People and Places: August 23, 2022
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 Kenneth B. Kahn has been named dean of the Strome College of Business at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He takes his new post on September 1. Kahn most recently served as dean and professor at Cleveland State University’s Monte Ahuja College of Business in Ohio. In that role, he oversaw the launch of new majors in property management, sport entertainment management, and business studies; instituted a research lunch-and-learn initiative to facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration; secured a gift to bolster data analytics within the curriculum; and established the first EMBA scholarship. Before joining Cleveland State, he held leadership and faculty positions at Virginia Commonwealth University, Purdue University, the University of Tennessee, and Georgia Tech. Kahn succeeds Jeff Tanner, who served as the dean of the college for eight years. |
 On July 1, Shelley McGill became acting dean of the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. McGill is a business law professor in the policy area of the department of business and recently was associate dean of Laurier’s undergraduate business programs in the Lazaridis School. Prior to her role as associate dean, McGill was director of the Bachelor of Business Administration programs from 2017 to 2019. She also serves as a member of the provincially appointed board for the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario. McGill succeeds former dean Micheál Kelly, who finished his 10-year term on June 30. Under Kelly’s leadership, the school created the Lazaridis Institute for the Management of Technology Enterprises, secured 40 million CAD (31 million USD) for key strategic initiatives, expanded professional graduate programs, and increased enrollment in undergraduate programs.
New ProgramsThis fall, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business will hold a new in-person executive education program called Digital Innovation Strategy and Management. The five-day program is designed to prepare executives to lead technology-centric organizations. Participants will discover how they can evaluate an organization’s innovation profile and how digital technologies transform business models, value chains, and entire industries. Attendees will learn how to make decisions when data is incomplete or unreliable, how to adapt to changing customer demands, and how to build an organizational culture that drives innovation. The University of Utah in Salt Lake City has announced a new program designed to support alumni interested in entrepreneurship. Lassonde for Life is presented by the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute, a division of the David Eccles School of Business, in partnership with the university’s office of alumni relations and a university office dedicated to innovation and economic development. The program will be offered primarily online over the University of Utah’s new platform, the Forever Utah Alumni Network. Lassonde for Life will begin with a series of workshops during the 2022–23 academic year and will also offer participants access to helpful content, mentors, and networking opportunities. The program is available for free to all alumni from every department and major at the University of Utah. CollaborationsThe Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship at the University of Strathclyde Business School in Glasgow is partnering with the Foundation for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Kashipur to organize an entrepreneurship conference at IIM Kashipur December 15–18. The conference will bring together scholars, entrepreneurs, and others from the entrepreneurial ecosystem to discuss emerging trends in entrepreneurship within India. These trends include digitalization, localization, multisector collaboration, and the rise of social enterprises. Participants also will try to gauge the long-term implications that COVID-19 will have on entrepreneurship in India. The McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin has entered into a three-year partnership with consumer credit agency TransUnion. Through the partnership, TransUnion will provide a multiyear gift to the McCombs Center for Analytics and Transformative Technologies with the goal of advancing research and recruiting more talent in the financial data science industry. The center will explore transparency and consumer privacy in the context of AI systems and offer cross-disciplinary collaboration with the university’s departments of engineering and computer science. Venkat Achanta, TransUnion executive vice president and chief data and analytics officer, will serve as executive-in-residence at the center. The government of Western Australia has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with INSEAD Business School, which has campuses in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North America. Through the agreement, teams of INSEAD students who are visiting Perth will study Western Australia’s innovation ecosystem as a way to showcase the region’s burgeoning innovation community to a global audience. As part of the MOU, a virtual reality case study will be developed in collaboration with the mining industry to highlight virtual business environments and support automation and robotics in mining. The MOU is supported by the government’s 16.7 million AUD (11.7 million USD) New Industries Fund, which is aimed at diversifying the economy and creating new jobs. Florida International University in Miami has partnered with cryptocurrency platform Blockchain.com to expand Web3 and cryptocurrency education at the university. The partnership will result in curricular, co-curricular, and continuing education programs that will be offered during the 2022–23 school year to students, alumni, and community members. Grants and DonationsThe Kelley School of Business at Indiana University in Bloomington will receive 1.4 million USD from the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) to support its Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER). The money will fund initiatives such as an international trade certificate; a video series related to foreign languages; and international research projects on innovation ecosystems, Indiana exporting and manufacturing, and cybersecurity. The money is part of a 17.7 million USD grant the DOE has awarded to the school, with the largest portion going to IU’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. Other NewsHarvard Business School has announced it will provide scholarships to cover the total cost of tuition and course fees for MBA students with the greatest financial need—approximately 10 percent of its student body. The scholarships will total 76,000 USD per year for the two-year full-time program. The school also will offer monetary support to more students from middle-income families, building on the approximately 50 percent of students who already receive scholarships. Both changes will benefit current and future students and are the latest in a series of steps designed to reduce financial barriers for students. For instance, over the past several years, the school has launched the Forward Fellowship program, which offers additional funding to students who provide support to family members; revised its financial aid formula to consider socioeconomic background in addition to other factors; and expanded outreach to first-generation students. The Cornell SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, has established an interdisciplinary theme of business sustainability to address challenges such as climate change, social and environmental justice, and inequality. The interdisciplinary theme will facilitate collaboration across all three schools in the SC Johnson College—the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, the Johnson Graduate School of Management, and the Nolan School of Hotel Administration. The three schools already offer multiple courses that grapple with sustainability issues and conduct research about the grand challenges facing society. Co-directors for the new theme will be Mark Milstein of the Johnson College and Jawad Addoum and Catherine Kling of Dyson. Beginning with the 2022–23 school year, the Kania School of Management at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania will change its DBA program to a PhD program in accounting. The curriculum and degree requirements will stay the same. The business doctoral degree, which was launched in 2017 and graduated its first cohort in 2021, provides a flexible path for experienced practitioners to become tenure-track academics. It is the university’s first PhD program. If you have news of interest to share with the business education community, please send press releases, relevant images, or other information to AACSB Insights at [email protected]. |
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