Professor Michelle Baddeley, Associate Dean (Research and Development) UTS Business School
How would you use to describe research in the UTS Business School?
While business schools are traditionally about big corporates and their profits, our vision centres around an approach which is more inclusive, focussing on social justice and serving the public purpose, as befits our role as a publicly-funded university.
We’re interested in people and smaller organisations – not just SMEs but also community organisations, interested in exploring how they connect up to people’s livelihoods and their communities. It’s a popular misconception that business is about the big end of town. Most businesses are small-to-medium sized. A lot of these smaller businesses are up against it in the COVID era, especially in sectors like tourism and the arts.
Backing this up, our focus is unashamedly on social justice, civil society and exploring ways to build inclusion. Not that we want to move away from business – we’re a Business School! We want to leverage the strength of businesses, of all sizes, helping them to contribute to building livelihoods and well-being.
What are some of the main areas that the faculty researchers excel in?
We have five discipline groups – these are the established focus for our research and engagement activities – and the groups include management, economics, accounting, finance and marketing – and a lot of our research happens in these groups. We’ve been keen to build up research centres that champion key themes, from multidisciplinary perspectives. We’ve recently reorganised this into four main research centres, with the newest two established just last year.
Business Intelligence and Data Analytics – led by Prof John Rose – are specialists in empirical work – and they have a number of collaborations with government, focussed on understanding consumer choices and how to use data to evaluate projects or ideas.
The Centre for Policy and Market Design (CPMD) leverages the international expertise we have, exemplified in the CPMD Director Prof Isa Hafalir, and applies cutting-edge economic insights from mechanism design to provide robust evidence-based insights to guide policy. CPMD also hosts our Behavioural Lab – bringing together experimental researchers from across the Business School would are keen to use experimental methods to explore insights from behavioural economics which might help solve some of the big challenges around the links between individuals and their behaviours, including how those behaviours affect society and the economy at large.
The Centre for Livelihoods and Wellbeing (CLAW) brings a multidisciplinary lens, uniting insights from across UTS focussed on decent jobs, disability, new ways to create livelihoods – especially for disadvantaged groups, promoting health and wellbeing and helping/informing people about their important household decisions relating to energy, the environment and climate change and housing.
Our Centre for Business and Sustainable Development (CBSD), directed by Associate Professor Danielle Logue, is exploring ways that we can move towards a net zero economy, and has a number of collaborations with other research centres like the Institute for Sustainable Futures, Climate Change Cluster and Institute for Public Policy and Government.
What’s the most interesting projects that have come across your desk in the past 12 months?
We’ve got a large multi-year project working the Faculty of Health and our long-standing industry partner Stryker, led by Dr Katrina Skellern, that is exploring some exciting innovations in the field of medical manufacturing. It’s looking at 3D printing of surgical bone implants, exploring the business models to support the technology and role of the patient journey. The technology is cutting-edge but a key gap in knowledge, which this research is trying to fill, comes in developing business models which align with the patients’ lifestyle and quality of life, as well as with medical practitioners’ best practice. Good technology should make patients more comfortable, but it also has to be supported by a robust business case to encourage innnovative investment in this space.
We also have a number of projects around energy, the environment and climate change. Associate Professor Danielle Logue and CBSD are researching the circular economy and exploring how to get to net zero by encouraging recycling and producing new materials with no carbon emissions. They’re also analysing how market mechanisms can work when we don’t have a price on carbon and can’t quantify it effectively.
Another environmental project that’s just starting-up is a collaboration between CLAW and BIDA exploring consumer demand for sustainable aviation. There are technologies already out there and in use – including sustainable aviation fuels which can be made from a diverse range of waste such as cooking oil or even used clothes. But these are still under-utilised even though aviation is a large contributor of carbon dioxide and other emissions. We worry about sustainable land transport and we need to start working about sustainable aviation too because zero carbon flight is an achievable goal.
Can you talk us through some of the key planks of the new Business School strategy?
Rather than having a standalone research strategy, we’re keen to embed our research strategy within our overall strategic positioning and, led by our Dean – Prof Carl Rhodes – we released our strategic positioning statement document a couple of months ago, and asked ourselves a key question: what does it mean to be a business school in a socially-committed public university?
Given we’re a publicly funded institution, we need to enable businesses to improve the standard of living and quality of life not just for Australians but for people around the world. We’re looking at research that’s sustainable and about impact in the real world.
An example of this is the work we’re doing around disability. The Business School, via CLAW and other other research centres, collaborates closely with the UTS Disability Research Network, championed by Prof Simon Darcy. This network is exploring the importance of inclusiveness, not just for those who live with a disability. Enabling people with a disability to find good jobs works well for everyone but people with a disability face a lot of discrimination in their job search and workplaces. An exemplar of impactful research aimed at developing insights to redress these problems is the Hotel Etico project.
What some of the main research priorities for the year ahead?
We’re keen to encourage our academics to collaborate and work together to share insights and ideas. We’re achieving a great deal in this space and our research centre model is part of this. We have done a lot of work around mapping capabilities – with great support from the DVCR – this helps our academics discover one another. A lot of people across UTS might be working on, say, sustainability but you never hear about them. We’re doing a lot of capability mapping inside the Business School but also outside so that we can begin to connect the dots.
We were visited by an AACSB International accreditation team last week and were thrilled at the enthusiastic feedback we got from the AACSB panel about our collaborative ethos and the genuine contributions we make in terms of supporting inclusiveness and impactful research. They encouraged us to act as a model for other business schools in championing impactful research to serve people not just businesses.