Professors Allan Riding, Miwako Nitani, Barbara Orser and Martine Spence will examine the financing and growth of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) with an $82,070-grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). This research program seeks to understand better the role of bank financing on growth of young firms. The team will investigate linkages among financing constraints, remediation, growth, innovation, and exporting. 

About the researchers:

Allan Riding holds the Deloitte Professorship in the Management of Growth Enterprises (with Professor B. Orser). His work spans bank financing, loan-guarantee programs, angel and venture capital, and initial public offerings. Current research focuses on the structure of the Canadian venture capital sector, preferences for, and access to, financing sources for knowledge-intensive small firms, and financing impediments to international trade.

Miwako Nitani is an assistant professor in finance whose work identifies obstacles facing companies in need of capital and evaluates public policies in support of business creation and growth. Professor Nitani's research encompasses, among other topics: the roles of banks and governments; junior stock exchanges; credit rationing; liquidity constraints and bank lending.

Barbara Orser is a full professor and the Deloitte Professor in the Management of Growth Enterprises. She conducts research on SME growth, including entrepreneurial decision-making, gender influences, internationalization of SMEs, and public policy. She is the co-author of a book on female entrepreneurship that will be published by Stanford University Press in 2015.

Martine Spence is a full professor whose research focuses on, among other areas, international entrepreneurship, sustainable entrepreneurship, and export marketing. She has held a number of research fellowships from Canadian, British and supranational organizations for her research on international entrepreneurship and sustainable entrepreneurship in the context of Canada and of emerging and developing nations. 

Professor Dan Lane brought a focus on climate adaptation to this week’s Canadian Operational Research Society Conference in Ottawa. He and his colleagues presented outcomes from “C-Change,” a joint SSHRC/IDRC initiative focusing on Canada and the Caribbean and headquartered out of the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa. Their talks, at the largest Canadian gathering of scientists in operations research, addressed themes such as vulnerability and resilience in seaside communities, risk analysis in decision making, system dynamics and statistical modelling of severe storms, and community response to the effects of sea level rise.

The impetus for C-Change (short for “Coastal Change”) is the need of shoreline communities to plan for the increasing frequency of extreme weather events. In a background paper published on the project’s web site, professor Lane writes, “coastal areas are experiencing greater weather extremes, consistent with climate change model predictions…. there has been a significant increase in the last decade in the intensity of extreme rainfall and flooding events.”

While the problem has “engendered interest across sectors and levels of government in prevention, mitigation and risk reduction measures,” smaller coastline communities tend to be at a disadvantage in facing the threat. They lack the resources that cities have to conduct large-scale simulations to plan for storm surges and sea level rise, even though they may be particularly vulnerable to them. C-Change for this reason has focused on climate adaption in small communities, through an engagement with 8 study sites in Canada and the Carribean.

As an example, the C-Change community was instrumental in organizing an event in Little Anse, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia that enabled emergency officials there to evaluate and simulate response to crisis situations. Lane and his student Alex Chung, a candidate in the M.Sc. System Sciences Program attended the simulation, or “tabletop exercise,” held at Université Saine-Anne, Petit de Grat Campus in May 2014.

C-Change Community Collaboration in Cape Breton

The tabletop scenarios, developed by Chung as part of his master’s research, were linked to the potential failure of the local breakwater. “There is one road leading into part of the community, and there is a dip in the hill,” explained Chung. “In a storm surge or flood, the road could be blocked, essentially cutting off some residents. A key factor in this is the breakwater that was supposed to reduce the exposure is not offering the protection that it once did.”

C-Change engaged the Emergency Operations Centre for the Municipality of Richmond County, Cape Breton. The simulation and discussion were facilitated by a local representative with the Red Cross and brought participation by the mayor and councillors, members of the municipality administration, as well as the local MLA and MP for the area as guests. Later, Lane and Chung joined the Red Cross official in speaking to students in area schools as part of Emergency Preparedness Week.

The exercise in Little Anse was typical of other C-Change work in emphasizing, among other results, alternative adaptation strategies in planning for more frequent and severe storms and the evaluation of strategies in support of community decision-making. “The simulation helped build local capacity by demonstrating the need to mobilize knowledge, skills and resources from the ground up,” said Chung.

The trip also exemplified the C-Change approach is contributing knowledge and lessons that have both academic and applied value, Lane explained. “C-Change is using a participatory process of adaptation decision making for the communities, and the outcomes have truly helped these communities prepare for specific local risks and more generally have contributed valuable knowledge about achieving community preparedness to deal with the impacts of climate change.”

About C-Change

The C-Change Project (2009-2014) links community members and university researchers from Canada with members of the Caribbean community in support of research on coastal adaptation to environmental change including the impacts of storm surge and sea-level rise on susceptible coastal communities.

About the Canadian Operations Society Conference

The 2014 CORS Conference was held May 26-28 in Ottawa, with strong contributions from the Telfer School and the University of Ottawa.

Professor Craig Kuziemsky of the Telfer School of Management has been awarded a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) for innovative research centred on the engineering of computer-based contextual models to support collaborative teamwork. An Associate Professor and the Director of the Master of Science in Health Systems Program at the Telfer School, Kuziemsky is the University of Ottawa’s 2013 Young Researcher of the Year in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. He is recognized as one of the first researchers to study the engineering of collaborative processes.
 

Project Description

Collaborative teamwork is common in a number of domains, including healthcare, manufacturing and disaster management. However, our ability to design information systems to support collaborative teamwork is limited by our inability to incorporate context into requirements engineering and systems design. The overall goal of the proposed research is therefore to develop methodologies for engineering computer-based contextual models for collaborative teamwork. The applied component of the study involves the practical use of these models to support collaborative practices in two domains: healthcare and disaster management. In addition, the study has a strong student mentoring and training aspect. The project envisages the involvement of a PhD student and a post-doctoral student; the research will also involve students at the master’s level, exposing them to a wide variety of problem solving and research methodologies, multi-agent systems engineering methodologies and system development skills. Professor Kuziemsky will receive a $95,000 grant from NSERC over five years.

Leading scientists in operations research will be in Ottawa May 26-28 to attend the largest gathering of its kind in Canada. The 56^th Canadian Operational Research Society Conference, featuring more than 300 presentations from Canadian and international researchers, “is really representative of the variety of approaches being applied to operations problems in a wide range of contexts including transportation, telecommunications, logistics, health care, finance, energy, and the environment,” said Jonathan Patrick, Associate Professor at the Telfer School of Management and one of the conference program co-chairs. The different research tools and methodologies reflect the influence that computer science, mathematics, engineering and the management sciences are having on operational research, he explained. “The common thread is in the effort to design new approaches that can lead to improvements like better use of evidence in decision-making, more efficient organizational processes and workflow, or a reduction in the time and cost needed to achieve work outputs.”

Health care is a focal point of many of these innovations and a key theme of this conference. Professor Patrick, whose own studies focus on applying the methods of operational research to improve the efficiency of health care management, is the coauthor of two papers to be presented under the theme of improved capacity allocation and patient flow in health care. He also chairs a session dedicated to the modeling of health care performance. Patrick will be joined at this conference by several of his Telfer School colleagues who are either chairing sessions or contributing papers as principal investigators and co-investigators. They include Professor Sarah Ben Amor (multi-criteria decision making in health care), Professor Wojtek Michalowski (health informatics), Professor Craig Kuziemsky (interdisciplinary health care teams), and Pavel Andreev (performance management in health care).

The conference also boasts a strong all-around contingent from the Telfer School in many other disciplines, Patrick noted. Finance professors William Rentz and Francois-Éric Racicot will present their research focusing on asset pricing models. Professor Jonathan Li chairs a session on modern modelling techniques in risk management and will also present his research on finance and risk analysis. Professor Dan Lane, a scholar in the areas of community-based management, fisheries and ocean management, and climate change adaption, chairs a session on climate adaptation strategies and will present a paper on sustainable fisheries (with Adjunct Professor Richard Moll).

There will be two keynote presentations. Jonathan Rosenhead, Professor of Operational Research at the London School of Economics, examines whether the field of operations research is prepared to meet complex societal challenges such as climate change. Participants will also hear from Margaret Brandeau, a leading operations researcher whose work focuses on the development of applied mathematical and economic models to support health policy decisions. Brandeau, who is the Coleman F. Fung Professor of Engineering and Professor of Medicine (by courtesy) at Stanford University, presents “Public Health Preparedness: A Multi-Billion Dollar Problem/ Opportunity.”