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National Research Foundation

Faculty members receive NRF rating

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 12:13

Director of the GSB Professor Walter Baets and Professor Eric Wood are the latest to be recognised for their excellent research output over the past few years. They join other rated faculty John Luiz, Ralph Hamann, Thomas Koeble and Chipo Mlambo.

Both Baets and Wood have received C-ratings. They are recognised by their international peers to be established researchers with a track record of high quality research in their respective fields, Baets in complexity theory, and Wood in entrepreneurship.

The NRF acknowledges those researchers who have an outstanding record of new research. The successful rating allows the researchers access to international funding as well as incentive funding from the NRF, and is used as a national indicator of excellence, benchmarking the GSB internationally.

“We are extremely proud of these ratings, and even more proud of the fact that a large part of our academic staff are NRF rated. This proves once again that the GSB belongs right up there with the best business schools in the world,” says Baets.

“This also means that we have the financial support to produce more research that is important, fresh and relevant to what we do at the GSB. This all affects our ability to stay relevant and to offer high quality business leadership development programmes that have an impact on society,” he says.

The NRF ratings are a primary mechanism through which the South African research community assesses research productivity, and it is also an important means through which research funding is allocated. The evaluation is undertaken by national and international reviewers who critically scrutinise the research done during the assessment period. It is extremely important for a researcher to submit their research for ratings because if unsuccessful no further registration by the researcher can be completed until after a two, or even three year period.

Traditionally, only established researchers with a solid background of excellent research and younger researchers displaying the potential to become established within five years or those becoming future leaders in their field have applied for ratings.

“As with all ratings or evaluations, they are not perfect, but they involve a relatively thorough assessment of research outputs in terms of their contributions to science, including reviews by international peers,” says Ralph Hamann, research director at the GSB.

“The NRF rating of Walter Baets and Eric Wood, together with John Luiz, brings the number of NRF rated faculty to six, which I think is a number we can be quite happy with, for now. It is a notable improvement from last year, an increase of 600 per cent. These figures improve further if we include visiting faculty members Nicholas Biekpe, Chris Breen and Enrico Uliana,” he says, congratulating his colleagues.

On September 7, Wood gave an inaugural address at UCT on the Art of Value Creation.