2018 Lazaridis Institute research seed grants announced

May 18, 2018

Established in 2015, with a generous gift from Mike Lazaridis and funding from the Government of Ontario, the Lazaridis Institute is working to increase Canadian prosperity by making national technology entrepreneurs globally competitive. One pillar of the Lazaridis Institute is research, with a focus on how tech firms can successfully move from startup to stay-up and then transition to scale-up in the global market.

To fulfil its research mandate, the Lazaridis Institute provides annual seed grants. These grants support early stage research projects, and are intended to help faculty and graduate students study a variety of management issues faced by tech firms at various stages of development.

Earlier this spring, the Lazaridis Institute’s Research Advisory Committee announced the 2018 recipients:

• Ammara Mahmood (Marketing) with N. Vulkan and T. Hellmann (UK): Impact of Equity Crowdfunding on Product Innovation and Adoption
• Bill Morrison and Bradley Ruffle (Economics): Do Pre-filled Online Forms Encourage More Accurate Reporting?
• Hamid Noori (ODS): IoT-Enabled Business Models in Product-Service Systems
• Ivona Hideg (OB/HRM) with S. Mor (Israel), F. Godart (France), Y. Engel (Netherlands): Tackling the Gender Gap in Enterprise – The Role of Benevolent Sexist Attitudes in Underfunding of Female-Led Ventures
• Ling Chu, Robert Mathieu and Chima Mbagwu (Accounting): Non-GAAP Disclosures in Canadian High Technology Companies
• Simon Taggar (OB/HRM) and Anne Domurath (Policy) with Nicole Coviello (Marketing): Developing Scalable Businesses: A Study of High-Technology Accelerator’s Outcomes

“The research we’ve funded this year addresses a variety of issues pertinent to high-growth technology firms,” says Nicole Coviello, research director, Lazaridis Institute and professor of marketing. “One project investigates how the pressure-cooker environment of an accelerator impacts the individuals and teams trying to develop scalable businesses. Another pertains to gender issues and one of our studies explores this issue in the context of under-funded female-led ventures.”

The topics and research of the successful recipients are all germane to today’s tech companies, and will help founders and teams as they move from startup through to stay-up, then scale-up in global markets.

“The Lazaridis Institute seed funding is very important to our research program,” says William Morrison, associate professor of economics. “It gives us the ability to begin a series of decision experiments in which participants will complete a number of incentivized decision tasks. This approach guarantees that participants have an incentive to make choices that are in their best interests, but it gets expensive and so the Lazaridis Institute funding is a crucial first step to implementing our research and collecting this valuable data.”

This year’s recipients are all excited about the opportunities this funding provides.

“Gender bias is big in the tech industry,” says Ivona Hideg, assistant professor of organizational behaviour and human resource management. “Women entrepreneurs earn less – both because they ask for it, and initial research tells us also because venture capitalists don’t want to put too much pressure on them and their many roles.” Hideg and her colleagues are going to look at this phenomenon (called benevolent sexism), to see the role it plays in female-led startups.

“It’s good to have this funding available,” says Hamid Noori, executive director, Lazaridis Executive Master’s in Technology Management, and chair professor in enterprise integration and technology management. “It allows us to explore new research ideas in the areas of technology and innovation.”

To learn more about the Lazaridis Institute and its research projects please visit lazaridisinstitute.ca.