The Business and Management Research Institute (BMRI) held a series of brief talks to increase awareness of BMRI initiatives and policies to staff and encourage them to be more research active. The event took place on 15th January 2019 and was well attended by academic staff and PGR students.

Prof Ram Ramanathan, BMRI Director, started the event by providing an overview of BMRI, its objectives, an extract of Faculty’s Business Plan, achievements in the previous year, and plans for the current year. The overview of BMRI was followed by brief presentations by leaders of BMRI’s five research centres.

Dr Crina Baltag, acting leader for the Centre for Research in Law (CRiL) was the first to present highlights of the achievements and activities of the research centre. It was highlighted that CRiL was actively represented in external and internal conferences, seminars and workshops and had a constant number of excellent quality publications in international journals and books.

Dr Sandar Win then talked about the activities of the Centre for Research in Contemporary Accounting, Finance and Economics (ResCAFE) who spoke about a publication workshop, among others, organised by the centre. This was followed by presentations by Dr Alia El Banna on the activities of the Centre for International Business and Marketing (CIBAM), by Dr Christina Schwabenland on the activities of the Centre for Leadership Innovation (CLI), and by Professor Yanqing Duan on the activities of the Business and Information Systems Research Centre (BISC). Some of the recent publications, bursaries, writing retreat, awards and project successes were highlighted in these talks. Prof Ramanathan then mentioned about potential reorganisation of another research centre, INTOUR, to link with other disciplines.

The afternoon session started with research presentation by Principal Investigators (PIs) of successful projects with BMRI’s internal funding 2017/18 on findings of their research projects.

The PIs have submitted a summary of their activities and findings to BMRI Director well ahead of the event. They are available to interested parties if they approach BMRI Director or the corresponding PI.

The research presentations by staff members were then followed by a presentation by a PGR student. Ms Ioana Stoica presented her ongoing research work the co-creation process of place brands and its contribution to negative place reputation and investment attraction. She outlined a shift of power in place branding: the actions taken by the place stakeholders are becoming more influential in creating a place image than the marketing & branding efforts taken by place municipalities. Specifically, residents as stakeholders are considered to be the most important target audience of place brands for multiple reasons. Ioana's research aims to understand the co-creation process of place brands by examining the role of residents in contribution to negative place reputation and investment attraction. She is proposing to use a qualitative methodology with a case study of Luton. The presentation was interactive with interesting questions about place branding from the audience.

Finally, Professor Ramanathan discussed BMRI’s preparations on REF 2021 highlighting the role of BMRI Research Institute membership.

The event ended with thanks from BMRI Director.