A joint research project between CASS Business School and AIRMIC will help to close the gap between risk management theory and practice by identifying “risk events” and drawing lessons from them for risk managers and their companies. The initial results will be revealed at the AIRMIC annual conference in June.
The first stage of the research, funded by some of AIRMIC’s sponsors, is a survey of members to identify and classify such risk events for further study. These are incidents which are sufficiently important that they are likely to attract public attention and have a potential impact on the company’s reputation and even its balance sheet, such as natural disasters, severe fires, loss of life, a major product recall or a big strike.
There will be two further stages in 2011 and 2012, subject to funding. The first is to find examples of such risk events that have occurred between 2000 and 2006 and are in the public domain and look at their impact, for example on market capitalisation.
The final stage will be to go deeper into the case studies to draw out the risk management lessons from the events to see what strategies were the most effective in mitigating the consequences for the company.
