Carolyn Deuchar

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Biography

Carolyn Deuchar (previously Carolyn Nodder) is a Senior Research Officer at NZTRI. She joined the Institute in 2005 after several years of working with NZTRI on a variety of publications and projects. In her role as a Senior Lecturer in the School of Information Systems and Computing at Unitec Institute of Technology, Carolyn tapped in to the valuable links and expertise offered to NZTRI’s broader membership. She attributes the support of the Institute as a critical element in her achievement of an A grade thesis and Honours in her Masters studies (Master of Computing). NZTRI offered Carolyn a ‘safe haven’ for her cross discipline interest in both tourism and technology – one she has now advanced to PhD level. Carolyn’s Masters Thesis investigated ICT adoption issues amongst tourism small and medium-sized enterprises in Waitakere and Rodney District, Auckland.

 

Carolyn’s work experience includes 12 years in the New Zealand Travel and Tourism industry, where she has gained a rich insight into the effective application of new technologies in the aviation, travel agency and tourism sectors. In addition to her research and consultancy activities, Carolyn has taught eCommerce, pedagogical strategies for the use of ICT and social impact of ICT courses at both undergraduate and post-graduate level. She is an experienced trainer and facilitator and has run workshops for business and community organisations. Carolyn has been a member of a number of commercial research and evaluation projects in New Zealand, Canada, and the South and Central Pacific (including those sponsored by the European Union and the United Nations Environment Program) and has developed and delivered training and workshop programmes for groups based in Vietnam, Chile, the Pacific and New Zealand.

 

Carolyn is also a PhD candidate.

PhD (working) title: Tourism SME network formation in New Zealand: the role of ICT

Small tourism enterprises (STE) lie at the heart of the New Zealand tourism industry and play a pivotal role in the economic development of many regions. There is increasing evidence that STE business performance can be significantly enhanced by the formation of networks, partnerships, alliances and clusters. Tourism policy is focusing increasingly on the development of ‘dense’ networks of STE as a tool to increase the performance of the tourism industry worldwide. Information and communication technologies (ICT) offer considerable potential to facilitate networking among small tourism firms. This PhD research will examine STE network formation in New Zealand, the processes that underlie it and how ICT facilitate and strengthen those processes. The thesis adopts regulation theory and the concept of flexible specialisation as tools to understand STE networks and the ways in which they facilitate regional economic growth. A mixed methods approach is proposed where data collected through a series of informal, semi-structured interviews; a national web-based survey; a review of secondary data; and a case study in Western Southland are used to evaluate STE network formation and the subsequent role of ICT.

Publications

Conference articles


2005
Nodder, C., Simon Milne, and John S. Hull. “Does ‘Weaving a Web’ Create a Cluster? A strategic approach to Web evaluation for clusters of small tourism businesses.” Paper published in proceedings of ENTER 2005. Innsbruck, Austria. (2005).

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