This month has seen SBS dean Professor Susan Hart visiting Bahrain to preside at graduation ceremonies, and will also be travelling in the Far East and Middle East for a partners' visit for which she was joined by Marianne Nimmo, MBA/Offshore Director of Operations.
Professor Hart was also teaching marketing management while overseas. Other academics teaching at our centres this month include Professor Alan Wilson (Marketing) who has been in the Far East teaching, Dr Jillian MacBryde was in the Far East while Tom Houghton (Management Science) spent October in Japan at our partner institution, Nagoya University of Commerce and Business. The cohort was a mix of Japanese and foreign exchange students from a wide range of countries and covered the economic, financial and policy aspects associated with delivering sustainable energy.
Professor Alan Wilson of the Marketing Department delivered a presentation on October 25 on Customer Experience Management to the Senior Leadership Team of STV (Scottish Television Group). The audience consisted of 25 senior managers from across the group.
PhD student, Andrew Clarke, has had an article published in Scottish Labour History. Andrew's article is entitled, "And the next thing, the chairs barricaded the door': The Lee Jeans factory occupation, trade unionism and gender in Scotland in the 1980s". in his first year of his PhD in history, he has secondary supervision from Human Resource Management.
Adam Wagner has been employed with Powderbeds.com since his graduation from Strathclyde Business School's Department of Marketing in 2010. As Marketing Manager he is part of a small team in Powderbeds.com, an Innovative online ski accommodation booking site that won the coveted best Retail/E-Commerce award at The Herald Scottish Digital Business Awards 2013.
Winter 13/14 will be their third season of operation and Edinburgh-based PowderBeds has firmly established itself as a leading online retailer of ski accommodation, with sales currently up 72% year on year. This success is particularly remarkable given the challenges experienced by the ski industry during this period. Now in their fifth year, these prestigious awards aim to recognise the success of businesses of all sizes in the area of digital technology and the internet. The Retail/E-Commerce award was presented to the organisation that best uses e-commerce to benefit the wider business and has a site which effectively converts visitors into purchasers. Key criteria included design, functionality, checkout process, user experience and after sales service.
Dr Matthew Alexander and Dr Kathy Hamilton, Department of Marketing, hosted an exhibition as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science. The exhibition, called "Adopt a Station: Celebrating Community Engagement," explored the role of community actors in the regeneration of their local environment. Adopt a Station is a partnership between First ScotRail and individuals or groups who "adopt" local railway stations. The exhibition was based on the outcomes of a 3 year ethnographic study and centred on themes such as aesthetics, heritage, tourism and place. The exhibition, held at Wemyss Bay station, was on show for 2 weeks in November and attracted members of the general public, and representatives from the railway industry and adoption groups.
In October, Professor George Wright (Strategy and Organisation) was invited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to nominate candidates for the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.
Professor Wright commented, "I am honoured by the request. Previous winners Daniel Kahneman and Alvin Roth published some of their research papers in the journal that I edit, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, and so I infer that the Academy are interested in nominations of candidates who have a behavioural emphasis in their research contributions".
The 4th seminar in an ESRC series on Consumer Vulnerability took place in the Insight Institute at the University of Strathclyde on November 15. The seminar series is hosted by Kathy Hamilton, Department of Marketing, University of Strathclyde, Susan Dunnett, University of Edinburgh and Maria Piacentini, University of Lancaster.
The focus of this seminar was "Social Exclusion and Vulnerability" and discussion focused on the extent to which individuals are served or excluded from the marketplace. The first presentation was delivered by Professor Carol Kaufman-Scarborough from Rutgers School of Business, New Jersey, and considered social exclusion from the perspective of consumers with disabilities. Dr Sally Hibbert, University of Nottingham then spoke about consumer roles, goals and resources in relation to the experience of vulnerable young people in transition to independent living. The third presenter was Dr Aliakbar Jafari, Department of Marketing, whose talk was entitled "Religion as Stigma in the Age of Militant Secularism." The final presentation was delivered by Gary Christie, Head of Policy & Communications at Scottish Refugee Council. Gary talked about the impact of the UK's asylum regime on refugee consumer interactions and consumption of public services. The next seminar in the series will take place on March 7 2014 and the focus will be on poverty. For further information please contact kathy.hamilton@strath.ac.uk
Tobias Pret, a full time research student at the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship, won the award for best paper in the Creative Industries Track at the Institute for Small Business and Enterprise Annual Conference.
Head of the Hunter Centre, Professor Eleanor Shaw, Dr Jillian Gordon (Hunter Centre) and Dr Juliette Wilson from Marketing attended while Tobi presented his first ever conference paper.
The title of Tobi's paper was: "Entrepreneurial Capital: exploring the perspectives of craft entrepreneurs".
A book co-edited by Professor Alec Morton (Department of Management Science) with Jeff Keisler and Ahti Salo has won the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society publication award for this year. INFORMS is the leading association for professionals in the fields of analytics, management science and operations research.
The book is entitled, "Advances in Portfolio Decision Analysis: Improved Methods for Resource Allocation" published by New York: Springer Science+Business Media.
This month also saw a book chapter of Professor Morton's gaining coverage in The Financial Times in an article headlined "NHS targets don't hurt patients".
Professor John Quigley, Department of Management Science, was successful in securing a further year's funding from the London Mathematical Society (LMS) to run a series of joint workshops with the Universities of Durham, Brunel and Salford on the theme of Mathematical Methods in Reliability. This is the third consecutive year the money has been awarded following the success of the previous workshops offered by this group. The department of Management Science hosted workshops on the theme of expert judgement, which drew a wide range of participants across SBS and the wider university as well as industrialists and academics from the UK, Europe and Asia.
Dr Viktor Dörfler (Management Science Department) gave two keynote talks over the last month. At the 11th European Conference on e-Learning (ECEL 2013), which took place at our partner institution the SKEMA Business School, in Sophia Antipolis, France, in a thought provoking presentation titled 'Passionate Learners: Lifelong Learning in a Flux' he discussed the future of e-learning. In the breaks the talk was followed by numerous discussions between passionate teachers.
A week later, at the 2nd conference of the Economics of Communication (EcoCom 2013), Berlin, Germany, Dr Dorfler gave a keynote talk titled 'Bridge: ICT for Connecting Knowledge and Knowing'. Starting from the twin-role of education and coaching in the development of competent business executives, Dr dorfler introduced his vision of a future Hybrid Learning Platform in which the e-coach, the e-mentor and the e-facilitator are supporting the knowledge increase of the next generation of business executives.