CCA expert panel recommends new SSHRC program for large-scale business research

A report released last week recommends the creation of a new program to support large, multi-year collaborative projects in management, business and finance (MBF) research to better connect academic activities with collaborators in industry and the not-for profit sector. The study was commissioned by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to provide advice on how to best spend $11 million in annual base funding targeting MBF research, awarded by the federal government in Budget 2007.

The expert panel that produced the report was compiled by the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) and chaired by Dr David Zussman, a professor of public sector management at the Univ of Ottawa and commissioner of the Public Service Commission of Canada.

Entitled BETToR (Business Excellence Through Transfer of Research), the new program would be segregated from current SSHRC MBF funding and designed to improve the competitiveness and performance of Canadian business – performance that has been cited as a key reason for Canada's relatively low business R&D expenditures and weak innovation. Successful projects could include any research within the scope of MBF as well as non-traditional areas such as sociology, psychology, history, medicine, science and engineering.

The report found a disconnect between MBF research conducted in Canadian institutions and end users that could benefit from the research. The inability to find common fertile linkages between research and practice is due to several factors:

* academic research is seen as inaccessible, too technical and jargon-laden;

* research directly relevant to practice is not valued within tenure-based institutions;

* academic work does not address the medium- and short-terms problems faced by business; and,

* lack of opportunities for the two communities to interact .

"BETToR is being proposed to find opportunities to make connections. The disconnect kept coming up in interviews with academics and private sector representatives," says Trina Foster, CCA program director and lead for the MBF report. "What kept coming back was there weren't enough direct connections except in Quebec ... These problems aren't insurmountable but we've got to focus on overcoming them."

The report recommends that SSHRC establish an advisory group to help design the BETToR program and establish criteria for its evaluation after five years.

The panel recommends that the BETToR program should not have any funding cap or constraints on the composition of the research groups and should facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration with researchers that receive funding from the other two granting councils.

"With the exception of researchers in Quebec and a handful elsewhere, very little direct collaboration or knowledge transfer is believed to occur between Canadian MBF researchers and practitioners ... The fundamental disconnect ... has resulted in a general lack of both supply and demand between the two communities."

— CCA MBF Report

The expert panel found that recent graduates, business consulting firms and specialized knowledge centres are the three main avenues for knowledge transfer. Of the latter, only Quebec could demonstrate consistent success through organizations such as CIRANO (Centre for Interuniversity Research and Analysis on Organizations), which has an explicit objective of transferring research results into relevant data for business professionals.

In addition to proposing BETToR, the expert panel also found that Canada ranks highly in the MBF papers published and average number of citations. The institutions where MBF is conducted fared less well, however, with no Canadian school cracking the global top 10 ranking for MBF research, according to Financial Times annual surveys.

Canada has 58 institutions across Canada and 2,900 fulltime faculty that provide business programs, of which an estimated 60% conduct MBF, accounting and marketing research. For the full report go to: www.scienceadvice.ca

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