Professor Alan Wilson of the Marketing Department has been selected as a member of the Business to Business Superbrands Expert Council.
The Expert Council is composed of a small group of senior marketing professionals who are asked to rate Business to Business brands on quality, reliability and distinction. The top scoring brands go through to a second stage where votes are cast by 2000 individual business professionals to create an annual league table of the leading Business to Business Superbrands.
Dr John Ferguson, Accounting and Finance Department, is part of an organising team for a workshop that aims to promote cross-disciplinary collaborations both within Strathclyde University as well as between the University and the local community.
The workshop – Strathclyde Solutions Exchange – is a week-long interdisciplinary workshop, with the idea being that Strathclyde researchers from Strathclyde Business School and the university's other three faculties, will work collaboratively with each other to address problems presented by local organisations, charities and SMES. The 'problems' to be discussed are still being shortlisted, but will cover such areas as mental health, wellbeing, infectious disease, transport and marine sciences.
Based at Strathclyde, the workshop will take place during the week of September 12-16. More info is here.
Professor Tom Baum (Department of Human Resource Management) was invited to deliver a keynote address, entitled 'A complacent mediocrity. Has the tourism industry let higher education off the hook?' to the Tourism Education Futures Institute's (TEFI) Global Congress in Philadelphia. His theme was a critique of the 120 years in which tourism education, in one form or another, has failed to deliver the leadership capacity which the sector urgently requires at an international level.
Professor Baum argued that there has been a tacit acceptance of mediocrity by both employers and education in the programmes offered worldwide. He used the recent exciting changes in Strathclyde Business School as a case study of the direction which professional education in general, including tourism, can usefully take.
Professor Phil Taylor of the Department of Human Resource Management was an expert panellist at the European Outsourcing Association Conference in Madrid on 20-21 June. The theme of Professor Taylor's session was 'The Local vs Global - the Sourcing Dilemma'.
Emeritus Professor Roger Sandilands (Economics) has recently completed a commission from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Manila to write a background paper on housing finance and urbanisation in developing countries, with special reference to Colombia and Singapore where he has lived and worked for four years and six years respectively.
The commission is part of a wider ADB project to evaluate a massive new 5-year social housing programme being launched by the Chinese government to address the continuing migration of millions of relatively poor farmers to China's burgeoning cities. This rural-urban migration is a universal trend but one that has still a long way to go in China where about 50 per cent of the population still live, often in close to bare subsistence conditions.
The SMAAS (Strathclyde MBA Alumni Association Switzerland) organised its 3rd SMAAS Barbeque Event on the shores of Lake Zurich on July 7. The informal event was open to Strathclyde alumni and current Strathclyde MBA students as well as their guests. The event took place at the Rowing Club of Zurich and 52 alumni, students and guests were present to enjoy the evening, despite the appearance of a thunderstorm.
Professor Lesley Walls of the Department of Management Science gave a plenary talk at the leading international conference, Mathematical Methods on Reliability, which was held in Beijing on June 20-23.
Professor Stan Paliwoda (Department of Marketing) has been appointed to the Board of Directors of the Korean Academy of Marketing Science. He is also to be Chair of the 'Global Marketing and Web 2.0' Track of the Global Marketing Conference which will be held in Seoul, July 19-22, 2012. This event is being co-hosted by the Korean Academy of Marketing Science; Japan Society of Marketing and Distribution; European Marketing Academy; International Textiles and Apparel Association; and the Australian & New Zealand Marketing Academy. Full details are available on the website of the Korean Academy of Marketing Science.