Professors Sandra Schillo and Diane Isabelle received $10,000 from the Telfer-Sprott Research Fund for their project, “Applying Quality Function Deployment to Science, Technology and Innovation Policy.” The research is expected to provide a deeper understanding of interdependencies within innovation systems.

About the Researchers

Sandra Schillo, the principal investigator, joined the Telfer School in 2012. She focuses her research on improved methodologies relating to the measurement of innovation, entrepreneurship and their impact. Professor Schillo holds a PhD in innovation and entrepreneurship and a Master’s in Engineering Management.

Diane Isabelle has been teaching at the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University since 2008. She holds a PhD in management, an MBA and an engineering degree. Her career spans the private sector, the public sector (National Research Council Canada) and academia.

Telfer-Sprott Research Fund

This fund was created in 2011 to promote joint research activities between professors at the Telfer School of Management and the Sprott School of Business leading to external grants and publications in high quality, peer-reviewed journals.

Professor Morad Benyoucef of the Telfer School received a grant of $75,000 from the Natural Sciences Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) over five years for his project “Enabling Social Commerce - A New Form of E-commerce that Leverages Social Ties Between Users.” He will examine design frameworks and processes for developing social commerce platforms and delve into the links between users of these platforms. Design frameworks that add “commerce” features to social media platforms as well as those that add “social” features to e-commerce platforms will be investigated.

Professor Benyoucef’s research into online marketplaces, e-procurement, e-negotiations, e-health, and web 2.0 has received funding from, among others, the NSERC, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation. It is anticipated that his latest study will help fill the gap in academic research on social commerce while benefiting businesses and consumers. Explains professor Benyoucef: “The findings will enhance our understanding of social commerce, which is taking on an increasingly important role in the marketplace. The scientific contribution will be in creating and using new methodologies to address complex issues such as innovative social commerce design and more accurate and efficient algorithms for social tie prediction and community detection.”

Dan Lane has been appointed to a United Nations pool of experts that will help produce the first global integrated assessment of the state of the marine environment, bringing together environmental, economic and social aspects. This initiative is part of a process for global reporting on the world’s oceans and seas that was established by the UN following the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development.

Full professor at the Telfer School, Lane is Principal Investigator and Chair of the Oceans Management Research Network (OMRN), a Joint Initiative Program of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and Chair of the C-Foam (Canadian Fisheries, Oceans and Aquaculture Management) research cluster based at the Telfer School. Professor Lane is also Co-Director (Canada) of the IDRC-SSHRC International Community-University Research Alliance (ICURA) "C-Change" project, Managing Adaptation to Environmental Change in Coastal Communities: Canada and the Caribbean.

More information is available at these links:

• UN Global Marine Assessment;


• C-FOAM;


• C-Change ICURA;


• OMRN;


• Online Profile of Dan Lane.

What might be the value of using a well-known managerial tool in the context of school reform? Magda Donia is seeking to find out with exciting new research focusing on a teacher job redesign program in Brazil. Her study proposes that changing aspects of teachers’ jobs, in the absence of any additional financial expenses, can lead to an improvement in both teacher and student-centered outcomes. The resulting data will help guide an educational transformation in Brazil.

“We’re assessing the value of job enrichment in the test schools for an innovative pilot program,” says Professor Donia, who teaches courses in human resources and organizational behavior at the Telfer School. “Job enrichment has been shown to help motivate employees for better performance and creativity, but most studies so far have looked at individual employees in the private sector in North America and Europe. Our research takes place in a different cultural context, and in a public-sector environment that has significant financial constraints, so it’s a very unique opportunity in terms of measures.”

A school restructuring program that included job redesign was introduced by the Instituto de Co-Responsabilidade pela Educação (ICE), first in 20 schools in the northeastern state of Pernambuco (2004 - 2007) and then in 16 schools in Sao Paulo, the country’s industrial centre (2012). The contribution of ICE in reforming Brazil’s high schools was recently featured in an article in The Economist (2012). Specific changes relating to job enrichment include enabling teachers to use a wider range of skills, having more opportunity to receive feedback, broadening their perceived role in the future success of their students, and increasing their autonomy in organizing and scheduling their work. There is now an opportunity to track the impact of the job enrichment program on positive teacher and student outcomes.

The Pernambuco test schools, located in a remote and less affluent part of Brazil, have already seen some improvements in students’ grades, graduation rates and public university enrollment. Those outcomes are particularly noteworthy in a country where historically, most of the students admitted to public universities, which are the best in the country, are those from families who can afford to send them to private preparatory schools.

Professor Donia and her colleagues will use a longitudinal and cross-sectional study to compare the 15 schools (approx. 4,000 students) in the state of Goiás joining the pilot program in 2013 with matched schools comprising a control group. “On a practical level,” says professor Donia, “the research comes at an important moment in the implementation of the program, providing valuable data to determine the value of expanding it to other public schools facing similar challenges.”

More information is available at these links:

• Magda Donia's online profile;


• Institute for Co-Responsibility in Education (ICE);


• The Pernambuco Model (from The Economist).