BUBT Research Centre (BRC)

Prof. Santi Narayan Ghosh
Director, BUBT Research Centre

Since its beginning in 2003, Bangladesh University of Business & Technology (BUBT) has been giving enough emphasis on undertaking research projects by the members of the teaching staff and also publication of research based articles. At the same time, BUBT started publishing its journal to create an opportunity for teachers to publish the abstracts of their research works. Even young teachers are not promoted to higher positions without any publications. Results of all these policies were not at all satisfactory.  In a situation like this, the university administration specially, Prof. (Dr.) Shafique Ahmed Siddique, the chairman of BUBT Trustee Board, the Vice Chancellor, Professor Md. Abu Saleh and Mr. Sarwar Kamal, member of BUBT Trustee Board thought that faculty members are not going to be involved in research, because young teachers do not have proper training in research methodology. On the basis of this assumption, university authority decided to create an opportunity for young faculty members to have intensive training in applied research methodology. With this purpose in view, BUBT in September, 2013 decided to establish BUBT Research Centre and also appointed Professor Santi Narayan Ghosh, a retired professor of Accounting as full time professor of Accounting and Finance. As Prof. Ghosh had the experience of more than 45 years of teaching accounting and finance in the Department of Accounting, Dhaka University; experience of more than 35 years of teaching cost accounting, management accounting and financial management in the Institute of Chartered accountants of Bangladesh, 3 years experience of working as the director of the Bureau of Business Research, Faculty of Business Studies, University of Dhaka and also 3 years experience of acting as the Chairman of the Department of Accounting, Dhaka University, the University authority took the decision to appoint him as the Director of the newly created BUBT Research Centre. Prof. Ghosh has wide experience in undertaking research projects, management consultancy works and supervised successfully several Ph. D. students. Moreover, he has the experience of writing interpretation of IASs and ISAs for the ICAB as a consultant appointed by the World Bank. He also worked as a member of the Consultant Team of the Emerging Market Group to design the Bangladesh Financial Reporting Council.

BUBT Research Centre started its activities phase by phase. In the first phase it started to organize training on research methodology with the title “Intensive Training Program on Applied Research Methodology” (ITPARM). It was planned to accommodate 25 young teachers in a program and there would be two programs in an academic year. Each training program would be administered by one managing committee consisting of all deans and department chairmen. Dean of Business Faculty and the Director of BUBT Research Centre would work as the Chairman and Secretary of the managing committee respectively.

Each training program will be worth of at least nine semester credit hours i.e. three full semester courses. This program will include issues like, (i) Knowledge and its creation; (ii) Research and its paradigms; (iii) Research Methods; (iv) Qualitative and Quantitative methods; (v) Data Collection and Data Editing; (vi) Data Processing; (vii) Hypotheses Development and their Testing; (viii) Use of SPSS, STATA, & AMOS; (ix) Econometrics and Regression Analysis; (x) Research Problem Identification; (xi) Research Proposal Writing; (xii) Style of Citation; (xiii) Report Writing and (xiv) Replication Studies. Conducting replication studies is the most important feature of this intensive training program. It is assumed that most of our colleagues do not find any research problem to undertake a research work. So it will be easy to select one completed research work done in any foreign country or select published article to replicate that study in Bangladesh. For our training, the management selects articles published in mostly in US and Australian journals for replication in Bangladesh. Here the selected participants are to write the proposals, defend the proposals, develop the research instruments, collect data, process data by using SPSS / STATA, test hypotheses and write reports and defend the reports.