Dr. Lea Meyer

As a specialist in performance and public management, Dr. Meyer focuses on the influence of regulation on an organization’s strategic choices and performance orientation. Her key area of interest is facilitating the process through which organizations can orient performance in relation to the regulatory environment.

Through her consultancy, Polaris - strategic foresight, Dr. Meyer serves organizations by helping them to establish their own performance dimensions and linking them to the regulatory environment. This creates a collaborative relationship between the organization and its regulator. Dr. Meyer has designed a model embracing six different performance dimensions, each composed of specific key performance indicators. By applying this model, Dr. Meyer assists in creating a better understanding of the different types of performance. Particularly in the gambling sector, an integrated, multidimensional performance model enhances an organization's transparency, strengthens its market positioning, and helps it distinguish itself from its competitors. An organization able to demonstrate a proactive, sophisticated performance – including social, environmental and legal performance, as well as financial and operational performance – wins a clear advantage over its competitors. Further, those organizations that are able to show that they both hold and measure values, such as social responsibility and transparency, will strengthen and safeguard their reputations.

Dr. Meyer also developed a unique tool, which encompasses ten different indicators and captures the regulatory intensity in which an organization operates. Her research identifies the benefit of a global approach to the analysis of the regulatory environment. She assists regulators in improving their understanding of these links and in addressing the impact of a regulation on the subject. Her work has also demonstrated that by developing a more sophisticated and proactive approach to performance, organizations gain a more meaningful and collaborative interaction with regulators and other industry actors.

Dr. Meyer obtained her PhD in Public Management from the University of Lausanne (Swiss Graduate School of Public Administration IDHEAP) in 2013. At IDHEAP, she was a key researcher in a lottery-funded project that focused on gambling regulation. In 2013, Dr. Meyer was a visiting scholar at Colombia University’s School of International and Public Affairs in New York City. She further holds a Master’s Degree in International Relations from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Dr. Meyer lectures at the University of Lucerne in Switzerland and is currently project manager conducting evaluations for the Swiss parliamentary overview committee, where her main areas of focus are the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense, and the Ministry of Economics. She is currently involved in a study on the Swiss federal council’s participation in economic sanctions.

Dr. Meyer has made a series of academic contributions, the most recent being the book “The influence of the regulatory environment on organizational performance – the example of the sports betting and lottery sectors”, published by Haupt in 2015.