The Applied Management Review
From cooperative education project to academic publication
Reza Yaghoubi
Waikato Institute of Technology
The Applied Management Review (AMR) is a peer-reviewed journal published by Waikato Institute of Technology (Wintec) that presents original research in applied business and management. The research presented by the AMR focus on assisting a variety of companies across several industries through offering viable solutions to practical problems and addressing real-world questions. Consistent with this vision, the AMR encourages submissions that address specific practical problems or make methodological advancements in applied research in all areas of business and management.
The first issue of the journal contains research conducted by students and their academic supervisors at Wintec's Centre for Business, IT and Enterprise. These studies have produced outputs tailored to help New Zealand businesses who chose to participate in Wintec's Co-operative Education Projects. The articles published in this issue of the AMR cover a broad range of topics including capital structure, product selection, customer satisfaction, efficiency improvements, internal controls, work-life balance, and supply chain management.
The AMR is the outcome of a long process of continuous improvement in our research practices from the start of Wintec’s Applied Management programme in 2014. The Cooperative Education Projects (CEP) provided an opportunity to produce over 200 pieces of research at Wintec. The students initially presented their research to their supervisors and a moderator who would examine the quality of the research. After running the CEP for a couple of times, we envisioned a student research conference where students could receive quality feedback from the audience and experience a large networking event where they could practice public speaking, learn from other participants and potentially meet their future employers. Fast-forward 3 years, we have held 6 semi-annual conferences so far and have observed continuous improvement in several aspects including variety and quality of research, quality of presentations, quality of feedback provided by the audience, the industry participation, and overall quality of the event.
We also envisioned that improving quality of the research would pave the way for publishing our research journal – A journal that bridges the gap between academic research in business and the research needs of real businesses. This would, in turn, enrich the larger research ecosystem that we were building in our community. Now that the first issue of the AMR is published, we are one step closer to that vision. However, we still have a long way ahead.
We intend to expand and continuously improve the quality of the research published in the AMR. Already started to invite and accept submissions from international authors, the editorial board is keen to invite quality submissions from across New Zealand from both academics and professionals.