NEW DEAN TARGETS TRANSITION TO CLEAN ENERGY COUNTRY: Chile SCHOOL: Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez Business School
SHOULD RESEARCH BE DEMOCRATISED? COUNTRY: Italy SCHOOL: Graduate School of Management, MIP Politecnico di Milano In a move to democratise research, the question of what research should be carried out is increasingly being put to ordinary people. For example, one local council in Denmark has asked its constituents to vote online to decide what medical research should be funded. Chiara Franzoni, a Full Professor at the School of Management at Politecnico di Milano (MIP), and Director of its Master in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, together with Diletta Di Marco, a PhD student at MIP, and Henry Sauermann, an Associate Professor at ESMT Berlin, sought to understand how citizens could become more involved in the decision-making processes behind research projects, while taking into account the issue of how to make this representative and free of bias. The team recruited 2,300 citizens from Amazon Mechanical Turk – a crowdsourcing platform that allows organisations to find ‘co-workers’ for tasks – to make assessments on four real research proposals using the criteria of social impact, scientific merit and team qualifications. The participants were given two options: a free vote, or a vote which asked for a small donation towards the funding. The research found that if a participant considered the problem(s) addressed by a research proposal to be of high importance, they were likely to pay less attention to its chances of solving the problem. It also found that if the participants were asked to make even a small donation, those who had higher income and education were more likely to vote, narrowing the inclusion and representation of the sample. In addition, if a participant had a vested interest in a particular problem tackled by a research proposal, then they were far more likely to vote for the proposal. However, in these cases, participants did not overestimate the project’s social impact expectations, and were able to provide a largely unbiased assessment. This allowed the researchers to conclude that while the general public’s evaluation of social impact might not necessarily be ‘better’ than traditional research grant mechanisms, they might be able to provide a different, and potentially complementary, perspective on the type of research that is funded. / Ellen Buchan (EB)
The new Dean of Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez Business School (UAI Business School), Juan Carlos Jobet, has another outlet through which he can leverage his ministerial experience after accepting a role with Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP). Jobet, Chile’s Minister of Energy between 2019 and 2022, and Minister of Mining between 2020 and 2022, will join the CGEP’s Distinguished Visiting Fellows programme that aims to bring public and private sector experts together to further its aim of advancing energy and climate solutions through research, education, and dialogue. ‘This role at Columbia CGEP will enhance my role as Dean of the UAI Business School. Sustainability is one of the central challenges faced by companies in Chile and the world, and Columbia is a global benchmark on this issue,’ said Jobet. Jobet’s research, classes and public policy proposals will focus on the development of the green hydrogen industry, the decarbonisation of the electrical matrix and the role of metals and minerals in the energy transition process. ‘Climate change is the biggest challenge facing our generation and the current energy crisis shows that we must accelerate the transition to clean energy,’ Jobet added. As Minister of Energy, Jobet presided over Chile’s first energy efficiency law and the accelerated development of new solar and wind capacity. In mining, he led the development of a long-term strategy for sustainable, competitive and greener mining. He became Dean of UAI Business School in April. On his appointment, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez’s Rector Harald Beyer described Jobet’s professional background as ‘extraordinarily forceful’ as he talked about the need for Business Schools to ‘be a reference in the training of future leaders of companies and ventures of the 21st century,’ against a backdrop of, ‘technological revolution, climate change and uncertainty’. / Tim Banerjee Dhoul (TBD)
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