle ~ of £144,00 to 180,000 total worth per year).         

Research Supervision

Dr Stylos has five PhD completions; in three of them served as lead supervisor (Fulya Acikgoz, Qingchen Tian, Raffaello Rossi), and two more as co-supervisor (Mengyun Hu, and Sofia Garane as external supervisor). He is currently supervising three exceptional PhD candidates, while two of them have received funding for completing their studies. 

Leadership (Teaching)

Niko founded and directed the MSc Marketing programme (September 2017 - November 2019), a highly innovative and the most successful postgraduate taught programme across the University of Bristol in terms of student enrollement and revenues. As proposer and programme director of MSc Marketing, he led the design of the programme’s three pathways/awards (Digital; Strategy & business development; General) offering 12 modules/units. This resulted to a unique and highly successful specialist master’s in marketing programme with proper coverage of state-of-the-art marketing knowledge (commercial, sustainable, social). Niko focused particularly on introducing interdisciplinary aspects in this programme, such as digital marketing, Industry 4.0 / Big Data, Creativity, Tourism & Hospitality (Contemporary issues in Marketing), Strategic Brand Management, and Sustainability marketing, via the three MSc Marketing pathways.     

Impact

My ESRC IAA project on the "Pathfinder" career portal was the mechanism for collaborating with ARCUS NEWS LIMITED (previously 4Delta Ltd.) and providing support to the creation of the ‘ARCUS News’ digital platform for academics (www.arcus.news) which was full-scale released in 2023. This is now further expanded as is moving towards phase 2 (platform to be enhanced with AI-powered capabilities) with the support of a new EPSRC IAA bid of £45,000 budget.

I was interviewed by Caroline Dewing, Co-Founder of Future Agenda - an open-source think tank and advisory firm for major companies, governments, and NGOs around the world; and some of my publications were included in her final report - “Open Foresight”. I was interviewed by Lilit Marcus, the Travel Producer for CNN Digital Worldwide about the impact of COVID-19 on tourism which appeared on “CNN Travel”. I collaborated with British Academy "BA Showcase” – a 3-day event to demonstrate the social impact of smart technologies on democratising business innovation.  

External Roles

Dr Stylos holds the following roles:

• Associate Editor European Journal of Management and Business Economics (2* AJG/CABS)
• Associate Editor Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Insights.
• Associate Editor (2018-2023) Frontiers in Psychology: Organization Psychology section.
• Guest Editor (2022-2024) Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Insights.
• Associate Editor (2017-2020) Journal of Tourism Analysis: Revista de Análisis Turístico in the field of tourism marketing.  
• Editorial Advisory Board Member for the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management; Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research; Tourism Review; Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Insights.
• PhD Examiner (viva voci; 9 oral examinations so far, including 6 examinations as external examiner).
• External Examiner for the Postgraduate Research (PGR) taught component of College of Business & Social Sciences, Aston University Business School.
• External Examiner for Undergraduate and Postgraduate Marketing programmes in Middlesex University London and Dubai campuses (2016-2021).
• Project Evaluator for Research, Technological Development and Innovation Programmes of the Research Promotion Foundation in the Republic of Cyprus (large EU funded programmes).
• Project Evaluator for the National Environment Research Council (NERC), UKRI Innovate UK.
• Project Evaluator for National Science Center, Poland.
• Member of Innovation Caucus (UK).

Teaching 

I am experienced in both face-to-face and online provision of the following modules.

Currently teaching:

Strategic Brand Management

Big Data in Marketing Intelligence

Previously taught:

Contemporary Issues in Marketing Management

Marketing Management

Tourism Marketing

Marketing Research

Marketing Communications

International Marketing

Marketing Principles

Economic, Social, Ethical, and Environmental Engineering (interdisciplinary)

For PhD applicants

PhD applications are more than welcome and selectively supported. PhD proposals should be closely aligned with the aforementioned research interests. Potential applicants are invited to send by email a draft proposal with their CV and evidence of their main qualifications attached.

The proposed topics should be interdisciplinary in nature. The topic areas/research fields that may be supervised are:

• Consumer behaviour modelling in tourism and hospitality marketing with new technologies, e-retailing, or retailing in the tourism sector
• Industry 4.0 technologies management (not generic, a certain choice of technology is required) / Society 5.0 applications in tourism and hospitality management, or e-retailing
• Decision-making with Big Data from an ecosystem perspective
• Smart retailing in a tourism destinations context
• Digital retailing and Society 5.0
• Contemporary business intelligence and managerial challenges in tourism and hospitality
• Digital placemaking and destination branding
• Contemporary servicescapes (tourism or retailing)
• Reponsible innovation, open innovation (business/marketing modelling) in tourism /hospitality or e-retailing
• Sharing economy / collaborative consumption in tourism and hospitality, or e-retailing
• Gen Zers engagement with ‘travel marketplace’ platforms, or smart retailing platforms

A robust theoretical background / foundations (underpinning or overarching frameworks) should be clearly provided, and the anticipated theoretical contributions of the proposed PhD project should be clearly outlined.

Recommended methodologies: either quantitative, or mixed methods approaches. Proposals that would be based on a single qualitative technique, and applied at one country setting only, would not be considered for PhD supervision.