Ema Talam – a new PhD student in the Business School

Ema Talam has recently joined the Business School to start research for her PhD.  Her topic is “Evaluating the potential of public policy to jointly promote firms’ exporting and innovation”, supervised by Dr Mehtap Hisarciklilar-Riegler and Professor Geoff Pugh.

Ema completed her Bachelor’s degree in the field of management at the School of Economics and Business of University of Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and received the Golden Badge of the University of Sarajevo for her accomplishments.

Ema then completed her Master’s degree in Economics at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). Her Master’s thesis explored the link between (un)employment, income and ethnic tensions and was titled “The link between ethnic tensions and unemployment in multiethnic countries: The case of Bosnia and Herzegovina”.

At the beginning of 2018, Ema has received the Preseren Award of the Faculty of Economics of University of Ljubljana for her Master’s thesis. Ema has attended several other notable educational programmes, such as the International Summer School in Human Rights at University of Oslo (Norway) in 2014. So far, Ema has written and published two papers that covered two distinct topics: “Socialism and Marxian economics: An overview” and “The link between globalization and gender equality”.

Currently, Ema is surveying the literature. Generally exporting and innovation are treated as separate activities. Only a small portion of the literature recognises that the link between the two exists and explores the link between exporting and innovation (i.e. how exporting influences innovation and vice versa). Furthermore, public policies aimed at promoting exporting and innovation are directed towards just one of the activities. Numerous studies have evaluated the effects of such policies.

The research will examine the links between exporting and innovation. The research will explore how exporting and innovation affect firm performance, both when undertaken separately and jointly. Furthermore, it will analyse the impact of public policy support on exporting and innovation activities.

Finally, based on the all of the previously stated, the research will examine the implications of findings for policy and institutional design. The focus of this examination will be to explore whether programmes for firms aimed at supporting exporting and/or innovation activities should be designed and implemented jointly or separately.

Ema is on linkedin here

or email her on t028882h@student.staffs.ac.uk.