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Cardiff Business School

Research at Cardiff Business School

Our purposeful, internationally-leading, real-world social science research is central to achieving our Public Value ambitions.

Over many years, we’ve built a strong and sustainable research community that enables faculty to thrive while making distinctive and important contributions to their disciplines and beyond.

We’ve actively embraced the San Francisco Declaration on Research as an opportunity to move beyond journal rankings and metrics to consider research studies on their merits and viewed in relation to social, economic and environmental impact.

Principles and purpose

Since 2014, £15m of research funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), government and industry, has enabled us to promote a core set of principles fundamental to Public Value research, including the co-creation of knowledge; development of interdisciplinary connections; a collegial research culture; and inclusive engagement.

These principles contribute to our long-standing reputation as a leading international centre for business and management research. This is demonstrated through the day-to-day work of our colleagues and also by the quality of our 2021 Research Excellent Framework submission, which resulted in us achieving the highest possible score for research environment, reflecting our collegial, inclusive and participative culture.

Our Public Value ambition

Since 2015, our research has been guided by our Public Value ambition - to generate sustainable economic development alongside social and environmental improvement.

This renewed sense of purpose has broadened the scope of research interests among our faculty and helped integrate our scholarly and societal contributions. In doing so, we’ve created an environment where collegiality, inclusivity and participation are key elements, as we work with our partners to collaborate on research, co-create knowledge, and co-produce impact in policy and practice.

Grand challenges

Our strategy prioritises actionable research that’s critical, challenging, theoretically informed and underpinned by intellectual curiosity. Within this context, we focus on five flagship grand challenges:

These grand challenges are complex. They cannot be addressed in isolation or viewed through a single disciplinary lens. So, we’ve adapted our existing structures to facilitate collaborative research, the coproduction of impact, and the co-creation of knowledge.

We support faculty to develop discipline-specific expertise and insights, while also engaging in collaborative research as members of multidisciplinary communities, centres, groups and units.

We’ve also made strategic engagement appointments within the School and regularly host faculty networking opportunities with our community of partners and collaborators. These include:

Taken together, these initiatives support and guide our strategy and decision-making, so that we can maintain and extend our research culture, address grand challenges and deliver economic and social impact for the communities of Wales and the world.