Successful inaugural meeting for the MIA project

In a novel approach, the digital project meeting gathered more than 25 researchers, practitioners and master students from six different countries in an online conference room through Zoom. A truly global research consortium, the MIA-project is made up of leading supply chain management, public health and humanitarian operations experts from BI Norwegian Business School, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, INSEAD Business School, Lancaster University, Rotterdam School of Management, Jimma University, Institute of Health and St.Paul's Hospital Millennium Medical Colleges.

Screenshot of the digital meeting in operation.

In the inaugural project meeting, representatives of the consortium discussed the way forward for both the major project MIA as well as the smaller COVID project, which was recently granted funding from the Norwegian Research Council’s GLOBVAC program.

Project leader and professor of Logistics at BI, Marianne Jahre led the meeting from a classroom at BI Nydalen, Oslo. The digital meeting, originally planned for a physical meet-up at BI Nydalen, was compressed into an intensive agenda, for a digital format. The meeting started with a quick round of introductions, before Dr. Jahre presented the project project goals and objectives. Lead researchers Dr. Kim van Oorschort, Assistant Professor Harwin de Vries and Dr. Kostas Selviaridis subsequently presented the status of work so far, in their respective fields.

Illustration of the agenda for the day

By the end of the meeting, the participants split up into different breakout-rooms in Zoom and discussed topics such as which stakeholders the project ought to reach out to, what questions needed answering, as well as the data needs for answering them. Dr. Jahre concluded the meeting at noon with a conviction that the project is in good hands.