A new partnership between a leading research institute and one of Australia’s top universities aims to improve the profitability and sustainable success of the nation's businesses.

Globally renowned University of Melbourne has partnered with the respected Ruthven Institute amid mounting concerns over corporate Australia’s longstanding performance problems, and a shared belief change can only occur through new and innovative approaches to business practice and teaching. 

The Ruthven Institute is chaired by Mr Phil Ruthven, who is the founder of IBISWorld, the world’s largest international online market and industry database. Explaining the imperative of the new partnership, Mr Ruthven said, “Despite fewer recessions, an explosion in the number of business conferences and more than a million new Commerce and MBA graduates, the profitability of Australian businesses hasn’t improved in four decades.”

Mr Ruthven said only 1 in 8 of Australia’s 2,000 largest corporations achieve world best practice returns of 22%, instead struggling to achieve an average 7% return, despite accounting for over 40% of the nation’s revenue.

“Too many Australian business leaders still rely on intuition rather than evidence,” said Mr Ruthven. “The objective of the Ruthven Institute’s alliance with The University of Melbourne is therefore to continually research, report on and update the factors contributing to world best-practice profitability and success; and to help local businesses, both big and small, to achieve these goals for themselves,” he added.

The Ruthven Institute analyses corporate data spanning 45 years to recommend better business strategies to help deliver world-leading best practice and performance. The alliance with The University of Melbourne will focus on strengthening research to better inform managers and train the next generation of undergraduate and post-graduate business students.

Central to the partnership, the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Workplace Leadership - a leading management educator and global research leader - will establish a new Research Hub focused on corporate strategic leadership.

According to Dr. André Sammartino, Associate Professor in the Department of Management & Marketing at the University of Melbourne, the Hub will support teaching across the business disciplines and will also become an authority on the effectiveness of business management teaching – essential in today’s globally competitive business environment.
 
“The case for evidence-based decision-making rests on the evidence itself, and with so many Australian businesses underperforming, now is the time to ask why and do something about it,” Dr Sammartino said.
 
“As the Ruthven Institute data shows, Australian firms are batting well below the level expected. We view much of this as reflective of a clear unwillingness to learn from history or step outside some very narrow conceptualisations of performance drivers. Continuing to hope we can survive in a more and more competitive region over the coming decades without changing our practices is naïve and misguided.
 
“By observing and scrutinising the key relationships between conditions, choices and performance, Australian firms have the scope to genuinely drive Australia’s growth. Together with the Ruthven Institute, we hope to position evidence-based decision making as business as usual,” he added.

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