CIER Analytics Lab
The CIER Analytics Lab facilitates business analytics research and educational projects for all students and faculty members at Lakehead University, as well as strengthening collaborations with researchers from different universities or organizations across the world. The lab is committed to addressing practically relevant problems and producing impactful research, as well as training highly-qualified personnel (HQP) in business analytics theory, technique, and skills.
The lab seeks to partner with industry, who will provide data, problem scopes, access to users and experts, and other important resources needed to conduct a business analytics project. The industry partners are then matched with researchers and students, whose projects will align with the offerings from the industry. The lab will also collect open data or archival data to complement the data resources for student training and academic purposes. The members of the lab will be actively seeking funding support from internal and external grant opportunities (e.g. Mitacs, NSERC, and SSHRC) to facilitate its operations.
Resilience of Newcomer Women in NWO
The project was funded ($193K+) through Future Skills and is beginning now for the next two years. Future Skills is linked through Ryerson and the Conference Board of Canada. Three community partners: NWO Local Immigration Partnership, Thunder Bay Multicultural Association, and the Thunder Bay Community Economic Development Commission (CEDC). This study is looking at the shocks experienced by newcomer women in NWO and the impact on employment.This study is now in the second year of data collection. Over 20 in-depth interviews have been completed with new immigrant women. A survey was also conducted with over 3000 members of Northwestern Ontario for comparative analysis. The first-year analysis will be available in October 2022. This project, funded by Future Skills will focus on the supports and innovations that are needed for newcomer women to be able to fully participate in the labour market. More information is available at www.renewnwo.ca
Digital Transformation in Healthcare
Digital Transformation in Healthcare is an umbrella category that captures research that generally involves introducing technology in a variety of healthcare settings. Past and current partnerships include those with Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Foundation (TBRHSC) and St Joseph’s Care Group (SJCG). Currently, a Fulbright scholar is at Lakehead University in the fall semester of 2022 to research on this topic. Preparations are underway to provide him with projects that focus on various technology-concerned aspects of providing healthcare to Indigenous populations. There is interest in the community and this will be used to form formal industry partnerships in the region where research activities can be continued.
Innovation Ecosystem Research
Innovation Ecosystems are evolving sets of entities and their interrelationships that contribute to the innovative importance of a population.
This summer, the CIER hosted a speaker on the experience of Windsor/Essex County on developing their Intelligent Community (https://www.intelligentcommunity.org/). The mission of Intelligent Communities is to use Information and Communication Technologies to improve regional economies and social conditions. A working group is being assembled in the region to implement an Intelligent Community. This working group is intended to include many community members including those from regional municipal governments, first nations, local industry, social services and regional institutions. It is expected that this will yield research projects pertaining to innovation ecosystem research as well as many other diverse topics.
The Faculty of Business Administration at Lakehead University has hosted the 2022 Canadian Council for Small Business & Entrepreneurship (CCSBE) conference, which was held virtually this year. The CIER is sponsoring the event via some funding as well as some logistics help.