SFU Beedie professor Natalie Bin Zhao awarded Mitacs grant

SFU Beedie Professor Natalie Bin Zhao has been awarded a Mitacs grant to understand the business insider’s perspective on medical device recalls, and how that perspective affects opportunities for organizational learning and improvement. The $15,000 award will also help support Professor Zhao’s research assistant and PhD student.

Professor Zhao’s proposed research seeks to understand the CEO’s role in a firm’s response to product failures, including failure correction through leader modelling fallibility (LMF). LMF refers to business leaders openly acknowledging and discussing errors they made at work. Professor Zhao’s aim is to understand the consequences of LMF at the firm level and explore the mechanisms through which CEOs’ LMF influences the firm’s error correction speed

“Innovation in health-science companies is full of uncertainties that may lead to product failures, which offer opportunities to learn valuable lessons and improve organizational practices,” Zhao says. “Firms may fail to learn if business leaders regard these failures as threats to their reputation and image and try to justify these failures or blame them on others.

Mitacs is a national, not-for-profit research and training organization dedicated to advancing collaborations between industry, academia and government in Canada, and to fostering international research networks between Canadian universities and the world. For more details visit the Mitacs website.