Higher levels of sophistication and complexity are required of corporate finance today, yet managers often label academic finance tools as “too complex” or “too impractical for business to implement.” Given this apparent disconnect, explains Samir Saadi, an assistant professor of finance at the Telfer School of Management, it has become even more important for academics to translate knowledge in a way that is “actionable” for industry. “When tools from academic finance are written off as not relevant to industry, there are often missed opportunities to benefit from potentially useful innovations, because there’s a real connection between the scholarly insights, what students learn in the classroom, and the knowledge and skills finance professionals will use on the job.”

A former Visiting Scholar at Stern School of Business, New York University and Visiting Researcher at INSEAD, France, Saadi focuses his research on corporate finance topics such as mergers and acquisitions, capital budgeting, payout policy, and IPOs – as well as how these areas overlap with corporate governance and business ethics. Awarded a PhD in Finance from Queen’s University in 2012, he has taught at Queen's University, Royal Military College and University of Ontario Institute of Technology and he has also served as a consultant for several companies. His arrival at Telfer in July of this year marked a homecoming of sorts for Saadi, who completed his MBA at the school and served as a research associate.

Teaching finance classes in both the MBA and EMBA programs in the winter term Saadi will highlight how research in finance can improve practice. Speaking about the challenges of knowledge transfer, Saadi says it took decades for industry to adopt the use of “net present value” and for the technique to become routine analyzing capital budgeting projects. Newer methods of financial analysis such as real options analysis (ROA) now appear to be taking almost as long to gain acceptance among managers despite the attention they’ve received.

“Real options” refer to the opportunities that emerge after a firm initiates a project, such as the option to grow or the option to defer investment, that aren’t captured in standard financial analysis, Saadi explains. ROA can help overcome these limitations and so provide more accurate valuation. This approach “enables firms to cope with high levels of uncertainty about the upside potential or downside risk of an investment and allow for high levels of flexibility.”

It is not the design or features of the technique that prevent firms from using it but lack of knowledge. Saadi co-authored a 2011 study of management views of real options in a large sample of Canadian firms that found that only 36 of 214 respondents (16.8%) reported using them. He says the findings, which have been widely cited in finance textbooks, highlight only one area where more expertise is needed – “not only by financial analysts but also by top management.”

Saadi reminds his MBA and EMBA classes that, as with any technique, there may be valid reasons to use or not to use a real options approach in a particular case, “but when you don’t have the knowledge to routinely consider a wide array of approaches when analyzing projects, you can’t fully seize the opportunities from these choices.

Researchers were awarded a $120,000 grant from MITACS-Accelerate in partnership with IBM Canada for six innovative research projects to enhance efficiency and performance in health systems. Centred at the IBM Centre for Business Analytics and Performance (CBAP), these projects leverage the expertise of the Telfer School of Management and the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). Using operations research methods, the projects aim for improvements in the delivery of healthcare in the following areas:

Capacity Planning for a Network of Community Care for the Elderly

Craig Kuziemsky (Telfer) with Liam Peyton (EECS) will simulate and model the flow of patients through the system of community of care. The research will provide capacity plans for the various nodes in a network that runs from acute care, through sub-acute and into home service, assisted living and long term care housing. The goal is to remove congestion in patient flow through the system and to ensure reasonable wait times.

Information System Support for Patient Care Process Performance Management

Liam Peyton, Greg Richards (Telfer) and Wojtek Michalowski (Telfer) will explore the development of care process monitoring applications within a generic application framework for patient care process performance management. These tools will provide both a user experience component to collect form data and display real-time analytics used to monitor and manage care processes and a data integration component for collecting, processing, aggregating and reporting events relevant to care process management.

Enhancing the Diagnostic Process through Application of Data-Mining Techniques

This project by Bijan Raahemi (Telfer) and Daniel Amyot (EECS) will aim to improve the depression diagnostic process by identifying bio-markers for depression as well as co-morbidity indicators through data mining of electro-encephalogram (EEG) recordings and matched sample cardiac data.

Supporting Operations of Clinicians Using Operations Research Methods

In collaboration with the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, Wojtek Michalowski and Daniel Amyot will contribute a framework to conduct an assessment of the performance of emergency department physicians, one that captures the effectiveness of their services and the efficiency involved in providing these services. The framework model will be calibrated and validated using emergency department data.

Diabetes Management Process Flow

This project led by Greg Richards and Daniel Amyot centres on the Community Diabetes Education Program (CDEP) of Ottawa. It will map the CDEP process within the Centretown Community Health Centre and expand the map to other community resources that feed the CDEP as well as those that support it. A simulation of the impact of process changes on patient quality and process efficiency will be developed. The project uses IBM Blueworks and IBM Websphere Business Process Manager.

Supporting Operations of Interdisciplinary Healthcare Teams with a Multi-Agents Methodology

Daniel Amyot and Wojtek Michalowski will develop a multi-agent decision support system to facilitate collaboration and coordination among interdisciplinary healthcare team members. The system will align execution of tasks according to a patient management workflow and assign team members to these tasks according to formally described capabilities.

The Telfer School of Management aims to contribute solutions to Canada’s health challenges and prepare students to be meaningful contributors in health systems management – one of the School’s three strategic areas of excellence. A principal focus is to create and validate enabling technologies, processes and practices and to generate management expertise that improves health costs and outcomes.

Professor Doug Angus participated last month in a workshop on “Franchising in Health” at the Centre for Innovation in Health Management (CIHM) at Leeds University in the U.K. The complexity and variety of services offered within a health organisation point to the need for business models to support them effectively. This workshop is part of a new program of work exploring the potential of franchising – an idea mostly experienced in the retail sector –as a model for ensuring quality and spreading innovation. A follow-up workshop is planned for spring 2014.

Full Professor at the Telfer School of Management with expertise in health economics and health policy, Doug Angus teaches in the M.H.A. and M.Sc. Health Systems programs. He has research activities at the international, national, provincial and regional levels in areas related to health economics, health policy, program evaluation and health care management.

A unique industry-academic workshop on optimization in finance and risk management co-organized by Telfer professor Jonathan Y. Li was a huge success. This event, held in Toronto September 23-24, provided leading insights and unique networking opportunities designed to bridge the gap between academic research and financial applications of optimization techniques.

Hosted by the prestigious Fields Institute, the workshop drew a wide array of participants from financial institutions such as the Royal Bank of Canada, Bank of Montreal, CIBC, Scotiabank, TD Bank, State Street, Goldman Sachs, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, Sun Life Financial, Manulife Financial, S&P Capital IQ and IBM.

Professor Jonathan Li is an assistant professor in management information systems at the Telfer School whose research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of operations research and financial engineering.