Research - MIK
MIK is the RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT AND INNOVATION Unit (R+D+i) of the Faculty of Business Science (Facultad de Empresariales) – of MONDRAGON UNIBERTSITATEA, specialised in the area of organisational management and it consists of, approximately, 40 people researchers), who cooperate with persons from different organisations in order to develop their R+D+i projects and the Advise and Technical Assistance project.
Our main aim is to carry out basic research tasks and apply them in the area of business; especially in the case of aspects concerning organisation, management, social-labour and property matters, as well as in the case of innovation aspects and in the case of the establishment of new business. Besides, we think that the research tasks of our Unit:
- Must be orientated both to (business) innovation to (academic) training, bringing over new knowledge, tools, theories and methods and,
- It must be based upon business praxis. In other words, it is essential for us to research while we cooperate directly with the organisations.
The organisations are social entities and, regardless of their objectives (serving customers, creating employment, providing benefits, etc.), their main operational pillars should study, pay attention to and innovate in order to develop new businesses and come across new forms of work, management, organisation and richness distribution.
We believe that the centre or axis around which the whole organisation as a system is articulated is the social-human dimension, the person; and, thus, for any organisation to attain its objectives with the maximum degree of success it is absolutely necessary to take them into account.
What is more, we dare say that many business initiatives fail because they do not recognise the importance of the human factor, because they do not pay attention to the management of new business opportunities or because they do not implant management/organisation models in order to balance the technical and social function.
Many business organisations do not surrender and keep trying to develop or use technical tools of advanced management in order to make it possible to integrate people in everyday business management.
Technical tools, such as the 5 “s” (order and cleanness), the EFQM model (European Foundation for Quality Management), the strategic planning... used in order to move on in the way towards the improvement of management are not always as productive as one would wish.
Besides, the GEM study (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor) concerning 2005 and promoted by the London Business School and Babson College, which measures the degree of generation of new business activities, shows that the situation of the Basque Country, with a 5.9% average potential for entrepreneurship, occupies an intermediate position with regards to the 9.38% average rate of the rest of the countries studied. Logically enough, these data make us pose the following questions:
- Which factors determine the degree of generation of new business?
- What happens in the surrounding context of business organisations and of the persons that form part of them so that the technical tools applied become old-fashioned or make it impossible to attain the objectives desired?
One of our tasks, as management researchers, is to elaborate a work hypothesis in order to develop projects that may help us find new solutions in the research areas that we have decided to develop and that are related with: a) the management of new business opportunities, b) advanced or emerging management and organisation dynamics and c) property and they are all focused on the person.
Thus, we put forward those questions that we are worried about as if they were hypotheses:
Why is it that so many organisations do not take up the way towards the use and generation of new business?
Could it be because of the lack of training and awareness of the need to create new companies/businesses?
What is the cause of the partial failure of the application of the new tools to technical management?
Could it be, partly, due to a probably too early application of those tools, due to the fact that there is no cultural adequacy as far as training, motivation and the compromise with the persons we work with are concerned?
If the starting hypotheses were valid we should start to think of designing research projects that could propitiate a set of tools in order to help companies to start up new activities and so that people could see that those new tools are ideal and necessary.
That is why we suggest that, before starting to apply the technical tools, other tools of a social character should be designed; the person would be the structural axis of such tools and they would promote both entrepreneurship and innovation and new opportunities to take part in management and property.
New Research and Innovation lines
Our Research Lines focus on the development of sociological studies, models, tools, theories and methods to support the efficient operation and the transformation of organisations, both at their social-human level and at the technical-business level. Considering this perspective, we put forward four Research lines: