Beedie School of Business News

MOT MBA Alumni and Saltworks Technology founders, Ben Sparrow and Joshua Zoshi, have been featured in the current issue of The Economist. Past winners of the New Ventures BC Competition, Saltworks Technology addresses the issues of the production of potable water through a desalination process that is designed to be economical, environmentally sensitive and sustainable.

This year, Saltworks has completed a solar capture station in the Okanagan for heat capture testing, has partnered with the BC Innovative Clean Energy Fund and Sustainable Development Technology Canada and will be presenting its thermal heat driven technology at the International Desalination Association World Congress in Dubai mid-November 2009.

To read the article in The Economist, click here.

RBC announced the winner of its RBC Mini Innovation Challenge. For the 2009 competition, the challenge for student proposals was about organizations and social innovation: “Organizations that support Social Innovation and create social good will do better if they can work together but currently mechanisms do not exist that support easy and effective group-to-group collaboration. Suggest innovative ways to allow these organizations to connect and collaborate.”

A total of 51 teams registered, with SFU representing 10 of the 51. BUS338 alone had 7 student teams submit proposals. 20 proposals were short-listed with 8 of the 20 coming from SFU and the winning proposal coming from the “Pink Rangers” team from SFU. Congratulations to the team (Anho Sham, James Avendano, Josephine Jane Gunawan, Luke Cheung and Shirley Yeung) for their winning project on “social innovation clusters”. The winning team receives a $1,000 donation from RBC and the “Pink Rangers” have chosen Kla-How-Eya as the recipient.

For the course website BUS338: Managing Technological Innovation, click here.
For more information on the RBC Mini Innovation Challenge, check out their blog: http://blogs.rbc.com/innovator/

To read the winning proposal, click here.
For more information on Kla-How-Eya, click here.

Starting with the November 2009 Academy of Marketing Science Quarterly newsletter, PhD candidate in Marketing, Colin Campbell, has started up an interview series with the assistance of AMSQ Editor, Theresa Flaherty. The column is titled “New Minds meet Great Minds” and will pair PhD students in marketing with established marketing academics for each interview. The first installment features Anjali Bal (PhD Marketing, SFU) interviewing Dr. Jagdeish Sheth, the Charles H. Kellstandt Professor of Marketing at Emory University.

To read the first “New Minds meets Great Minds” interview, click here.

Marketing Professor, Leyland Pitt has received a seed grant from the Advanced Practices Council (APC) of the Society for Information Management to investigate “iApps in U-Space: Developing Customer Service Applications for Smart Phones”, with Iris Junglas, University of Houston.

The Advanced Practices Council is a forum for senior IT executives who commission exclusive research and share cross-industry perspectives.

This grant is awarded for a proposal that is to be developed into a presentation for an SIM/APC meeting to take place in Atlanta, GA in January 2010. If the SIM/APC committee thinks the project should go on to the pilot stage, Leyland and his co-author will receive additional funding with further funding possible on a subsequent round of presentations and evaluations.

For more information on the “iApps in U-Space” proposal, click here.

The Honourable Gary Goodyear, Minister of State (Science and Technology), formally announced 181 Canada Research Chairs newly awarded or renewed in 45 Canadian universities. As part of that announcement, Associate Professor Ian McCarthy’s Canada Research Chair in Technology and Operations Research has been renewed for five years.

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BC Hydro, which has women in six of its 10 senior management team positions, is the first recipient of SFU’s new Nancy McKinstry award for leadership in gender diversity. McKinstry, now retired, is a former vice-president of Odlum Brown Limited and past chair of the SFU board of directors and of the Investment Dealers Association of B.C. Keep reading…

From SFU News Online. By Barry Shell In April 2009, Alberta oil-sands giant Suncor Energy was fined $675,000 for not installing pollution-control equipment at one of its plants near Fort McMurray. But in a gratifying turn for academics, the provincial court applied something new called creative sentencing, which in part resulted in a $315,000 research [...]

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How SFU Business fared in the news for the week ending October 16, 2009.

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The British Columbia Human Resources Management Association (BC HRMA) interviews Rick Colbourne, Executive Director of the Learning Strategies Group.

Link to the Interview

John Turley-Ewart of the Financial Post recently interviewed Faculty of Business Administration Dean Daniel Shapiro about our MBA programs and our approach to business education.

“We positioned ourselves as providers of relatively small cohort-based MBA programs that target very specific sectors or demographic groups, as opposed to a one-size-fits-all MBA.” – Daniel Shapiro.