Gallupe named winner of Research Excellence Award

“I am motivated by a quest for knowledge; for finding out things we didn’t know before”

2000-10-16 - While working on his PhD in the 1980s, Professor Brent Gallupe and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota created a stream of research in computer-based support for organizational groups and teams that has continued to grow, spawning journals and related research areas, such as knowledge management systems. Today, Gallupe is known around the world as an expert in the use of technology support for teams and organizations as a whole, and as the author of dozens of research papers, articles and presentations. It is this commitment to research that has earned Gallupe Queen’s School of Business’ 2000 Award for Research Excellence.

“I am motivated by a quest for knowledge; for finding out things we didn’t know before,” says Gallupe. “Universities distinguish themselves from other educational institutions by being creators of knowledge, through basic and applied research. We’re not just knowledge disseminators, we’re creators.”

In 1987, Gallupe applied his quest for knowledge and founded the Queen’s Executive Decision Centre and Canada’s first electronic group-decision support laboratory. The Centre is now a self-funding organization, supporting many public and private sector organizations in Kingston and across North America as they generate fundraising ideas, formulate marketing plans, or develop e-commerce strategies.

In addition to his research into group support technologies, Gallupe is also Co-Chair of the School of Business’s E-Commerce Research Program. “We have a number of researchers in the School conducting high quality e-commerce research. My role is to help co-ordinate that research and assist in acquiring resources needed to conduct the research.”

Gallupe believes that research is an important component of university teaching. This term, he is applying research results from a study conducted this summer by one of his masters’ students to the database course he is teaching to upper year Commerce students.

“The research looked at technology factors affecting e-loyalty,” says Gallupe. “We looked at things like, what brings people back to a particular web site. In the database course, we are able to point to a number of technological factors. For example, the ability to send automatic feedback to a user comes from data in a database, or the tailoring of buying suggestions comes from a database of user preferences.”

Conducting research takes time, something that Gallupe believes is recognized by the administration at Queen’s.

“Teaching is relatively structured and mostly driven by deadlines, but research is typically unstructured and inherently demands more flexibility in terms of time,” says Gallupe. “Queen’s has provided me with the resources and the time to be able to do quality research.”

Gallupe’s reputation for being on the forefront of information technology has earned him frequent invitations to lecture around the world, and for the past ten years he has had an on-going visiting professorship at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand.