Business
and
environment

Dr. Monika Winn: transforming organizations

The common thread of my research over the years has been a focus on positive organizational change, specifically toward more sustainable ways of organizing business. I've examined what prompts firms to innovate, how stakeholders affect reputation and organizational learning, and how these dynamics create institutional change.

My pioneering research with European and Australian colleagues has studied the impacts of climate change on the need for firms to develop both new forms of resilience and new abilities to adapt. By examining adaptation to massive, discontinuous change, we're filling a blind spot in organizational theory.

I'm very excited about researching an overarching framework that lets companies fit sustainable strategies into their very DNA - and therefore into everything they do.

Business
and
poverty

Dr. Joshua Ault: the context of poverty

I study business innovation in low-income markets of less-developed countries. Specifically, I examine the questions: What is poverty? What role can business play in the fight against it? Can organizations create profits while alleviating poverty?

My work builds on recent findings that poverty might not be a function solely of income, but rather both the causes and effects of poverty are strongly influenced by the national context. In that vein, I explore the conditions in which business-led innovation is most likely to provide solutions.

I look at the commercial microfinance industry, a for-profit scheme that provides very small loans to poor entrepreneurs to help them grow their businesses and increase their incomes. Ideally, my work will help governments, agencies and individuals understand the conditions under which either the commercial approach or the non-profit approach is most likely to succeed in alleviating poverty.

Social
enterprise

Dr. Ana María Peredo: community-based solutions

Dr. Ana María Peredo is an associate professor at Gustavson School of Business and director of UVic’s Centre for Co-operative and Community-Based Economy. Her courses, which include Entrepreneurship and Small Business for the Non-Specialist, and International Business’s Global and Local: Sustainable Communities, pay particular attention to social enterprise and alternative business models.

"I study impoverished, indigenous, and rural communities," she says, "to learn how collective enterprising, aimed at community benefit and not just individual profit, can add value to a community."

Health
and
wellness

Dr. Angela Downey: a wellness culture

Angela Downey is an associate professor of accounting at the Gustavson School of Business and has been researching in the health environment for nearly two decades.

"My research focuses on two areas," she explains. "One is the process of implementing health promotion programs in organizations and the impact of the changes on productivity, absenteeism, morale, and turnover. I’ve also examined how the change process for worksite health promotion differs from other types of organizational change."

"As well, for nearly a decade as a health economist, I’ve used costing theory and models to study the implementation of evidence-based best practices in health organizations and developed tools for measuring the effects.

"I hope that understanding the economic and wellness consequences of changing our health care practices will help us sustain and even improve them."

Student
research

MBA 596 is a four- to six-month consulting project in which students help organizations find solutions to business problems. Many clients are not-for-profits and sustainability-related organizations that value the help of faculty-led business students to make a difference in the community. In 2010, nine of 15 projects were sustainability oriented.

COM 470 is a directed research paper course undergrads can complete while on exchange in another country. Of the 52 papers submitted in 2011-12, nine involved sustainability. The year's best papers are here.