Professor Sandra Schillo will contribute to a BioFuelNet Canada (BFN) project designed to position biofuel R&D for enhanced use in policy, regulation, practice and commercialization. Dr. Schillo, a researcher in innovation and entrepreneurship, is also the founder of the research and consulting services firm Innovation Impact Inc. and the founding editor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. She will collaborate with lead investigator Dr. Fred Pries of the University of Guelph’s Department of Business and Amy Lemay of VISTA S&T, a PhD student at the University of Toronto. The team will conduct research into the links between research activity and potential research user/receptor needs.

The project is supported by a $75,000 grant covering a two year period (November 2012 - March 2015) provided by BioFuelNet Canada, a Network of Centres of Excellence (NCE) that brings together the Canadian biofuels research community. Findings from the project are expected to enhance knowledge mobilization and contribute to a better alignment between user/receptor needs and academic research on Biofuels.

As the need to achieve more efficiency and better quality in the healthcare field intensifies, there has been a move to make better use of interprofessional healthcare teams. And the leadership and change dynamics on these teams, where members of different professional groups have to work together to serve clients, have become a hot topic for researchers like Professor Samia Chreim of the Telfer School of Management. The questions that intrigue her have broad implications for the training of healthcare personnel: how do people define their roles? How do professional cultures and professional mindsets influence how these individuals work together? And what happens to the boundaries used to define workplace roles?

“The power dynamics in these environments are fluid, with multiple people sharing roles,” professor Chreim observes. For example, there are boundaries between clinical leadership roles and administrative leadership roles. Other lines are drawn between formal leaders and other members of the team. There are also demarcations that help define professional skills, perspectives, and areas of expertise.

“Management happens at the boundaries – and many different types of boundaries have to be navigated,” says Dr. Chreim, who earned a best paper nomination for her exploration of this topic at the prestigious Academy of Management Conference in Boston last August. “The different boundaries may be open or closed in response to different needs; to achieve a particular team objective, for example, or to assert professional roles or autonomy.”

Dr. Chreim says it’s easy to understand why academics and practitioners are increasingly interested in these dynamics. They’re observable at the level of individuals, work teams, and institutions, and they are linked to major change: a shift in the way that people perform their roles, a move towards new work arrangements, a change in cross-organizational relationships and networks. “The research contributes an important narrative of how change happens in organizations, one that has great explanatory power in a time of intense debate over how to reshape the healthcare system.”

M.Sc. Health Systems candidates Vicki Sabourin and Javier Fiallos today presented highlights from their internships at the Canadian Primary Health Care Research & Innovation Network (CPHCRIN) and the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO). The three-month internship component of this program promotes linkages between research and practice and prepares students to be meaningful contributors to health systems delivery after graduation.

Fiallos contributed to a decision support project in the emergency department of CHEO, analyzing patient visits data and developing quantitative models. His aim was to identify improvements to the department’s triage system and explore modifications to surgery block scheduling and nurse staffing for day surgery. “I learned that health systems generate an immense amount of data which does not necessarily contribute to process improvements unless appropriate research questions are proposed at the outset,” Fiallos explained; “I deepened my understanding of how data can be put to effective use by employing the right research tools and knowledge.”

For her internship, Sabourin joined CPHCRIN, where she contributed towards building a strategic plan under the supervision of Dr. William Hogg, the executive director, and Hannah Irving and Michelle Prentice, the network’s coordinators. “I gained tremendous knowledge of the research development process through opportunities to review the literature and to synthesize findings that emerged from meetings with members of the Network,” says Sabourin, who holds a BSc. in Nursing from the University of Ottawa. “I also learned about the importance of coordinating CBPHC research efforts through a pan-Canadian network.”

Lavagnon Ika of the Telfer School has received a prestigious prize from the International Project Management Association (IPMA) recognizing his research program on the supervision, management and critical success factors of international development projects funded by the World Bank. Professor Ika’s work opens up promising opportunities for reciprocal contributions between the fields of project management and international development while laying the ground for new insights on best practices.

“Project practitioners in any industry can draw valuable lessons from other sectors and also learn a great deal from failure. All too frequently, projects fail because of mismanagement,” says Professor Ika, who taught project management for twelve years at the Université du Québec en Outaouais in Gatineau before joining the faculty at Telfer last August. “International development projects in particular can be instructive, given their complexity as multisectorial, social, technical, and political undertakings.”

IPMA presented Dr. Ika with a 2012 Young Researcher Award for his outstanding doctoral work and related scholarly output. Among his research contributions, Ika recently published “Critical Success Factors for World Bank Projects: An Empirical Investigation,” in the International Journal of Project Management, and he is the guest editor of a special issue at the Journal of African Business entitled: “Why Do Projects Fail in Africa?”

Professor Ika received his award, presented his findings, and contributed to a panel of award winners on the practice insights emerging from the research at the 26^th IPMA World Congress, October 29-31 on the Greek island of Crete.