Fellowships for Professors Mark Hart and Richard Thorpe

We are delighted to announce we have awarded our first Fellowships to Professor Mark Hart from Aston Business School and Professor Richard Thorpe from Leeds University Business School.

Professor Hart will work on further developments in engaging the business school community with small and medium size enterprises. The expected outcomes of this work include developing frameworks and support for research in to the effectiveness of business school interventions for SMEs, and exploring with BIS effective funding models for the work business schools do with SMEs. This will inform and feed into our work on the Small Business Charter.

Professor Thorpe will concentrate his project on helping to solve issues around research funding. In particular he will look at ways of improving the peer review process; funding sources for Doctoral students; fellowship schemes for early career academics; as well as exploring responses to the impact agenda in relation to research outcomes.

Both projects reflect current areas of interest for the Chartered ABS and build on work already undertaken. Full reports will be written up at the end of the year and communicated to the membership.

They will each hold the title and work on their respective projects for one year.