Dr Minette Bellingan is an Industrial Fellow with Industrial Resilience Research Group, Institute for Manufacturing, and CEO of a subsidiary of Coupang.com, the largest e-commerce company in Korea. Her research interests are action research, industrial sustainability, organisational design, behavioural change, business-model innovation and decision-making. Her global work experience has included general management, manufacturing and sourcing for retailers including Amazon.com, Metro GmbH and Tesco. Minette is extremely interested in the role client businesses can play in improving factory labour standards. Her ongoing research seeks to identify new ways for concerned businesses to work with remote factories to ensure they are socially responsible, fair, safe and healthy workplaces.

Minette’s academic career began in London with a BA (Hons) in Textile Design, Fine Art & Cultural Studies from Central Saint Martin’s. After working initially as a retail buyer, she undertook an MBA from the Open University’s Business School, and began to specialise in OEM and ODM sourcing from Asian factories. Having completed her Master’s degree at CISL she achieved a PhD in Engineering at IfM. She has worked in Europe and the USA as well as in Asia, and her more senior roles have involved managing relationships with factories, product sourcing, operations and quality and compliance. She has grown many businesses from conception and built multiple private label brands. For Coupang she set up and now manages the largest dry ice factory in Asia.

Her ongoing research focuses on investigating effective well-being interventions to supplement routine monitoring and audits. She is particularly interested in how labour standards can impact a factory's efficiency, product quality and production yields. Her longitudinal research in factories in China has led to academic publication including two articles in the International Journal of Production Management and an award-winning paper for the 2018 EurOMA Conference. Her post-doctoral research explores potential 'interventions’ to improve factories' social responsibility and labour standards and the well-being of their workers. She aims to continue to deepen her understanding of how industry and academia can work together toward solutions that move us into a sustainable future.

Publications

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