Deakin Business School researchers have been awarded significant funding in the highly-competitive Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Projects Scheme.

The ARC National Competitive Grants Program supports high quality research leading to the discovery of new ideas and the advancement of knowledge. 

We’d like to offer huge congratulations to Deakin Business School’s Professor Roger Simnet, who, with Dr Shan Zhou from the University of Sydney, has been awarded $286,362 in funding from the Australian Research Council. 

This significant achievement will further their important project centered around evaluating innovative assurance practices for sustainability reporting. 

The project is expected to make substantial contributions in identifying and evaluating best practice credibility-enhancing techniques and informing policy and standard-setting options in Australia and overseas. The benefits include higher quality and more reliable disclosures resulting in better resource allocation decisions and informed policy determinations.   

We’d also like to congratulate Dr Kristijan Mirkovski who, with Dr Libo Liu; Professor Marta Indulska and Professor Paul Lowry in a project led by The University of Melbourne, was awarded $288,064 in ARC funding for a Process-Based Framework for Open Innovation with Social Media Data. 

This project aims to improve the capacity of Australian businesses to derive value from social media data for innovation in an efficient manner, which is central to improving Australia’s global competitiveness. 

This will be achieved by developing an open innovation process-based framework for social media, which utilises advanced analytics to unlock the value of social media data and provides the analytics tools required at each stage of the innovation process. The resulting outputs will allow local businesses to transform social media data into actionable insights for each of the three stages of the open innovation process through machine learning and social network analysis algorithms. 

Last but not least, we’d like to congratulate Dr Daniel Avdic who, with Professor Michael Shields; Associate Professor Sonja de New; Dr Rachel Knott; Professor David Lawrence in a Monash University-led project, has been awarded $567,988 for their research into Labour Market and Health Dynamics of Australia's Front Line Workers. 

This project will provide insights that can inform policies designed to protect the health of front line workers and meet future workforce demands. 

Additional congratulations to the unsung heroes of our recent and ongoing research income boost, the Research Funding and Development team in Research Services: Dr Stefanie Johnstone, Dr Maks Sipowicz, Bron Kelly and A/Prof Josh Newton.