How can Scottish businesses tap the added value of collaboration for innovation both within and beyond their workplaces? That's the key theme for the latest Scottish Enterprise Workplace Innovation Masterclasses, which will take place in Edinburgh on the morning of Thursday 8th June.
The Masterclass will feature two innovative business leaders and a leading international business researcher.
Robert Carr, a Partner at Anderson Strathern, one of Scotland's leading law firms and current Scottish Legal Employer of the Year, will discuss how our uncertain times challenge businesses to become more connected and build 'adaptive capability'.
Johanna Pystenen, HR Director at the leading Finnish IT firm, Vincit, will share her experiences of building collaborative teams and empowering employees to innovate - a journey that has led Vincit to be named Best SME Workplace in Europe by Great Place To Work.
Dr David De Geest of Hong Kong Polytechnic University will share his research on what works for companies in promoting 'boundary spanning' for creativity and innovation.
It promises to be a stimulating morning of sharing ideas on fostering collaboration for innovation.
This Masterclass will be of interest to HR professionals
or business leaders with an interest in supporting employees to innovate. If
interested, please do register here.
Further information is available from
Further information is available here. David
Cotter, a third year Marketing student has been selected as one of the three
students shortlisted from across Scotland for the Marketing Society Scotland
Star Marketing
Student of the Year award. David has
been invited to attend the Marketing Society Scotland awards dinner on June 8 where
the overall winner will be announced. Professor Peter McKiernan, Strategy & Organisation,
has been invited to sit on the scientific committee of the Chartered ABS
sponsored European Journal Guide for its next revision. The guide is used
widely by international scholars and, at each revision, many new journals - as
well as the existing ones - have to be assessed and categorised. The panel is
made up of three representatives from Scottish Business Schools on the panel
and is an inaugural Companion of the ABS. Professor McKiernan ran the April 2017 round of the
doctoral programme at IEDC, Bled, Slovenia- one of Europe's top private Schools
of Management. Doctoral students came from as far afield as Russia and the USA,
with a major concentration from central and Eastern Europe. Professor McKiernan
coached the final year doctoral students in academic writing for scholarly
journals, practical journals and books. He has also recently led both the April Babcock LEAD and
DRIVE executive programmes for SBS. The former focused on improving the
contractual bidding process and the latter on building a culture of innovation
in Babcock's international community. Now, participants will follow a
structured, supervised project based upon the SBS experience and will present
their final results to senior line managers. A group of Masters Students from the Department of Marketing
attended a one-week module on Country of Origin Branding at Universidad Pablo
De Olavide in Seville, Spain. This involved lectures and visits to a number of
Spanish companies. The students were accompanied by Professor Alan Wilson and
Carol Christie. Jami Hall, MSc Tourism Marketing Management student, said,
"A part of the three Marketing MSc courses allows us to choose electives; and
one of the elective options that I chose brought me to Seville, Spain for a
week. Our group were visiting students at Pablo de Olavide University, taking a
course on Country of Origin Branding in Spain. We spent our afternoons on their
campus learning from visiting lecturers and working on a group presentation we
would be giving on the afternoon of the last day on how we would bring a
Spanish product of our choosing into the UK market. "Our week in Seville was non-stop and exciting, but also
eye-opening and rewarding. Everyone took something different from the
experience and we all left with not only gorgeous photographs and fun memories,
but also a much deeper understanding of Spanish culture and of nation branding
as a whole." The Department of Management Science and Bruce Power have
begun a two year project worth £230k to develop decision support tools aimed at
reducing lost time due to outages. The project sits within the newly formed
ANRC and will be completed by Euan Barlow, Tim Bedford, Emma Comrie, Matthew
Revie and Lesley Walls. A new project funded by the Universities Low Carbon Power
and Energy research theme is developing simulation and optimisation tools to
minimise the time taken to install offshore wind farms. The project, led by Matthew
Revie and Euan Barlow of Management Science, is worth £165k and will take 14
months to complete. Meanwhile, a team of researchers in Management Science and
EEE have been awarded £70k for a 10 month project investigating different
methods of forecasting for offshore wind farm access. The project, funded by
Data Lab Innovation Centre, is collaborative with Datalytics Ltd and looks to
build upon the Universities existing knowledge in this area and to develop
relations further with SSE, Scottish Power and CalMac. Second
year undergraduate Marketing students in the Services and Retail Marketing
class recently took part in a marketing analysis of various shopping malls in
Glasgow. The
teams prepared an analysis by carrying out a detailed observation audit of the
existing malls and their current strategies and then put forward
recommendations. There were a total of 62 groups with typically five members
per group. As
a group assignment for the class, they worked with departmental tutors in the
tutorials on this topic. They all had to submit a report of 3,000 words make a
presentation in the final tutorial group. The Department then selected the best
five groups and asked them to make a formal presentation on the Finale day. The best team, who won £1,000 for
the best overall presentation, comprised: Thomas Gilian, Anastasia
Inverary, Emilia Higgins and Diana Krasniqi. Jennifer Barhorst and Professor Alan Wilson (Marketing) won
Best Paper in the Branding, Strategy and Research track at the Marketing
Management Association Conference in Chicago, USA for their paper on
"Retweeting Brand Experiences: Factors Motivating Receivers to Proliferate
Brand Image Disruptions". Professor Alan Wilson of the Marketing Department, Kim MacGillavry Vice President, Customer Experience, DHL Freight and Neil Davey, Managing Editor of My Customer have produced a white paper on measuring and managing an organisation’s customer experience.
Many companies around the world and across all industries have recognised that it is becoming business-critical to have a loyal customer base. The long-term growth outlook in mature markets is more or less flat and consumerism is getting the upper hand globally. So, keeping customers happy is more important than ever before. This goes well beyond the traditional marketing mix. Nowadays, managing the customer experience is the key to sustainable profitable growth. An increasing number of CEOs have understood that their organisation needs to be more customer-centric to succeed. The white paper sets out a framework that leadership teams can use. The Customer Experience Management (CEM) maturity model and the related questionnaire enables organisations to assess their actual performance along five dimensions and identify the maturity of their customer experience management programme. It also reveals the concrete things that can and should be done to improve the customer experience. It has proven to be a useful tool for CEM executives and practitioners to guide them and their leadership through the change process. The white paper launched on April 20 and is freely available for downloading. Gioele Figus has recently been successful in an application for a two year Fellowship in the Scottish Government’s Centre of Expertise in Climate Change, “ClimateXChange”. The project, worth £64,805 in the first year, is led by Dr Grant Allan (Economics) alongside Professor Peter McGregor (Economics) and Professor Karen Turner (Centre for Energy Policy, International Public Policy Institute). This research will in particular examine proposals in the Scottish Government’s recent Energy Strategy and will provide input to policy makers on the energy and economic consequences for Scotland. Dr Grant Allan gave an invited presentation at an international workshop in Brussels on March 28 organised by the International Photonics Advocacy Coalition and the Optical Society. His presentation was titled, “Economic impact of reliable environmental modelling”. The invitation-only event was attended by representatives from leading agencies, including the European Commission, European Parliament, European Space Agency and business and sector leaders with activities across the UK and Europe. Dr Grant Allan, Department of Economics, attended a “Scottish Business Breakfast” at Stanford University on April 4. This was an invitation-only event hosted by Tom Baer (Stanford Centre for Photonics Research) and arranged by the Scottish Universities and Stanford University Programme (SU2P). It was attended by business leaders from California and Scotland and saw presentations by Professor Sir Jim McDonald and First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon. MSc Business Analysis and Consulting student Nadia Vasileva (Management Science) attended the Roland Berger Case Study Challenge in Bucharest early April, where she was part of the team winning the challenge. Consultancy firm Roland Berger organises this weekend-long challenge every year, where selected applicants are invited with all their expenses covered.Marketing student in shortlist for Student of the Year Award
Strategy Professor invited on scientific committee of
European Journal Guide
Marketing students' trip to Seville for branding module
Management Science research successes
Marketing student teams wins finale
Marketing paper success
Marketing White Paper
Economic modelling Fellowship funded by Scottish Government
Economic academic presents in Brussels workshop on environmental monitoring
Scottish Business Breakfast at Stanford University
Student part of winning case study challenge team