2010 news

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VMS paper makes international top 50

A paper by two Victoria Management School academics has made an international top 50 list out of 15,000 articles assessed by Emerald publishers. Professor Stephen Cummings and Associate Professor Urs Daellenbach travelled to Montreal in August to receive an Emerald Citations of Excellence award for their paper 'A Guide to the Future of Strategy'.
"It was a great honour for us to see our paper make this list alongside some pretty elite company," says Professor Cummings.
"We and our research assistants have put an enormous amount of effort into this project over the past four years."
Every year, publishing company Emerald's team of independent academic reviewers summarises and assesses over 15,000 articles published in the top journals in the fields of management, economics, marketing, information systems, accounting and finance.
Cummings and Daellenbach's article was published in the journal Long Range Planning. It used a new bibliometric data-mining tool called Leximancer to survey past trends in strategy scholarship as an insight into potential key trends for the future.
Assisted by a Victoria Faculty of Commerce and Administration research grant, their analysis examined how trends such as scenario planning, benchmarking and knowledge management have emerged in previous decades.
"We used this data to pick a number of areas to watch in the coming decade, including a move away from copying best practice toward seeing each organisation as particular and unique collection of capabilities to be developed, and the effective strategist needing to become more of a politician and leading 'from the middle' rather than the top," says Professor Cummings.
Other articles on the list this year include one by GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt in the Harvard Business Review and a paper by famous economist Robert J. Barro in the American Economic Review.

For the full Top 50 list of 2009's best papers visit here.

Recent research news

As a very active research school, the Victoria Management School is constantly generating new research outputs which can be found in the publication lists of our staff. From time to time, we will also highlight recent research achievements with articles describing how they came about and the impact they are having or may have. We hope you will find reading these articles interesting and potentially stimulate the reading of the source research material as well.

Strategy + Creativity = Sustainable success

Successful strategy is closely linked to creativity, according to recent research.

A new book Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation by Professor Stephen Cummings from Victoria Management School and co-author Dr Chris Bilton from the University of Warwick argues that creativity and strategy are more closely related than we might expect.

Initially setting out to contrast how business and creative organisations develop strategy, their research uncovered more similarities than differences.

“We found creative connections behind most successful strategies and strategic thinking behind the most creative,” says Professor Cummings.

“This could be found in a range of examples from the music industry, sports, fashion, film, theatre and dance, as well as from successful corporations such as Apple, Ford and Google.”

As well as international examples ranging from the Royal Shakespeare Company, football manager Arsene Wenger and writer Nick Hornby, the book also looks closer to home. New Zealand examples include fashion designer Trelise Cooper, Natural History New Zealand— one of the world’s largest makers of documentary programming, Air New Zealand and Crown Research Institute Industrial Research Limited (IRL).

The researchers found that for creative strategy or strategic creativity to be effective, the key was integration between areas that are now often treated separately: innovation, entrepreneurship, leadership and organisation.

Creative strategy also requires a shift away from the ‘command-and-control’ style of leadership.

“Leaders of creative strategy acted as facilitators and connectors rather than as heroes with all the ideas,” says Professor Cummings.

“Successful leadership in this regard requires a relatively ego-free centre, involving others in the strategic innovation process.”

Professor Cummings and Dr Bilton identified six degrees of strategic innovation: value, cost, volume, market, boundary and learning—a set of categories that can be linked to an organisation’s value chain to ensure that creativity is strategic, rather than just creativity for its own sake.

In addition, they developed an innovation-generation matrix, suggesting a move away from copying a ‘best practice’ model towards encouraging companies to learn from worst practices, debate different types of good practice, promote promising practices, and leapfrog best practice to develop ‘next’ practices.

“Following best practice is the enemy of creative strategy,” Professor Cummings explains.

“Asking people to copy an answer that has already been identified is debilitating, it dulls their ability to develop the new ideas that any organisation not simply competing on cost is going to need to sustain to stay relevant.”

The book is published by Wiley and was launched in the UK in May through Arts & Business, an organisation that connects companies and individuals to cultural organisations. The launch included a panel discussion in London featuring Cummings and Bilton, Stefan Stern of the Financial Times and Vikki Heywood, CEO of the Royal Shakespeare Company, debating the issues raised by the book.

Employers need focus on capability

May 2010

Employers need a focus on human capability to ensure their workers are happy and their organisation is productive long term, according to Victoria University research.

Researcher Dr Bryson says that other than legal compliance, there is currently no accepted set of principles guiding employers.

"Management and Human Resource Management practices are largely buffeted along on the tide of 'best practice', personal beliefs, or meeting the demands of a business strategy, where the needs of business survival and shareholder prosperity often outweigh other considerations.

"Hence, good managers and supervisors sometimes find themselves in the situation of being 'custodians of bad practice'."

Dr Bryson led part of a team which conducted a five-year research project, funded by the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology and hosted in the Industrial Relations Centre at Victoria Management School, exploring the conditions that are required to develop optimal human capability in the workplace.

"Human contributions to society are not solely through work, and organisational contributions to society are not solely economic," says Jane.

"Workers aspire to live lives they have reason to value, that is to be capable humans—not just skill sets for the workplace."

One component of Dr Bryson’s study involved more than 200 interviews carried out across 30 organisations, which asked participants about the drivers and barriers to being able to develop capability in the workforce.

Results indicated that to develop human capability it was more advantageous to be in a permanent job, which offered more stability and a willingness of employers to invest in development opportunities. It was also more advantageous for organisations to take a long-term view rather than prioritising short-term gain.

"One of the interesting things we found going into factories were those that had, say, invested in literacy and numeracy training for their staff were actually getting much more loyalty and productivity from their staff—so, even though on the face of it these staff are easily replaceable, it still makes sense to invest in their development."

Dr Bryson's research includes recommendations on important considerations when designing jobs and work processes to provide good quality jobs and experiences. It also advocates enabling workers to take part in decision making, and creating a workplace environment which encourages development.

A framework for examining the institutional and social structures within and around the workplace was also created, in order to determine whether they facilitate or constrain individuals from achieving their potential. Jane hopes this will stimulate discussion between parties with different interests, particularly unions and employers.

"Through the provision of good quality jobs and work environments, organisations can improve upon their role as capability enhancing institutions in society."

Dr Bryson is the editor of a book due out in June Beyond Skill: Institutions, Organisations and Individuals, published by Palgrave Macmillan, which features two chapters on her research. The book brings together chapters from a unique combination of leading workplace researchers in New Zealand, Australia and the UK, exploring the conditions that are required to develop optimal human capability in the workplace.

Tourism 2050

Dr Ian Yeoman and Professor Douglas Pearce of Victoria University's Management School and Dr John Moriarty of J & H Moriarty Ltd will receive $791,600 over the next three years from the Foundation of Research, Science and Technology (FoRST) and the Ministry of Tourism to construct a series of scenarios about future tourism in New Zealand.

The scenarios will paint multiple pictures of the futures in order to shape future thinking, provide insight and an understanding of how the world is changing.

Stage 1 of the project involves identifying the keys drivers of change whether it is technology, climate change, ageing populations and resources through interviews with experts and secondary data analysis.
Stage 2, is the construction of four scenarios along a timeline to 2050 covering the dimensions of the world, New Zealand, demand and supply structures and social values.
Stage 3 is an economic evaluation of those scenarios based upon a number of changing conditions. Stage 4 is updating the scenarios based consultation with industry and expert opinions and the final stage is communicating the scenarios to industry and relevant communities. For further details of the project visit www.tourism2050.com

School of Management Te Kura Whakahaere