College of Business and Economics | Annual Report 2021 34 conference proceedings (8%). This is the result of the College’s strategic orientation to reduce overreliance on conference proceedings. RESEARCH IMPACT The College continues to do well in as far as impact is concerned. A total of 576 publications have been listed in Scopus outlets (+21% year-on-year) with 2 749 Scopus citations demonstrating a significant impact. Around 28,6% of the publications are listed in the top 10% of global journals as identified by SNIP. POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOWS The number of Postdoctoral Research Fellows (PDRFs) has increased from 48 in 2020 to 62 in 2021. The research output units per PDRF has improved to 1.64 (+112%). The PDRF programme is a mentorship intervention, which aims to prepare academe of the future as well as researchers/ knowledge producers who are poised to produce knowledge for human advancement. PATENTS Although the CBE has improved in as far as innovation is concerned, most of the innovation outputs have been in teaching innovation. Strategically, the College is pushing to increase its innovation index and produce patents as intellectual capital. RESEARCH FUNDING The CBE generated a total of R26 million in 2021, slightly short of the target (-8%). The reduction has been largely attributed to the drop in the international grant support from some R8 million to R4 million (-51%). TOWARDS RESEARCH FUTURE-AGILITY In a constant changing world, the College recognises the fact the future of flexible business organisations is an oxymoron and therefore has a research agenda that considers future scenarios. The College considers the investigation of contemporary and future topics such as applied data science, predictive analytics, consumer intelligence, future product differentiation, future world of work, and market intelligence. From 2020 onwards, the research endeavours in the College are guided by the following foci: • Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL): A total of 5% of the outputs showed orientation to SoTL in the first year of SoTL being tracked in the College’s ROUs. • Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR): Around 16% of the 2021 publication outputs have demonstrated engagement with the broader focus of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. • Decolonisation of knowledge: Generation of knowledge informed by the local contextual setting is important. The generated knowledge can be augmented with the existing Global-North knowledge value systems. • Metaverse: There has been wider recognition of the metaverse as an imaging conceptualisation that could impact the business world. Metaverse being at the centre of the semantic Web (Web 3.0) enabling interaction models of the virtual or augmented reality in 3D environments will enable the modelling of business entity interactions. The College has intensified efforts to diversify its pool of expertise to have a connected eco-system of knowledge production competence. The College is home to 11 Distinguished Visiting Professors (DVPs) from all over the world. Of these, two are listed in the 2021 Clarivate Most Cited Researchers. The increasing number of visiting scholars enables the internal CBE researchers to have access to global networks, which could potentially bring in international funding and the realisation of groundbreaking research. The College is on course to train more academics to obtain doctorates to increase the confidence in knowledge production and postgraduate supervision. GOING FORWARD The College will continue its strategic push for its researchers to publish in Scopus- and DHETrecognised journals, especially paying attention to the journals’ position in the SNIP ranking system. On postgraduate administration, enhanced monitoring of postgraduate progression and the postgraduate output mapping endeavour will culminate into an improved attainment of set targets. The College will push towards increasing its research innovation portfolio to generate patents as intellectual assets. It can arguably be stated that the College is in the right direction in as far as positioning itself as an epicentre of excellence for critical pan-African enquiry. Prof Kelvin Bwalya Vice-Dean: Research, Innovation, and Internationalisation College of Business and Economics, University of Johannesburg
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