Gurprit Kindra, professor of marketing at the Telfer School, served as an expert witness in a recent case decided by the Federal Court of Canada. The dispute involved Corporation Habanos, the makers of Cohiba cigars, and Tequila Cuervo of Mexico. Corporation Habanos sought protection under Canada’s Trade-marks Act when Tequila Cuervo sought to market a rum in Canada c called “Lazaro Cohiba” rum.

Normally, under such circumstances, the applicant has to prove in Court the fame of the brand in question in the marketplace, an expensive and time consuming process. As expert witness, Professor Kindra used the novel idea of using pop culture as a proxy for establishing a brand’s reputation. The Cohiba brand had been widely referenced in film, television, music and other media and Corporation Habanos, on the strength of that evidence, was able to demonstrate that Cohiba trademarks are widely known across Canada. In its decision, the Court prohibited Tequila Cuervo from using the Lazaro Cohiba name in Canada.

The decision (2013 FC 1010) is being appealed by Tequila Cuervo.

The CGA-Canada Accounting and Governance Research Centre (CGA-AGRC) – a collaboration between the Telfer School and the Certified General Accountants Association of Canada that supports research in accounting and related fields – concluded the year with a public seminar by well-known public accounting expert Noel Hyndman of Queen's University Management School, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Professor Hyndman presented “Public Sector Reforms: Changing Contours on an NPM Landscape”. Previous studies suggested that, over the last decades, public-sector accounting has moved from Public Administration to New Public Management ideas, and more recently, towards a New Public Governance approach. Those systems are often presented as mutually exclusive and competing, and Hyndman’s study, focusing on accounting changes in the UK government starting from the 1990s, tells a different story. An extensive document analysis showed that “the political debate continues to predominantly utilise New Public Management arguments, with the three systems viewed as containing complementary, rather than competing schemes.” Hyndman said his evidence pointed to “layering, rather than replacement of ideas.”

This was the last seminar of 2013 for the CGA-AGRC Distinguished Speakers series and the Centre’s executive director, Daniel Zéghal, FCGA, used the occasion to acknowledge the continued support of CGA Canada, represented at the event by Elena Simonova, and longtime CGA Ontario supporters Lilian Goh, FCGA, Paul Faulkner, FCGA, and Jean Laporte, FCGA.

Professor Doug Angus and colleagues will study managerial behaviours that support research use in nursing and allied health professions with a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CHIR). He will join researchers from the University of Ottawa School of Nursing, among them professor Wendy Gifford, the principal investigator; the School of Rehabilitation Sciences; the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, and from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute.

The behaviours of managers and their lack of leadership are major limiting factors to research use by clinicians to ensure healthcare is high quality, effective, and evidence-based. Moreover, what leaders actually do to leverage research use to support healthcare is not well understood in the literature. Through a systematic review, the researchers will help to bridge the gap by synthesizing the evidence on leadership amongst front line and senior managers associated with the use of research evidence by nurses and other health professionals. A second objective of the study is to determine the effectiveness of interventions that promote these behaviours.

Doug Angus brings expertise related to the development of knowledge translation tool kits for healthcare managers and use of expert information systems by managers, researchers and clinicians. A Full Professor in the Telfer School of Management, Professor Angus has worked at the international, national, provincial and regional levels in areas related to health economics, health policy, program evaluation and health care management.

IBM, Syracuse University School of Information Studies, and the University of Ottawa Telfer School of Management collaborated earlier this month to deliver a very successful international conference exploring the challenges related to delivering big data and analytics education. The Big Data & Analytics EdCon 2013 (Nov. 2-3 in Las Vegas) was co-chaired by Greg Richards, professor of performance management at the Telfer School of Management and Professor Susan Dischiave of the School of Information Studies, Syracuse University.

The focus for this conference was the potential of big data and data analytics to transform business and academia and to outline projects and plans for curricula. There were 53 representatives from leading educational organizations and universities in the U.S., Canada, China, France, Israel, Norway, the United Kingdom among other countries.

Greg Richards is Director of the IBM Centre for Business Analytics and Performance, which brings together Canadian and international researchers, academics and industry to provide leadership in curriculum development and research in business analytics and performance.