Professor Peter Little

We found in Australia in the last decade that it's becoming easier to engage industry in research because everything is so competitive. Most businesses are international in their reach and most businesses are dealing with complex questions, very often involving intersections of knowledge or intersections of disciplines. And it can be very hard for a business whether it be a private business or not for profit business or even a government department to be able to resolve their own complex issues without research help and that's how these partnerships come into being. And we feed off each other and we give value to each other. The teaching programs need to be underpinned by research, that's the first thing, secondly it's one of the core activities of the modern business field and particularly if you want to be well recognised internationally as a business school, you have got to be good in research and I think thirdly our industry partners in the businesses community that we serve want us to undertake research in conjunction with them but also to make sure that the programs that we deliver are really rigorous and underpinned by good research. We have an expectation of everybody who is a full time academic staff member here that they undertake research of one kind or another. Some people research into teaching matters but the vast majority of our QUT Business School members are researching matters in their discipline. Some people do what we call primary or basic research which is more theoretical. We have a lot of people who work on industry related research. I think that's what we are more known for historically and we are very good on that space, working with industry and undertaking industry related research. And that has two advantages, one is that is can contribute to practice, it can solve business problems, but also it can lead to higher quality journal outputs. If you are a research student, I think, coming here where you have got people who are doing world class theoretical research but also world class industry related research it is terrific and people can choose whether they want to do the more theoretical research or whether they want to do industry related research which is also based on theory and is creating new knowledge and has the same outcome, that is, we're seeking in every case to publish our results in the highest quality journals and share them, not only with the business community but also the international scholarly community.