Professor Margaret Dalziel is presenting a paper on measuring the impact of government investments in research and innovation at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Waterloo, Ontario. The study is slated for publication in the June issue of Optimum Online, a joint initiative of the Centre on Governance, University of Ottawa, and The Summit Group.

Dalziel conducted a systematic review of the state of knowledge and international best practices with Telfer graduate students Mimosa Zhao and Tanita Noor Tahmina and Council of Canadian Academies researcher Joe Rowsell. Their work – supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and Industry Canada – provides government policy makers and research managers with an appreciation of the scope, findings, and value of the academic literature and helps facilitate evidence-based policymaking.

More information is available at these links:

• Optimum Online

Sylvain Durocher has been awarded a $10,000 grant from CGA-Canada and the Canadian Academic Accounting Association (CAAA) to research “Comprehensive Income Information: A User’s Perspective.” Dr. Durocher, Logan Katz Fellow and Associate Professor at the Telfer School, focuses his research on accounting standard-setting, studying it from different theoretical perspectives.

His new project, with Anne Fortin of the Department of Accounting at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), will examine the use of comprehensive income information by financial statement users. It will also assess whether the reporting format can have an impact on their judgments and decisions. To date there is limited empirical evidence about the actual use of OCI by financial statement users in their financial analyses.

The researchers will add to the debate on comprehensive income, enrich the literature comparing professional and nonprofessional investors, provide valuable data on the impact of the two current reporting formats on users’ judgments and decisions, and contribute new insights on the impact of actuarial gains and losses – an important OCI item – on users’ judgments and decisions.

Do government and businesses receive value for money when they attempt to spur innovation through programs and organizations like research networks, science parks, and industry associations? The impact of these “innovation intermediaries” is often very difficult to determine, says Margaret Dalziel, associate professor at the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management. In a panel discussion at the 3rd Canadian Science Policy Conference in Ottawa on November 17, Dalziel noted that while there has been a renewed focus on intermediaries in recent years, amid heightened concerns for transparency and accountability, the efforts to gauge their impacts to date have had mixed results.

“The impact of these intermediaries can be positive, negative, or not significant,” says Dalziel, an expert on innovation and entrepreneurship who is researching how best to measure the effects of the intermediaries. “For example, one study showed the U.S. Small Business Innovation Research program had positive impact on revenues, employment and venture capital financing but another study found no impact on employment or investment in R&D.”

In the 1990s, studies of Sematech, a large U.S. R&D consortium, revealed positive impacts on generic technology and industry infrastructure, but negative impacts on R&D spending. Similarly, researchers have produced differing assessments of the impact of science parks and industry associations.

“It’s difficult to measure impact for several reasons,” Dalziel concludes. Every firm is different, there is a time lag between engagement with the intermediary and the firm outcomes, and it’s hard to distinguish between what are referred to as ‘selection effects’ and ‘treatment effects.’

“In other words, does engagement with intermediary X lead to high firm performance or does intermediary X engage with high performing firms?” says Dalziel. “In addition, an innovation intermediary’s activities affect firm resources and capabilities, but data on these characteristics is hard to come by. If data on firm performance is used to measure an intermediary’s impact, one has to control for other factors that affect firm performance.”

Dalziel says measuring what’s relevant, not what’s convenient, will be important in improving assessments. Researchers should use firm-level data, consider multiple dimensions of impact, and leverage the ability of executives to judge whether or not the intermediary contributed to a specific outcome.

She also cautioned that measuring performance shouldn’t detract from achieving performance, underlining the need to be efficient in measuring impact.

“Researchers have made promising strides in improving impact assessment, and reliable, relevant and actionable metrics are on the horizon.”

Jacomo Corbo will investigate the “Social and Economic Effects of Information Propagation in Large Networks” using a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

His research will map the flow of information in real organizations over time and will combine economic theories of production with social network theory to estimate the effects of information diffusion on the productivity of individuals and teams. It will utilize data on information flow and interactions within organizations and on online social networks to develop general predictive models of behaviour in settings with local network effects.

The objectives of the project are to estimate and enhance the productivity of information workers; to model, measure and improve organizational performance and our ability to forecast organizational behaviours; and to improve performance-related intervention strategies in information-networked environments.

Canada Research Chair in information and performance management since October 2011, Corbo actively participates in the IBM Centre for Business Analytics and Performance, at the Telfer School of Management. He will receive $95,000 from NSERC over five years.