Research may benefit NZ

By Tom Clarke

A new academic appointment at the Auckland Institute of Technology is expected to lead to research which will benefit Auckland and New Zealand.

Former Aucklander Simon Milne has been appointed an associate dean of research in AIT's faculty of commerce.

He also becomes professor of tourism and holds adjunct professorships in tourism at Victoria University in Wellington and at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Professor Milne will run a centre for business performance at AIT which will ensure that areas within the commerce faculty such as management, marketing, computer science and tourism, all start to generate more research. That research is expected to benefit New Zealand and Auckland economically.

His first project, which is already under way, is the creation of a Tourism Research Institute that will involve AIT, Auckland University and Victoria University.

Professor Milne says the institute will conduct research of value to the tourism industry, local communities and to other people who participate in tourism. It will also capitalise on a competitive advantage New Zealand has in graduate tourism education.

"We need to build on our global competitive advantage by ensuring that we aren't competing against each other as universities, but are cooperating between ourselves," he says.

"...We can bring together people in the research institutes and hopefully create a team that will not only generate really good research for the industry from an academic perspective, but which will also attract overseas students."

Professor Milne was responsible for establishing a tourism research group at McGill University. He says it was very successful in attracting graduate applications and in undertaking tourism research in many different parts of the world, including in Canada, Cuba and Russia.

He says the New Zealand institute will seek linkages with international institutions and he hopes it will also have international applicability.

Collaborative work has already started with the Washington-based Organisation of American States focusing on the link between information technology and tourism, and how small companies and communities can market themselves more effectively using the Internet.

Work is also under way with a South Island ski area and in the Golden Bay area to study how tourism can be improved, and with Maoridom in the Hokianga which was hit by flooding earlier this year. The aim is to create a Web site to market those communities.

Professor Milne believes there are real opportunities for small communities and businesses to form alliances and clusters and to use IT to effectively link into tourism markets.

He says the Tourism Research Institute will also concentrate on maximising the performance of tourism by creating a better understanding of the industry, the tourists that come here, and how information technology can improve performances and marketing.

Professor Milne is also interested in looking at improving the economic performance of tourism in the Auckland region.

Too often, tourism is about backsides on seats, he says, when there are many other issues to consider. These include how much economic benefit is being generated by tourism, maximising the linkages between tourism and the rest of the economy and ensuring that the jobs being created are skilled and secure.

Other issues include the environmental and cultural impacts of tourism, ensuring that tourism fosters and protects the environment and cultures it relies on, and that local communities have a role in determining what they want from tourism.

Professor Milne says these issues are important because tourism will not be a sustainable source of revenue and benefit unless it is planned and controlled in a way that ensures local people will support it.

Professor Milne did an undergraduate and masters in geography at Auckland University, and then completed a PhD in regional planning at Cambridge in 1989. He then joined McGill University in Canada and spent the next 11 years in Montreal before returning to New Zealand last year to become professor of tourism at Victoria.