Telfer Established Researcher Award 2021 – Lavagnon Ika

The Established Researcher Award recipient is a faculty member who has earned national or international recognition for the Telfer School of Management through outstanding and impactful research over the past five years. We are excited to present the 2021 Established Researcher Award to Professor Lavagnon Ika, a professor of project management at Telfer.

Since joining Telfer about 10 years ago, Professor Ika has made invaluable contributions to the Telfer School, including as director of the Telfer MSc in Management program from 2017 to 2020. He has had a tremendous impact on student research training, both as program director and as a researcher. He has supervised many PhD and MSc students, and has been involved in several MSc and PhD thesis committees all over the world, including in Australia, Botswana, France, India, South Africa, Serbia, and Trinidad and Tobago. In recognition of these activities, he also holds a joint affiliation with the uOttawa School of International Development and Global Studies. More recently, he launched the Major Projects Observatory, which unites researchers and students to address the challenges of conducting large-scale projects, in Canada and internationally, and to help bridge the gap between the theory and practice of project management.

Professor Ika has achieved great international recognition for his work. He has published over 40 peer-reviewed articles in prestigious international journals, such as World Development, Production Planning and Control, the Journal of African Business, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice and International Journal of Project Management. Recently, he was also awarded a SSHRC Insight grant to support his research. Over the past five years, he has received various distinctive awards for his contributions to project management and to scholarly activities in the field, namely:

• the Emerald Best Reviewer Award in 2018;
• the International Project Management Association (IPMA)’s coveted Research Award in 2017;
• the Emerald Outstanding Paper Award in Project Management in 2017; and
• Telfer’s Innovative Researcher Award in 2017.

He is well respected by the academic community, as demonstrated by his roles on the editorial and academic boards of prominent journals and associations. For example, he is the associate editor of the International Journal of Project Management, a leading journal in the field. He is a member of the academic boards of the International Project Management Association and of the US-based Project Management Institute, both of which enjoy worldwide status. Moreover, he has been a visiting scholar at several institutions around the globe, including the Skema Business School in France, the Swinburne Business School in Australia, the Institute of Public Project and Cost Engineering of the Tianjin University of Technology in China, the African School of Economics in Benin, the CESAG Business School in Senegal, and the World Bank in Washington, DC.

Given his accomplishments, Professor Ika is poised to make a difference in society, both in Canada, and around the world. Among his most recent achievements is an article entitled,  Vaccination de masse : la bataille ne sera pas facile” [Mass Vaccination: the Battle will not be Easy], which appeared in The Conversation and reached 28,000 reads in one week. In 2020, he was offered a fellowship by the World Bank to help them improve their project management practices. Unsurprisingly, his research expertise and knowledge also attract a great deal of media attention, including from the written press, Radio-Canada, and CTV News. The Telfer School is proud to call Lavagnon Ika one of our own and to offer him this well-deserved award in recognition of his many achievements as a global academic leader in project management. Congratulations Professor Ika!