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. About 30 participants (academic staff and PGR students) attended the event. The event also welcomed 11 PhD students from Jordan (with joint supervision with Middle Eastern University, Jordan).

Prof Ram Ramanathan, Director, BMRI started the event by providing an overview of BMRI, its objectives, achievements in the previous year, and plans for the current year including preparations for REF2021. The overview of BMRI was followed by brief presentations by leaders of BMRI’s five research centres.

Dr Andreas Yiannaros, from the Centre for Research in Law (CRiL) was the first to present highlights of the achievements and activities of the research centre. Dr Christina Schwabenland provided a detailed account of the research activities in the Centre for Leadership Innovation (CLI), including the writing retreat and the Equal Pay @50 conference in Luton on 04 March 2020. As the acting leader for two other research centres (ResCAFE and CIBAM), she briefly mentioned about research activities in these centres as well. Finally, Professor Ram Ramanathan provided an overview of the activities of the Business and Information Systems Research Centre (BISC) including recent publications and funding successes.

The afternoon session consisted of three research presentations by BMRI staff members, 3 presentations by BMRI PGR students and one presentation by an external expert.

The session was started with the presentation by Katherine Baxter on her research on the impact of gendered content in adverts promoting physical activity on attitudes and behavioural intentions. Christina Schwabenland and Alexander Kofinas organised an interactive session on the externally funded Lego Serious Play project. Alexander also presented his research on reflections on Change Management.

The day’s external presentation was delivered by Dr Gajanan Panchal from Aston University who talked about an interesting modelling work titled “Supply Chain Formation- A Mechanism Design in the DEA context”. A novel framework linking Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with Nash equilibrium has been discussed by Dr Panchal forshedding more insights on how supply chain formation mechanisms work.

BMRI PhD students then presented their ongoing research activities (Winifred Soribe: “Financing Entrepreneurial Innovation within England”; Mariya Rai: “Integration of Information Technologies in Marketing Strategies by SMEs in the UK” and Ioana Stoica: “Exploring processes of co-creation between the residents and the municipalities in the context of places with negative reputation – A case study of Luton”).

The evening session was devoted to discussions on ongoing externally funded research activities. Claudia Zugno presented the progress on the project titled “The Families Together Project: Assessing Challenges and Prospects for Refugee Family Reunion in the UK”, while Ram Ramanathan and Katarzyna Pelc presented progress on other research projects (ADPAC, TAF, Erasmus+ and REAMIT).

The event ended with thanks from BMRI Director.

The entire day was well attended by staff members and students, with significant levels of interactivity. Dr Banita Lal tweeted about a number of sessions with photographs.