| July 2007 | View back issues |
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| July 2007 | ||
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Here is the latest instalment of news from around Strathclyde Business School. If you have any news for the August issue, then please email Audrey@gsb.strath.ac.uk. Repeat order for executive education 
Dr Jonathan Levie of the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship has won a repeat $70,000 order for executive education from the University of Kentucky.
In 2004, together with Sharon Ballard of Enable Ventures Inc., he won an order to train 80 entrepreneurial coaches in the Kentucky Entrepreneurial Coaches Institute (KECI), an initiative of the Kentucky Agricultural Extension Service, in the following two years.Since then, hundreds of entrepreneurs have been coached by graduates of KECI. In February this year an independent assessors report concluded that the training was ‘excellent’, resulting in State funding to extend the Institute’s Dr Levie work from North–Eastern Kentucky to South–Central Kentucky and a repeat order for the Hunter Centre and Enable Ventures. Back to top Babson entrepreneurship honour Dr Jonathan Levie of the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship was honoured in June at the Babson Entrepreneurship Research Conference with an award ‘for outstanding leadership as co–director of the 2004 Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference’. Jonathan commented, "Three years on, I’m still approached by people telling me how much they enjoyed the ‘Strathclyde conference’. Credit should really go to Jillian Gordon for her thoroughly professional management of the operations on the conference." Back to top Strathclyde Supernovas 
A competition to find the business stars of the future is being run by the university’s entrepreneurial network, essential. Top prizes for the Strathclyde Supernovas include an all expenses paid strategy course at the prestigious MIT Sloan Management School in Massachusetts, USA.The competition is open to Strathclyde staff, students, and alumni with businesses less than five years old. Fiona Ireland, essential project coordinator, said, "We’re looking to find some of the brightest business stars of the future. Our judging panel includes some of the university’s successful entrepreneurial graduates who will be looking for individuals with exceptional ideas and outstanding businesses. "The essential team exists to help unlock entrepreneurial potential. All entrants will have the opportunity to find out more about our support and networking events, as well as the chance to win some fantastic prizes." In addition to the ‘Brightest Young Business’ there is also a ‘Dazzling New Product Idea’ category which hopes to unearth the next Dyson or iPod, with a first prize of £5000 product development support. As well as first and second prizes for each category, the competition will reward applicants who demonstrate particular consideration of, and commitment to, environmental issues. Winners of the Greenest New Product and Brightest Young Business in the Environmental Sector will enjoy a trip to Munich with tickets to attend the IFAT Conference – the international trade fair for the environmental sector. The deadline is August 24 – find out more at www.strath.ac.uk/strathclydesupernovas Back to top Deloitte and the Management Development Programme SBS first year students, David McEntee, Karayn Chisholm, Craig Turner, Siobhan Rooney and Graeme McGowan, were awarded first prize of £300 sponsored by Deloitte for their holiday project Go2C Japan. Working in their MDP teams, all 570 students were required to set up their own organisation, develop a holiday idea and undertake financial projections. The best three teams presented their ideas to Deloitte personnel in their Glasgow city centre boardroom. MDP (www.strathmdp.com) develops students’ IT and numeracy skills, presentation skills, team working, project management and skills for employability. 
Barry Fitzsimmons, manager, Deloitte, (left) with the prizewinners
Back to top Hunter Centre graduate wins Ernst & Young award Erwan Normand, a graduate of the Hunter Centre’s Postgraduate Technology Entrepreneurship Programme in 2001, has won the Science and Technology Entrepreneur of the Year award at the Ernst & Young Scotland Entrepreneur of the Year Awards 2007. In 2001, Erwan was a first year physics PhD student; now he is chief scientific officer of Cascade Technologies, the company he founded in 2003. Erwan shared the award with management team members Richard Cooper and Iain Howieson. Dr Jonathan Levie of the Hunter Centre said, "When Erwan first described his business idea to us back in 2001, Lesley Hetherington and I exchanged glances – we both recognised the potential straight away. Since then, Erwan’s tenacity and skill, coupled with the excellent support fom Research and Enterprise and the Strathclyde University Incubator, has created a technology–based business of which we can be rightly proud." Back to top Head of Department named 
Professor Chris Huxham has been named as Head of the Department of Management as of October.Chris has worked at the Graduate School of Business, now Department of Management, since 1996 and was with the Department of Management Science prior to that. She came to Strathclyde from the University of Aston Management Centre. Chris is also a Senior Fellow of the Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM). Chris Huxham Back to top Visiting professor at Beijing 
Professor Roger Sandilands of Economics spent six weeks as a visiting professor at the Advanced Centre for Economic Studies (ACES) at Renmin University in Beijing during May and June. ACES was set up in collaboration with Monash University in Melbourne to advance the ideas of the Chinese economist Xioakai Yang who was nominated for a Nobel prize just before his untimely death in 2004.Though Renmin University prides itself as the first university to have been set up by the Chinese Communist Party, the main focus of ACES is to advance the ideas of Adam Smith on the nature and potential benefits of free markets and personal liberty. Xioakai Yang was a prominent exponent of R. Sandilands & ex-student Shen Qi the ideas of Adam Smith and of the great American economist Allyn Young. Roger is an authority on Allyn Young and this led to his being invited to give 24 hours of lectures and seminars on Young’s (and Yang’s) ideas on increasing returns and endogenous growth theory to students in Renmin University’s Programme as well as some of their top undergraduates. Roger also took advantage of his visit to China to make a side trip to Tokyo. There he gave a seminar on Allyn Young at Sophia University where two years ago he spent a semester as a visiting professor. Back to top Strathclyde Hellenic Alumni Association inaugural event The Hellenic branch of Strathclyde University’s Alumni Association held its first ever event on July 5. More than 250 people gathered for the reunion party organised by Strathclyde’s Greek partner, International Management Studies (IMS). The event was attended by former students of Strathclyde, some of whom graduated in Scotland as early as 1965, and some who have graduated in Greece during the 10 years–plus that Strathclyde has had a presence in the country. Current students, professors and friends of the University also attended. Guest of honour was Professor George Avlonitis, head of Athens University’s marketing department and recently–elected President of the European Marketing Association. As a graduate of Strathclyde University, Professor Avlonitis will become an honorary member of the Alumni Association. The event provided the opportunity for former students to get back in touch with classmates and for lost friendships to be rekindled. The aim of the Association is to provide networking opportunities aimed at strengthening connections and forging professional and social bonds for those with shared educational and professional experience. More events are planned in the near future and the Association’s first General Assembly and elections will take place during October. The provisional Association committee comprises Afroditi Feredinou, George Georgopolous, Michael Stamboulides and John Kostaras. Panayiotis Milopoulos (IMS Graduate, MSc Finance) organised the whole evening with the venue’s management and arranged drinks sponsorship from Diageo. For further information on the association, contact erika.kenyon@imstudies.gr 
Hellenic Alumni Association inaugural event
Back to top Management Science conference The Department of Management Science hosted the 5th International Conference on Mathematical Methods in Reliability from July 1–4. The conference brought together almost 200 researchers specialising in operational research, statistics, computer science and engineering modeling. Keynote talks included one by Professor Jim MacDonald of Strathclyde on ‘New reliability assessment challenges in advanced engineering systems’. Vijay Nair of Michigan spoke on ‘Reliability Inference and Predictive Maintenance with Degradation Data’, while Alex Whitmore of McGill,Montreal, spoke on ‘Disaster Risk Management: An Application of Reliability Principles’ and Min Xie (NUS, Singapore) gave a talk on ‘Statistical process control approaches for reliability and maintenance modelling’. The meeting was sponsored by ScottishPower who are involved in a number of different research projects at Strathclyde including one in Management Science on analysing reliability data. ScottishPower representative Jim Gaw was present to chair some of the sessions. Almost 200 participants from 32 different countries attended the conference, including many from the Far East and the US. They were given a true Scottish welcome at the conference dinner held at Glasgow’s Peoples Palace. A piper welcomed them in and gave a rendition of Burns’ Address to a Haggis. Those attending the conference praised the organisation of the event in which research students joined with research staff and lecturers to make a highly efficient team. 
Conference speaker Vijay Nair
Back to top Bridging the Gap 
The EPSRC–funded Bridging the Gap programme, led by Professor Tim Bedford of Management Science, has now started operations. Its objective is to stimulate multidisciplinary collaborations and the first initiatives in this direction have been the University Research Day and a Ross Priory workshop.The first ever Research Day was held on June 6 and a team of Strathclyde Business School academics entered the Dragons Den–style event to compete for the EPSRC funding. The team comprised Dr Calvin Burns (Department of Human Resource Management), Dr George Burt (Department of Management), Dr Andrea Coulson (Department of Accounting and Finance) and Dr John Quigley (Department of Management Science). They were successful in their attempt to ‘slay’ the dragons and won £2000 to explore the future of trading social risk and 
responsibility. Their research, which takes a truly multi–disciplinary perspective on the study of risk, promises to expand the frontiers of risk research. They plan to conduct a series of scenario planning workshops, initially with other Strathclyde academics interested in the area of risk. The team will then engage with the business community to develop tactical decision making tools for social risk problems.The Ross Priory event was themed to look at decision making in space systems and brought together researchers mainly from the departments of Management Science and Computer Science. Ross Priory Back to top SUPA Entrepreneurs 
In May, Lesley Hetherington and Dr Jonathan Levie of the Hunter Centre taught a two–day programme of personal and professional development skills with an entrepreneurial flavour to second year physics PhD students from six universities throughout Scotland, as part of the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance Graduate School programme.
Back to top Keynote speeches 
Professor Tim Bedford from the department of Management Science was a keynote speaker at the Dutch Society for Risk and Reliability Analysis 15th Anniversary Symposium. Speaking on ‘Belief and disbelief in risk analysis’ his wide–ranging talk managed to link risk analysis into postmodernism, politics and even the web’s ‘Second Life’, a 3–D virtual world where players use digital replicas of themselves. He was also invited speaker at the conference on Convergence in Risk Modelling at the International Center for Decision and Risk Analysis in Dallas in May.Tim Bedford Back to top Professor 'Down Under' 
Professor Chris Huxham of the Department of Management was keynote speaker at the ANZSOG (Australia and New Zealand School of Government) conference in Canberra on June 29. The ‘Managing to Collaborate’ conference audience was principally made up of around 350 senior civil servants from Australia and New Zealand. Chris’s presentation, which was based upon Strathclyde research about managing collaboration across organisations, complemented the other keynote speeches which in the main involved senior civil servants talking about their experiences of collaboration.While ‘Down Under’, Chris was also invited to lead a seminar in a special series for the Department of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet and carried out a research seminar at Australian National University (ANU). Back to top Shanghai Alumni Association The Strathclyde MBA Alumni Network in Shanghai is continuing to meet monthly on the first Saturday of every month, with its third meeting to take place on August 4. Currently working on his final project, student Tobias Graf decided an alumni network would be a good idea, and the network is open not just to MBA alumni but to all Strathclyde graduates. Tobias was offered a job in Beijing just after he began his plans to launch the network and moved to Beijing, but his dedication to the success of the alumni network is shown in that he travels back for the meetings in Shanghai each month. Anyone interested in joining can contact Tobias at strath.alumni@googlemail.com Back to top Carnegie Trust award 
Dr Ian Cunningham, senior lecturer in the department of Human Resource Management, has been awarded £2,000 by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland to undertake collaborative research with Donna Baines from McMaster’s University, Canada, on the theme of violence against staff in the Social Care sector.Dr Ian Cunningham Back to top SCER news 
During the past few months the Scottish Centre for Employment Research (SCER) has been involved with two high–profile report launches.SCER conducted case study research into the effect of the Union Learning Fund and workplace union learning representatives on workplace learning and trade union organisation. The research was commissioned by Unionlearn, the learning and skills arm of the TUC. Authored by Professor Paul Thompson and Professor Chris Warhurst of the department of HRM, and Dr Tricia Findlay from Edinburgh University, the report was launched at Congress House in London in March. A second report was commissioned by the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) to provide research into the role, status, pay and working conditions of classroom assistants to assess whether this predominantly female group was receiving equitable pay for their work. The investigation was brought under the Sex Discrimination Act. The research itself was multi–contract and was conducted over two years, including two nationally representative surveys covering thousands of respondents. The final report – Valuable Assets; A General Formal Investigation of the Role and Status of Classroom Assistants in Scottish Schools – was publicly launched by the EOC in Edinburgh in May, attracting national attention in both press and television news. SCER is leading a project within the Department of HRM into the expectations and experiences of MSc in HRM students in terms of their education at the University of Strathclyde and their subsequent employment as HR professionals. The study is in its second year, following students through their education and into work, and has attracted interest from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), the professional body for HR professionals. SCER researcher Scott Hurrell was interviewed about the project for People Management magazine, the CIPD’s professional publication. 
L-R: Kay Gilbert, Dr Dennis Nickson, Laura Hutchinson (EOC),Muriel Robinson (EOC), Professor Chris Warhurst Back to top New administrator for Swiss MBA partner A new administrator to deal with the MBA programme and students in Switzerland has been appointed. Brigitte Bruder starts in August, bringing 12 years experience as a programme administrator at the Zurcher Hochschule Winterthur with her. Back to top New partnership for Strathclyde MBA in Bahrain Strathclyde Business School’s MBA programme in Bahrain is to be run in conjunction with a new partner after more than a decade of working in partnership with the British Council. Due to changing British Council priorities, SBS and the British Council mutually decided another partner would be better placed to progress the MBA. After considerable research the existing partners decided on the Royal University for Women (RUW), a new, private university. Professor Colin Eden, Director of the International Division, said, "This partnership only strengthens our commitment to Bahrain and the surrounding region." Back to top Special Libraries Association annual conference Christine Reid, manager of the Business Information Service (BIS), attended the Special Libraries Assocation annual conference in Denver, USA in June. The keynote speaker was Al Gore, former US Vice President, and Christine met him during the VIP reception. 
BIS Manager Christine Reid with former US Vice-President Al Gore
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