Ivey Professor Tima Bansal has had her Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Sustainability renewed for a seven-year term worth $1.4 million to continue her important work on a new approach to business that includes a long-term outlook.
She has been a Tier 1 Chairholder since 2013 and Western University has received annual funding to support her work through the Canada Research Chair (CRC) program.
Bansal said she is honoured to have her CRC renewed. She is studying the role of short-termism, globalization, and organizational scale in business’ pursuit of sustainable development.
A new approach to business
“Essentially, I am arguing that our approaches to business tend to ignore or undervalue the dimensions of time, space, and scale so we don’t see the value of the long term, the value of local, and importance of small scale,” she said. “If businesses continue to pursue bigger, better, faster, and cheaper, they will find it hard to contribute to a better planet and society.”
She advocates a new way of thinking where businesses consider their role in the bigger system.
“The companies that can create value for the business over the short and long term are able to see the full system in which they operate, and not just what is directly in front of them,” she said. “By valuing time, space and scale, organizations can learn how to be both short and long term, global and local, and big and small.”
Bansal founded Ivey’s Centre for Building Sustainable Value (BSV) and Network for Business Sustainability. A key focus of her work going forward will be on the BSV Centre’s Innovation Learning Lab, a consortium of 19 innovation leaders from diverse sectors, which is looking at ways to embed this type of thinking in organizations and reshape the innovation process.
The Canada Research Chairs program invests approximately $300 million per year toward research in engineering and the natural sciences, health sciences, humanities, and social sciences. Tier 1 designation are outstanding researchers acknowledged as leaders in their fields.
