Professor Alan Wilson of the Marketing Department took a group of the MBA25 participants to Milan for a Luxury Branding Elective in June. In addition to academic sessions on luxury branding, guest lectures were delivered by external speakers on Cartier, Patek Philippe, Italian luxury, the concept of Meta-Luxury and the Chinese luxury market.
Visits were also made to Maserati and Fratelli Rossetti. At the end of the five days, participants had to present their solutions for a real-life luxury branding issue to a panel consisting of Stella David, CEO of Wm. Grant & Sons Ltd; Maurice Doyle, Chief Marketing Officer of Wm. Grant & Sons Ltd; and Professor Alan Wilson.
Dr Pratima Sambajee (Lecturer in International Business at the Department of Strategy and Organisation) has been successful in her grant application from the Carnegie Trust to fund research in Mauritius on' Practices and strategies leading to Formalisation of Informal Businesses’.
This research project will explore the practices and strategies which facilitated the transition of informal businesses into the formal SME sector. It will take on both a micro and macro level perspective: firstly, it will explore the management practices of SMEs both at present and when they were informal and will seek to identify critical factors leading to formalisation of the business. Secondly, it will investigate the government’s role in creating this enabling environment and how continuous growth is being sustained.
Professor Alan Wilson of the Marketing Department took a group of participants on the Executive Masters in Hospitality and Tourism Leadership programme to Scottish Television (STV) as part of their Marketing module last month. Colin Ramsay of STV delivered an interesting seminar on the future of advertising and digital media and this was followed by a tour of the STV and STV Glasgow television studios.
Dr Andrew Perchard (Strategy & Organisation) and his co-collaborators on the History and Strategic Raw Materials Initiative (HSRMI), Drs Mats Ingulstad and Espen Storli (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), have just been awarded a $20,000 Peder Sather grant. This will fund a symposium at UC Berkeley entitled 'Making Markets: Grading and Trading in the Modern World, 1750-2014'.
More information on HSRMI is available at www.strath.ac.uk/business/hsrmi . You can follow HSRMI on Twitter at @HSRMI
ScotGrad, formerly TalentScotland, won the inaugural Association of Graduate Recruiters "Work Experience Programme" Award, on July 10 with the awards taking place in Liverpool Cathedral at the association's annual Student Recruitment conference. The awards, now in their 36th year, continue to recognise and reward best practice in the industry.
A Scotland-wide programme, part of the ScotGrad programme involves the graduates having to complete residential Business Strategy training courses during their job placement. The Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship designs and runs these training courses in partnership with Robert Gordon University. The Hunter Centre has been doing this for around 4 years, during the time when the programme was called Talent Scotland, and will be delivering the training component of the scheme for the next two years.
A paper about Absorptive Capacity Routines by Russell Matthews (Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship), Dominic Chalmers (Hunter Centre) and Norin Arshed (Heriot Watt, completed PhD at Hunter Centre) has been nominated as one of four best papers at the Academy of Management Strategy as Practice division. The trio will find out at the AOM meeting in August if they have won best overall paper.
Dominic Chalmers also has a best paper in the entrepreneurship division this year for work examining the contextualisation of entrepreneurship research.
Professor Alan Wilson of the Marketing Department chaired a session entitled "Co-Creation: using Customers to Foster Innovation" at the recent 20:20 Customer Experience Summit in London. Over 200 customer experience professionals attended the summit.