Kiwi XMAs and our PhD journey

Time really flies when we are having fun. Our second KIWI Xmas is now approaching fast. The family and the PhD have both been on a fast-lane lately. Sibren reached the finals with his Belmont Intermediate water-polo team; Edsard survived a set of daunting rugby matches & Aletta is busy working in Devonport Pharmacy. Guess they are all having great fun although Edsard decided to switch from rugby to sailing or to football. Which I can quite understand.

We are busily planning our first KIWI walkabout in the holiday season – Tauranga, Gisborne, Napier, Rotorua and Hobbiton with our Honda Honnepon. The boys and I have been sailing in the Hauraki Gulf in our Hokie-Pokie, our 40+ year trailer sailor. She’s a fair-weather Magnum 20 and the crew is a fair-weather crew. (So not exactly as on the famous picture). We will sail around Waihiki island during the first part of our Xmas break. To me the Hauraki seems like the best sailing water in the world. Beautiful islands all over, a blazing sun and water with the distinct colour of old Roman glass. Good water for swimming, snorkeling and fishing.

Teaching-wise has been quite busy as well. I lectured Asset & Facilities Management for 30-odd AUT postgrad students from the Master in Construction Management or Master in Engineering Project Management. Students said they very much enjoyed the classes and the interaction with Facilities Management practitioners. More or less in parallel I ran FMANZ master classes. Both the Built Asset & Facilities paper and the FMANZ master classes will continue to run in 2015. I really love the interaction and discussions in the class room – and always learn some new things myself. Moreover I met quite some nice people! (We feel less like a tourist now-a-days, but more like a Dutch Kiwi).

Our Dutch research on procurement within SMEs makes steady progress. Our IPSERA paper was ranked TOP 10 (see abstract) at the IPSERA 2014 conference. Unfortunately the paper was not accepted for publication in the Journal of Purchasing & Supply Management. The up-side is that we gained some valuable feedback which we use for the next phase of our Dutch case study research and the upcoming Delphi study, which have both been planned in 2015.

 My own PhD research has of course taken most of my time & efforts. In November I submitted my doctoral research proposal (PGR9 in good AUT jargon) to my supervisors which both signed the beast off. Hence I will present and defend my proposal on 28 January 2015. I guess I am on schedule but condensing an 80 page text back to 20 pages was quite some work. Nevertheless writing a shorter text sharpened the structure, and also sharpened my thoughts on research design and topic. The research title now is: Procurement of non-incremental sustainable technology innovations - the case of entrepreneurial firms supplying the New Zealand construction industry.

I will present this research proposal as a conceptual paper at the upcoming entrepreneurship ACERE conference (Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research Exchange) in Adelaide Australia.
For any European blog-readers: this is a 5-hour flight to a totally different country. Again palm trees, but then also roos and bears.

I hope to learn as much at the upcoming ACERE as I did at the past IPSERA conference, and meet lots of nice and interesting people. As I will return the 8^th of February, I will also bring some birthday gifts home for both Aletta and Edsard. They both have their birthday on that same day.

But first we will have our second KIWI Xmas. Without snow, slate, cold rain, slippery roads, and dark wet-windy evenings. To a certain extent we will miss that good old Dutch feeling. However, we hope to compensate that with a traditional KIWI XMAS beach pick-nick.

The Staal-family-downunder wishes you a good 2015!