PhD candidate Martina Čaić’s research in Dutch and Portuguese hospitals could help engineers and roboticists build better ‘socially assistive’ robots that will one day help carers and families look after the elderly.
Rankings: according to those who compile them, they represent expert opinions on quality. And nearly everyone else, it seems, has an opinion about those opinions: news media, employers, policymakers, taxpayers, prospective students and parents, and alumni looking back on their education and their alma mater.
“There are some academics who take the role of preachers when it comes to sustainability, who just reiterate that we must be sustainable,” SBE professor of real estate finance Piet Eichholtz observes. “We take a more pragmatic approach and say, well, let’s see if sustainability pays, in monetary terms. Because if it does that, you don’t need to be a preacher, you don’t need to have government rules – the market will provide incentives.”
Martin Wetzels, professor of marketing and supply chain research at Maastricht University’s School of Business and Economics, is looking at the impact of “digital disruption” on the academic and business world alike. His findings are the subject of his 2018 UM Star Lecture in Cologne.
The art market, worth about $45 billion globally, is booming. Rachel Pownall, who holds the TEFAF Chair in Art Markets at Maastricht University’s School of Business and Economics, is investigating how shifts in the trade and global economic developments can have an impact on the value of art. Her research is the subject of her 2018 UM Star Lecture.
Businesses increasingly see the value in inspiring employees to work more creatively – and they’re offering more time and resources for out-of-the-box thinking. Technology giant Google expects staff to spend 80 per cent of their time on routine daily tasks and reserve 20 per cent for more creative work. But for all its popularity, little is known about how well this approach works, Maastricht University academics Alexander Brüggen and Christoph Feichter tell Tracy Brown Hamilton.
All entrepreneurs are inspired by the dream of creating something new. For refugee entrepreneurs, building a business goes hand in hand with building a new life in a new land. How do they establish viable enterprises and find meaningful work for themselves and others? Tracy Brown Hamilton talks to Jarrod Ormiston, assistant professor in social entrepreneurship at Maastricht University’s School of Business and Economics, about his research into these questions.
Richard H. Thaler, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Economics, has helped bring behavioural economics in from the fringes of the discipline and introduced its ideas to a broad audience. We talk to Maastricht University School of Business and Economics academics about his impact, the role of behavioural economics in their work, and its place in education at Maastricht University.
“Flexibilisation of labour” is a term that crops up with increasing frequency these days, and perhaps nowhere more so than
Collecting music had long been a hobby of Peter Bollen’s, but it turned into a true labour of love when he starting hunting down and restoring music clips from TopPop. Over the years the television broadcasters turned out to have wiped countless clips, a disproportionate number of them featuring Dutch artists. “Cleaning up clips and restoring them to their full glory gives me a real kick.”