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Business School research video

• Video transcript

  The world is increasingly complex, interconnected, fast moving, and that creates both problems and opportunities for society, for governments, and for people's lives.

  Globally we’re facing constantly evolving challenges.

  Research is an incredibly powerful tool for change in our society, just small improvements in our understanding can have really fundamental changes in outcomes.

  Here in the Business School our research is driven by big global challenges.

  We’re not here to do theory for theory’s sake, we’re trying to create solutions.

  Trade affects all of our lives in major ways. The world trading system is facing some major challenges to do with geopolitical conflict, climate change, the rise of the digital economy and supply chain resilience.

  The work we do is very much focused on understanding how trade affects people. It’s important that policy takes into account those equity issues, those distributional issues and is inclusive. If you’re going to do research that has an impact, you need to collaborate.

  We need to bring different groups of people together, we need to bring different academic voices from different academic disciplines to find new solutions.

  Climate change is one of the biggest challenges that we face in today’s world. We have a chance still to do something about it.

  We have a large number of researchers looking at issues such as industrial decarbonisation, energy demand reduction, community level action.

  We also look at things like climate finance, so making sure that we have the right business models that can actually get us to net zero by 2050.

  Some of the solutions that we are looking at include policy measures, what are the sort of technological solutions that we need in energy demand reduction, and lastly, what are the behavioural messages that we might need in terms of people changing the way they use energy going forward.

  Digital transformation of work is going to be one of the biggest disruptive changes we have, equivalent to the Industrial Revolution.

  What we’re trying to understand is how do firms adopt these technologies and why they don’t, who are connected or disconnected and how this affects workers in terms of the quality of their jobs.

  Leadership, literacy and infrastructure are the really key areas that we need to focus on.

  The ultimate goal is to inform key actors how to develop a digital transformation that is inclusive and constructive so that it will not lead to increased forms of inequality.

  What we really care about it our work having a tangible impact on policy and policy decisions. We’re doing it in order to improve the way society functions and the decisions taken by governments.

  We are committed to using our research on delivering better outcomes for people, for policy and for practice, to create a fairer society and a more equal and prosperous world.