Strathclyde Business School’s partnership with Asia Scotland Institute was launched on November 29 with a guest speaker event featuring economist and writer Dr Gerard Lyons talking on Britain, China and Life After Brexit.
The partnership aims to add value to the student experience by offering the business school community access to influential players in Asian markets, and opportunities for engagement with the Institute and its impressive network.
Professor Graeme Roy hosted the event and networking dinner with colleagues Dr Gillian Pallis, Department of Human Resource Management, and Melissa McCrindle, Head of Marketing and Student Recruitment.
Dr Kerem Akartunali and Dr Ashwin Arulselvan from the Department of Management Science have been awarded two grants, worth US$60k in total, from the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research for their projects entitled "Node Deletion and Edge Deletion Problems in Network” and “Data Mining in Social Networks".
These grants will be supporting partly two PhD studentships, and they exemplify the excellent research carried out in the department in the domains of optimisation, data science and analytics.
The MBA full-time class had a successful site visit to the North British Distillery in Edinburgh as part of the ‘Life of a Bottle of a Bottle of Macallan’ series, in partnership with Edrington.
Established three years ago, this series has senior managers from the company present during the relevant academic modules. The presentations during the distillery visit were handled by the Head of Distilling for The Macallan and Head of Manufacturing at their Glasgow bottling plant, and provided the students with an insight of how capacity planning and the supply chain deal with a core premium product which takes many years to mature.
Professor Patricia Findlay, Dr Colin Lindsay, Jo McQuarrie, Dr Rachelle Pascoe-Deslauriers, Karen Cunningham (SCER/HRM) and the FITwork (Fair, Innovative and Transformative) PhD researchers (Maria Lopez Carrasco and Zinat Asif) delivered the second of the Workplace Innovation Masterclass Series, part of Scottish Enterprise’s new offering to around 80 employers at Malmaison Dundee on November 3. They were delighted to have Dr Peter Kesting (Aarhus University, Denmark), Charlie Rohan (Senior Director – User Centred Design, NCR) and Bernadette Malone (Chief Executive, Perth and Kinross Council) as the key speakers for this event.
Professor Patricia Findlay, Dr Colin Lindsay, Jo McQuarrie, Dr Rachelle Pascoe-Deslauriers (SCER/HRM) have continued to meet with Scottish Business Pledge employers and Food & Drink sector employers as part of the action research component of the Fair, Innovative and Transformative Work project.
The fourth event in the Glasgow Powerhouse series, a joint series of events run by Strathclyde Business School and PwC, focused on the Life Sciences sector and took the format of a round table discussion.
Event host Kevin Moore OBE, serial entrepreneur and chair of the Life Sciences Work Stream at Glasgow Economic Leadership, welcomed speakers from GSK, PwC, Strathclyde's CMAC (Continuous Manufacturing and Crystallisation) and TC Biopharm. The interactive event provided a forum to discuss topics such as growing life sciences companies in the Glasgow Biocorridor, funding sources, and supply chain opportunities through large pharma inward investment in Glasgow.
Craig Johnston, CMAC Industry Director, was one of the speakers and also wrote a blog about the sector and the event itself. Click here to read it.
Brian Garvey, Paul Stewart and Kendra Briken (HRM) led a delegation of 18 early stage researchers from UK to participate in the Newton Fund Researcher Links UK Brazil workshop along with 18 Brazilian counterparts.
The four day interdisciplinary workshop and field visit, “Production and appropriation of new energy sources: effects, conflicts and alternatives” was hosted by Federal University of Goias, who have an MoU with the Business School.
Among the outcomes are a new international research network across UK, Brazil, Mozambique and Mexico, "Social and environmental dynamics: work, land, energy and alternatives", a joint paper for publication and forthcoming film.
The Fraser of Allander Institute and Centre for Energy Policy hosted a joint event in the Technology and Innovation Centre entitled, “Linking CGE and TIMES models” on November 9. This workshop featured presentations from international colleagues including Taran Faehn (SSB Norway), Brian O’Gallachoir (University College Cork) and Matt Winning (University College London), as well as a presentation by Colin MacBean, the Head of Energy and Climate Change Analysis in the Scottish Government.
The event was hosted by Grant Allan (Fraser of Allander Institute and Department of Economics) and Karen Turner (Centre for Energy Policy) and supported by ongoing FAI and CEP activities in the Scottish Government-funded "ClimateXChange" and the EPSRC-supported "Energy Saving Innovations" project.
An article co-written by Dr Aliakbar Jafari from the Department of Marketing and Professor Pauline Maclaran of Royal Holloway, University of London) - 'Escaping into the World of Make-up Routines in Iran' – which was published in The Sociological Review (2014) has been in the spotlight again.
Dr Jafari was interviewed by Discovery Channel's Science News division (Seeker.com) in November 2016. His expertise on consumer culture negates the prevailing clichéd assumptions about women’s consumption of cosmetics as deviance in Iran.
Criticising narrow readings of non-Western consumption practices, Dr Jafari argues for an in-depth understanding of the historical, socio-economic, artistic, and cultural dynamics that underpin women’s consumption of cosmetic products and services in Muslim societies.
This news item has been extensively reproduced by many other websites around the world. Previously, as invited expert, Dr Jafari was interviewed by BBC Radio 4’s 'Thinking Allowed' on the same subject in June 2014: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b045bwr9.
The Department of Human Resource Management hosted a table at the recent HR Network Dinner on November 10, the premier awards dinner for the HR profession in Scotland.
Members of staff from the Department were joined by guests including Stephanie Lumb who recently graduated from the Business School and now works for Scottish Canals, who was nominated for HR Graduate of the Year. Other guests included alumni Craig Martin, HR Director at Glasgow Airport and Business Fellow Joanne Chisholm.
Professor Peter McKiernan (Strategy & Organisation) was elected to a Fellowship of the Chartered Management Institute as a reflection of his senior management roles in higher education over three decades. These include Dean of School, Head of School, Head of Department, Chairman of Department and Head of Group at top institutions like St Andrews, Warwick and Strathclyde as well as his role as Chairman of the British Academy of Management (BAM) and the European Academy of Management (EURAM).
Abroon Qazi, a research student jointly supervised in Economics (Dr Alex Dickson) and Management Science (Professor John Quigley) has successfully completed all the requirements to attain the ASA designation by qualifying in all the required exams:
Abroon managed to pass all the exams at the first attempt and as a result is to be reimbursed the full fees for FAP Interim and Final Assessments. His supervisors were very supportive of his aim to attain the prestigious credential and supervised his Final Assessment which involved applying the Actuarial Control Cycle to a business case study for evaluating an optimal price of a product and conducting risk and reward assessment using the tenets of Enterprise Risk Management.
Abroon is expected to defend his thesis in spring 2017 and he looks forward to applying for the EPSRC fellowship to pursue his post-doc research under the supervision of his PhD supervisors.
Dr Giuseppe De Feo, Department of Economics, has had a paper accepted for publication on the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy published by the American Economic Association. The article titled “Mafia in the ballot box” is co-authored by Giacomo De Luca (University of York) and analyses the role of the Sicilian mafia in political elections in the years 1946-1992.
Dr Giuseppe De Feo is also the organiser of a session on the Political Economy of Organized Crime, which has been accepted for the ASSA conference of the American Economic Association. The conference will be held on January 6-8 in Chicago. Dr De Feo is going to present a paper co-authored with Daron Acemoglu (MIT) and Giacomo De Luca (York) on “Mafia, Social Conflict and State Capacity”.
Dr Rodolphe Desbordes, Department of Economics, visited the International Monetary Fund (Washington DC) in November to collaborate with one of their research teams on improving their modelling of current account balances.
He was also invited to participate in a very prestigious conference in Hong Kong: http://webapp1.law.cuhk.edu.hk/2016conference/1129/conf/index.php where he discussed the impact of bilateral investment treaties on Chinese outward foreign direct investment.
John Anderson, head of SME Engagement at Strathclyde Business School, ran a session on scaling up companies at Cross Creative, a transformative training and development programme for senior tech/creative professionals in Scotland’s digital media sector run by the BBC, Channel 4, TRC Media and Scottish Enterprise.
There are five in-house sessions as well as a trip to San Francisco in March 2017 to meet up with international leaders in the industry.
The 2016 cohort of the Growth Advantage Programme (GAP) completed their first full workshop which featured guest Pinnacles of Growth speaker and Strathclyde Alumnus Dr Graeme Malcolm OBE, founder and Chief Executive of M Squared Lasers, winner of the Entrepreneurial Leader award at last year’s Strathclyde Enterprise Awards.
The GAP programme was launched in 2015 by Strathclyde Business School with the support of Santander Corporate & Commercial. This provided a unique opportunity for the leaders of growth-oriented Scottish SMEs to take a step back from the daily demands of scaling their business to develop a robust strategy for growth combined with a practical action plan to deliver sustained growth.
To find out more about GAP, click here
Professor Ian Cunningham (Human Resource Management) along with Andrew Eccles from the HASS Faculty presented the results of the first year of a two year research project exploring the enablers and barriers for voluntary sector support providers providing personalised support through the delivery of self-directed support on December 13.
The presentation was organised by Providers and Personalisation and was to an audience of practitioners from the voluntary sector as well as representatives of Scottish Government, local authorities and Audit Scotland. The second year of the research has begun and is exploring the local authority role in SDS.
The SCER/FITwork team from the Department of Human Resource Management, in conjunction with partners from the Institute of Design at Glasgow School of Art, delivered an academic symposium on Progressive and Creative Practice for Workplace Innovation to an audience of policy, employers and academics on December 7.
This was the final in a series of three events supported by the Scottish Universities Insight Institute and Patricia Findlay introduced the event, set the scene and chaired proceedings.
Guest speakers included Claire Dhéret, Senior Policy Analyst, (European Policy Centre), Sean Taggart, UKCES Commissioner, David Shears, Reward Partner, EE, Tess Lanning, Living Wage Foundation, Paul McKelvie, UKCES Commissioner, Adrian Gillespie, Managing Director of Operations (Growth Companies, Innovation and Infrastructure), Scottish Enterprise, with an expert panel discussion with Gillian Galloway, Head of Innovation, Highland and Islands Enterprise, Linda Hanna, Managing Director of Strategies and Sectors, Scottish Enterprise, Grahame Smith, UKCES Commissioner and General Secretary, Scottish Trades Union Congress and David Coyne, Skills Development Scotland.
Professor John Quigley, Professor Lesley Walls and Dr Matthew Revie (Management Science) were successful in a collaborative bid with FERA, Universities of Warwick and Leeds, to provide training in methods for expert knowledge elicitation for the European Food and Safety Agency. The contract is worth 600,000 Euros.
The CCC team led by Alan McIntyre and Ian Henry and partners Comillas have agreed a new MBA programme for Iberdrola to start in January 2017. This tripartite programme has been negotiated to develop previous programmes into a new model to deliver a third cohort of excellent students to the MBA.
Dr Aylin Ates (principal investigator) and Dr Steve Paton (co-investigator) from the Department of Strategy & Organisation have been successful in the award of £141,412 from the Innovate UK for a two-year Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project with Fishers Services Ltd.
This KTP project will develop an organisational capability to de-commoditise textile products by making them smarter and higher quality through adoption of an optimised RFID tracking system in the service value chain. SBS academics will transfer knowledge and expertise in the area of servitisation and strategic business modelling.