Business and Law in the time of COVID-19

OU-funded projects which have aimed to improve and support aspects of online learning and education during the pandemic are being showcased on Thursday 27 May.

The Business Schools Centre for Voluntary Sector Leadership (CVSL) is part of a research team, funded by the Lloyds Bank Foundation for England and Wales, which has launched The Value of Small in a Big Crisis report. 

Dr Jamie Woodcock made several recommendations when he was invited to give oral evidence at the House of Lords Covid-19 Committee inquiry. 

Dr Hilary Collins, a Senior Lecturer in Corporate Programmes for Executive Education, has received £7,500 to assess the impact of the pandemic on Continuing Professional Development (CPD) requirements for organisational development in the UK.

This blog is written by Dr Francesca Calo, Lecturer in Management at The Open University Business School (OUBS). This blog was originally published on 2 February 2021 and was written for the OUBS Department of Public Leadership and Social Enterprise (PuLSE) blog.

The disruption caused by Covid-19 has had far reaching impacts and required all of us to adapt to life’s challenges under lockdown. University law clinics are no exception and law academics and clinic supervisors have had to act fast and think creatively to keep their clinical programmes running.

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine received regulatory approval for emergency use from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) on 3 December. This came only months after a team of researchers led by Professor Zhang Yongzhen in Wuhan in early January made the genome sequence of Covid-19 publicly available.

Social entrepreneur, MBA alumna and member of The Open University Business School’s Alumni Council Dr Zoe Lawson discusses how to build resilience during the pandemic. 

The current pandemic has forced a lot of people to change patterns of behaviour and how normal activities are approached and carried out. In normal circumstances, change in the legal system is often cumbersome and slow, often reactive, rather than progressive in nature.

Public procurement is a highly regulated government activity, governed by laws or circulars within a state. In the UK, the procurement of goods, works and services is regulated by The Public Contracts Regulations 2015 (PCR), with similar provision for utilities, concessions and defence procurement.