Grant Awards

Project Summaries for Publicly & Privately Funded Research and Grant Awards

Grant Awards, FY2022

In fiscal year 2022, the College of Business received $1.39 million in research funding from public and private sources, including the college's largest-ever grant, awarded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and through the OSU College of Agricultural Sciences’ Global Hemp Innovation Center.

Additional research projects range from creating international learning environments to large government grants to research into the international education environment to establishing with the IRS a program to support the community in tax preparation.

Global Hemp Innovation Center

Three College of Business centers for excellence are studying a comprehensive, sustainable business model for industrial hemp in their work on the $10 million OSU Global Hemp Innovation Center and U.S. Department of Agriculture project.

Wrapping up the first year into the five-year, $10 million project, the Center for Marketing and Consumer Insights, the Center for Supply Chain Management and the Center for Advancing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Business have been hitting benchmarks for their contributions to the industrial hemp research grant, respectively, comprehensive consumer and producer market research and financial modeling across products, a sustainable supply chain strategy and culturally inclusive guidelines for business relationships.

The goal is to build a roadmap for the emerging multibillion-dollar hemp industry, and find opportunities for regional businesses.

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Highlights

American Councils for International Education, $10,000
Dr. Violetta Gerasymenko, associate professor of entrepreneurship & strategy, has a grant with the American Councils for International Education's U.S.-Russia University Virtual Partner Program (UniVIP) in contributing to a network for U.S. and Russian universities to navigate the challenging global international education environment, share innovative methods for virtual exchanges, and advance strategic internationalization goals.


U.S. Army Research Institute, $58,828
Dr. Jay Hardy, associate professor of management, is conducting research for the Army Research Institute with a multi-year grant to develop theories on mulitple topics involving Learning in Formal and Informal Environments.


Mid-Valley STEM-CTE Hub, $4,500
InnovationX — OSU’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, is working with OSU partners to expand access to entrepreneurship to historically excluded students with funding provided by the Mid-Valley STEM-CTE Hub.


UCOB TeachEngineering, University of Colorado Boulder, $37,739
Dr. Rene Reitsma, professor of business information systems, is working on a multi-year project with the National Science Foundation and University of Colorado Boulder to enhance and improve searches and recommendations of TeachEngineering.org, a digital library of free K-12 engineering curriculum.

Grant Awards, FY2021

Oregon State University has a Carnegie R1 Research classification and is one of only two universities in the country with all four public designations – Land, Sea, Space, and Sun Grant. Year over year, the College of Business humbly contributes to the global prestige and significance of OSU funded research as part of the university's research and extension mission. College of Business funded grants support the research excellence and publishing outcomes of our faculty into the leading publications of their disciplines.

In the 2020-2021 fiscal year, the College of Business was active in multi-year research projects funded at a total of $1,062,364 — from public and private sources. The college allocated an additional $333,586 to support faculty research and publishing, for funded projects totaling $1,395,950.

Projects range from research on the demand for mental health services during the COVID-19 pandemic in multiple nations to word-of-mouth consumer recommendations and impact to summer business-learning camps for minority communities to large government grants to research the impact of curiosity in learning or to develop online k-12 engineering curricula.

Highlighted Projects

The role of curiosity in organizational life

Dr. Jay Hardy, associate professor of management, is conducting curiosity research for the Army Research Institute with a grant to develop a novel theory on the curiosity drive in organizational life. The study, "Learning in Formal and Informal Environments - Examining the Role of the Curiosity Drive as a Facilitator of Formal and Informal Learning and Adaptability during Newcomer Socialization," aims to help the Army better understand the structure, function, and expression of the curiosity drive. This is expected to aid in the creation of socialization interventions leveraging curiosity’s unique power to facilitate learning and adaptability in new recruits. ($200,000, duration: summer 2020 through fall 2022, with U.S. Army).

 

Learning Hub for Launch Academy and LSAMP

Dr. Michelle Marie, program manager for InnovationX — OSU’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, is working in partnership with the OSU Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program to expand access to entrepreneurship to historically excluded students with funding provided by the Mid-Valley STEM-CTE Hub. By building relationships with first-year students active in LSAMP, Marie aims to establish an ongoing pipeline of student access to our Launch Academy student business incubator. LSAMP is dedicated to increasing the number of traditionally underrepresented students successfully completing STEM baccalaureate degree programs and currently comprises over 2,000 OSU students while Launch Academy consistently attracts cohorts that are about 40% women and 40% BIPOC students. ($4,500).

 

Free library of K-12 engineering curriculum

Dr. Rene Reitsma, professor of business information systems, is working with the National Science Foundation to enhance and improve searches and recommendations of TeachEngineering.org, a digital library of free K-12 engineering curriculum. Reitsma is working to design, develop and implement web-based visualization tools for rendering and navigating K-12 (science and engineering) educational standards and their alignment with K-12 curriculum collections. Past work on this project included the analysis of data collected from the user community such as comments and user stories and building networks of data relationships to significantly improve the user (e.g., K-12 teachers) experience, and support the growth of the collection. ($165,000, duration: winter 2020 through fall 2022, with University of Colorado Boulder).

 


College of Business Funded Research, FY2021

The college grants faculty research with the aim to advance scholarly publishing across our academic disciplines. These are our funded research projects in support of this goal.

 

Mental health worldwide under the COVID-19 pandemic

Dr. Jiyao Chen, associate professor of entrepreneurship and strategy, is conducting meta-analyses on the mental health of an adult general population, general and frontline healthcare workers, university students to analyze the prevalence rates of mental health symptoms across countries and regions under the COVID-19 pandemic. The research focuses on depression, anxiety, insomnia, and distress with the aim to provide evidence-based guides on the screening of potentially vulnerable segments of the population who are more likely to suffer mental health disorders during the pandemic so that scarce resources and time can be allocated to the people in need.

 

 

COVID-19 sensemaking and insights on decision-making 

Dr. Satoris Howes, professor of management, researched with government agencies including the U.S. Forest Service early in the COVID-19 pandemic (March 2020) to implement a continuous real-time communications system to support executive decision-making. Howes is using a grant to expand accessibility to the data collected from a total of 194 focus groups to promote the scholarly understanding of organizational complexities during the 2020 fire season and pandemic.

 

 

Using the next-gen of mobile apps while shopping 

Dr. Ryann Reynolds-McIlnay, assistant professor of merchandising management, is researching how use of mobile apps while shopping — and the changes to customer-technology interface which includes virtual reality and augmented reality — to examine the interaction between sounds and simulated touch of product. The project includes development of a shopping app that will give shoppers haptic feedback (e.g., vibrations and sounds) through a mobile device while interacting with augmented reality/virtual reality shopping apps.

 

 

Nature, entrepreneurial well-being, & entrepreneurial performance

Ph.D. student Scott Kozlak and Dr. Violetta Gerasymenko, associate professor of entrepreneurship and strategy, investigate the relationship between nature,entrepreneurial well-being, and entrepreneurial performance.  In particular, they are interested in understanding how exposure to natural areas “green space” affects entrepreneurial well-being and performance. The researchers plan to send out a multi-wave survey to a subsample of 500 family business owners/entrepreneurs who responded to a previous data inquiry from the OSU Center for Family Enterprise.

 

 

Loyal customers and word-of-mouth recommendations

Dr. Matthew Hall, assistant professor of marketing, is looking at data to determine how consumers respond when they find out that their recommendations (positive word-of-mouth) have not been followed by the recipient. He’ll look at what happens when brand supporters receive negative feedback from others in the form of unfollowed advice — e.g., their advice was unfollowed, and whether this leads these loyal customers to reduce their future support for the brand.

 

 

Does consumer bragging harm a brand?

Dr. Matthew Hall, assistant professor of marketing, has a second word-of-mouth research project investigating how consumers evaluate others’ motives for sharing content on social media, aiming to show that when consumers perceive others’ experiential sharing to be extrinsically motivated (i.e., attention-seeking, bragging, etc.), it decreases the perceived desirability of the shared experience. The aim is to consider whether firms can suffer adverse outcomes when their customers share positively about their experiences.

 

 

Measuring how people plan

Dr. Jason Stornelli and Dr. Colleen Bee are working to develop a scale that measures consumers’ propensity to plan. They’ll look at the factors that prompt individuals to be more or less likely to plan when they make their decisions about how to pursue goals in the course of everyday life (the intention-behavior gap). The insights could help researchers and companies to design interventions that make planning more likely and more effective in real contexts.

 

 

Retail displays: Maintaining customer service when shoppers interact 

Dr. Ryann Reynolds-McIlnay, assistant professor of merchandising management, is researching how customer interaction with retail displays impacts a frontline retail employee’s perceived ownership and territoriality of product displays and the subsequent display avoidance by shoppers. The goal is to assist retail managers in supporting their employees during customer service interactions when the employee is completing display recovery and merchandising tasks.

 

 

Social media: How media types promote information spread

Dr. Tim Kaskela, assistant professor of business analytics, is researching the impact of social media content, specifically how media types (image or video) moderate the effect of emotional and informative posts on information spread on social media by analyzing Twitter data from a mobile device company. The study will measure comments and shares of these emotional or informative posts.

 

 

The attention economy: Measuring when consumers crave attention

Dr. Matthew Hall, assistant professor of marketing, is researching how the attention consumers receive from their consumption behavior enhances the value derived from that consumption. The research aims to measure the value of human attention by demonstrating that the theoretical principles of the attention economy are relevant to consumer behavior, and by demonstrating an additional way that consumers derive value from their shared experiences — when sharing facilitates the receipt of attention.

 

 

Firearms and advertising during change

Dr. Aimee Huff and Dr. Michelle Barnhart, associate professors of marketing, are studying how firearms marketing has responded to national regulatory changes and socio-cultural events in the US. The project looks at consumer firearms advertising over the past two decades, and will identify how messaging has changed after major events.