DrJeff Chamberlain

As stated on my bio page, my research serves to inform my teaching practice and centres squarely upon my triple helix and therefore my research themes span business strategy, processes and technologies and the ways in which these link together to deliver sought after enterprise outputs, outcomes and impacts.

Aside from a long held interest in technologies, and then an obsession with everything Internet and web, my research interests have been informed by some more formal projects too. A minor thesis titled 'E-Tax – A study of Australian Government ESD’ amplified my interest in the intersections of strategy, processes and technology and spawned development of my triple helix, highlighting some of the considerations that sit within it, for example, innovation diffusion, transaction cost, disintermediation, communication, transformational leadership, change, business process improvement and management, business case development, project management and policy formulation.

Seeking broader understanding I shifted my focus to the largest, and economically critical, business sector in Australia - the SMEs, and their involvement with the largest enterprise systems - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERPs), to explore the triple helix from that perspective. This research materialised as my PhD, titled, 'Vendor Consultant experiences developing ERP proposals for SMEs’, which examined ERP vendor-consultant (VC) techniques for developing enterprise system proposals for SMEs. This combined a strategic resource-based framework with a business process management perspective to analyse the VC tailoring process. I found that competing pressures lead vendor-consultants to downplay the strategic contribution of enterprise systems and instead, focus on generic business processes. This highlighted that SME owner/operators are somewhat at the mercy of VCs when it comes to acquiring strategically suitable enterprise systems from them. There were several reasons for this but it was a paucity of SME strategic awareness and the relationships of this to business processes and technologies that contributed heavily to this shortfall.

So, looking through this larger lens gave rise to the importance of knowledge acquisition and learning approaches in SMEs, especially pertaining to the elements of the triple helix and their interrelationships. This has lead to several questions that underpin my current research interests, for example:

• what skills and knowledge do SME owner/operators need to survive today?
• why do SME owner/operators need these skills and knowledge?
• how do SME owner/operators most efficiently and effectively learn new skills and knowledge?
• how can/do SME owner/operators acquire/understand knowledge about strategic planning and process management?
• how can/do SME owner/operators acquire/understand knowledge about emerging trends, including technologies?
• when is the most suitable time for SME owner/operators to acquire and understand these types of knowledge?
• what are the constraints to SME owner/operator skill and knowledge acquisition and understanding?
• how can such constraints be overcome?
• can the academy help to address any constraints and deliver new, useful skills and knowledge to SMEs?

With recent advances in technologies such as generative artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, block chain, mixed reality, advanced manufacturing, bio sensors, bots, geospatial technologies and many others, there has never been a greater imperative for enterprises, of all sizes, everywhere, to be prepared to foresee opportunities to embrace modern technologies, facilitating improved or new business processes, and in turn enabling continuous improvement, strengthened competitive advantage and greater chances to achieve strategic intent. 

So to further explore this imperative, my most recent research project (2022-2024) looked into the outcomes, impacts and sustainability of a Global Advisory Program (GAP) for innovative and accelerating SMEs. The GAP was designed, developed and delivered by the Eastern Innovation Business Centre (EIBC) as a pilot project in 2020/21. My research uncovered 52 considerations for GAP operational optimisations and 12 strategic considerations, some of which are transformative. Many of these considerations directly related to the learning needs, approaches and perspectives of SME owner/operators (the clients in the GAP pilot) and interestingly, it was strategic planning (and its associated interrelations with business processes and technologies) that stood out as the most sought after SME skill/knowledge set. A full report titled, 'A Global Advisory Program for SMEs' was presented to the EIBC board in mid 2024.

Next steps are to take insights from the above sets of research, underpinned by the triple helix, and synthesise these into a survey for a larger sample of SMEs in Australia, to gain more clarity around the types of questions I pose above, and then present findings to local, state and federal government agencies, professional associations, and local business groups. If findings also suggest that the academy can assist by producing learning products, then this will also be pursued via suitable grants and possibly, industry partnerships. Of course, pragmatism will prevail!