A CIMA Grant to Gaia Melloni and Ariela Caglio

THE CHARTERED INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTANTS WILL FUND A RESEARCH PROJECT ON INTEGRATED REPORTING AND INTEGRATED THINKING

Bocconi Department of Accounting’s Gaia Melloni (as principal researcher) and Ariela Caglio (as supervisor) have obtained a 5,000 GBP, 12-month grant from the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) for their research project Practicing Integrated Thinking and Reporting – Evidence from executives’ incentives and remuneration.
 
"We are very happy for this grant as CIMA is the largest management accounting body in the world and therefore its grants are particularly prestigious: CIMA-funded projects and researchers gain a lot of visibility at an international level", said the two scholars.
 
CIMA is a UK-based professional body that offers training and qualification in management accountancy and supports research in this area with specific grants. The award is the results of a competitive process. The research application has been peer reviewed by external academics and practitioners, who assess the rigor and relevance of all applications and recommend some of them to CIMA’s Research and Development Panel and General Charitable Trust for funding. If the project is short-listed, an interview with a panel of experts needs to be passed. CIMA’s General Charitable Trust makes the final decision on whether or not a research grant is awarded.
 
The objectives of the funded research are to understand if integrated reporting (IR) is supporting integrated thinking (IT) by favoring the integration of long term and/or non-financial objectives in executives’ incentives and remunerations; assess if IR and IT bring about superior firms’ “integrated” performance (e.g. financial, social, environmental); explore if IR and IT lead firms to be more transparent on executives’ incentives and remuneration in their reports.
 
The International Integrated Reporting Council thus defines integrated reporting: “IR is a concise communication about how an organization’s strategy, governance, performance and prospects lead to the creation of value over the short, medium and long term. IR is considered an innovation in corporate reporting as it represents a single report, primarily for capital providers, that focuses on the ability of an organization to create value in the short, medium and long term by mean of its capitals (financial, human, intellectual, social, manufactured, natural)”.

by Fabio Todesco