Beedie School of Business News

The Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University has launched Ideas@Beedie, a digital magazine showcasing the business school’s academic research, industry impact and engagement with the community.

The magazine is available as both an app for Apple’s iPad, as well as in digital magazine format on the Beedie School of Business website.

The theme of the inaugural summer issue is social media – a growing area of focus for business researchers. Beedie professors have garnered numerous awards for social media research in recent months, and the school is home to a number of faculty and students who are using social media to engage with academics, businesses and the wider community.

Future issues of Ideas@Beedie will delve into themes such as international business, sustainability, entrepreneurship and business technology.

“Our goal is to highlight the breadth and depth of our business ideas to our readers,” said Daniel Shapiro, Dean of SFU’s Beedie School of Business. “With Ideas@Beedie, we hope to convey some of this scholarly activity in ways that are both relevant and insightful.”

Among the research topics explored in the first issue of the magazine are the advent of so-called mutated advertising in the Web 2.0 environment; the engagement of consumers using social media tools; and the growing usage of sustainability-geared apps for smartphone devices. The publication also explores management lessons to be learned from Vancouver’s infamous Stanley Cup rioting in 2011.

The e-magazine also features extensive profiles of Ryan Beedie and Joe Segal, both of whom have played extraordinary roles in the growth of the Beedie School of Business.

The launch of Ideas@Beedie comes on top of an extraordinary 18 month period for the Beedie School of Business. In February of 2011, the school received a record-setting $22 million gift from alumnus Ryan Beedie and his father Keith. Since then, it has launched a number of ambitious initiatives, including the Americas MBA for Executives, with partners in Brazil, Mexico and the United States; an Executive MBA for Aboriginal Business and Leadership, the first program of its kind; Canada’s largest undergraduate student-managed investment fund; and a high-technology entrepreneurship incubator.

This past spring, the school received endorsement from two prestigious accreditation bodies: the European Foundation for Management Development (EQUIS) and the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB).

In addition, the school has vaulted into the world’s upper echelon of research business schools – placing among the top 75 for business research, and the world’s top 25 for management-specific research.

The iPad app can be downloaded at the Apple iTunes store, at http://itunes.apple.com/az/app/ideas-beedie/id532907167?mt=8

The magazine can also be viewed on the web with most browsers at: http://beedie.sfu.ca/ideas

Tags: AACSB, Apple, apps, BBA, Brazil, Daniel Shapiro, EMBA, engagement, EQUIS, Ideas@Beedie, innovation, iPad, Joe Segal, Keith Beedie, management, MBA, Mexico, Research, Ryan Beedie, smartphones, social media, sustainability, United States

The following article was published by The Vancouver Sun on July 11, 2012.

The Penyo Pal team, including student members and developers, are working on an app that teaches people to speak Mandarin. Jessica Fan, second from left in the front row, is an SFU student, The team is part of the Next36 business accelerator program that’s working with top students from across Canada to develop a new generation of Canadian entrepreneurs.

VANCOUVER — Last month it was Silicon Valley, next week it’s New York and after that – the world?

Penyo Pal, a mobile app project by a group of Canadian university students including Jessica Fan of Simon Fraser University, is one of the leading entries in a national program called The Next 36 that’s helping to develop the business skills of 36 ambitious young student-entrepreneurs.

In June the Penyo Pal quartet was one of eight start-ups from across North America, and the only one selected from The Next 36, invited to present its app — a mobile game teaching users to speak Mandarin — at a Microsoft event in the San Francisco Bay area technology hub. They were named best Phase 1 start-up at the event.

Next week Penyo Pal is one of four Next 36 teams invited to participate in an event sponsored by the Canadian Consulate in New York where early stage businesses from this country will connect with American investors and venture capitalists.

Keep reading…

Tags: apps, Beedie School of Business, China, Claudia Hepburn, Galen Weston, Glowlab, Jessica Fan, Jim Pattison, Nadir Mohamed, Paul Desmarais, Penyo Pal, Rogers, Rogers Communications, sfu, SFU Beedie, Simon Fraser University, The Next 36, The Vancouver Sun

The following article was originally published in the November/December issue of BizEd Magazine, the leading voice of business education, published by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). The magazine is celebrating its 10th anniversary this fall.

Today, smartphone and tablet usage among business students is almost a given. To reach students where they live—on their mobile devices— more business schools are launching their own mobile campus applications. But as with any school initiative, designing a great institutional app takes careful consideration. Educators should be mindful of several steps and possibilities as they tackle the process:

Choosing objectives. Successful mobile campus apps serve a triple function—they build community, expand awareness of the school, and keep people informed. But they must do so without bombarding users with unneeded information. For that reason, business schools are defining their intended audience, choosing features, and outlining their objectives carefully before they jump into an app’s design. In that way, they can ensure that users find their apps interesting and valuable.

Photo: The Beedle School distributed promotional T-shirts that promoted its new campus mobile app as part of a student engagement contest. Each shirt has a QR code on the back that, when scanned with a mobile phone, takes the user to information about the app.

“We didn’t want to replicate or redeliver information that is already offered by other apps,” says Derek Moscato, director of communications for Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. “We didn’t want our app to be an overt recruitment tool, such as a digital brochure.”

Columbia Business School in New York, New York, released its iPhone app this summer, after taking six months to refine, test, and deploy it. Its goal for the tool was to help make students’ academic experiences as positive as possible. The app that resulted includes What’s App-enin’ At B-Schools searchable directories, campus maps, and details on campus events, club activities, and course listings. It also allows students to gather course assignments and materials in one place and receive campus safety alerts.

ESCP Europe wanted its iPhone app to connect its five campuses in Paris, France; London, England; Madrid, Spain; Berlin, Germany; and Torino, Italy. “We wanted the application to speak not only to students and alumni, but also to people interested in our conferences and the expertise of our professors,” says Hélène Allaire, the school’s events and social media manager. ESCP Europe’s app includes news, a monthly calendar of events, a course portfolio, information about faculty and research, locations of its campuses and partner universities, and a photo gallery. Students also can use the app to join the school’s online communities on various social media networks.

This summer, Hult International Business School, with campuses in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, released Hult Connect, a free mobile app for Apple devices that specifically targets Hult’s alumni network. Hult Connect allows former students to find other alums who live and work in their cities, so they can maintain relationships more easily. The business school can use the app to send news about alumni events and reunions.

Teaching with apps. The design of a school’s app also can offer an educational experience for students. That was the case for the Beedie School. A team of five SFU computer science and business students created Beedie’s app as a 13-week project for an interdisciplinary course, “Foundations of Innovation” in 2010.

Jan Kietzmann, who teaches the course, planned to make iPhone app design a general focus for the course. But he says it was a “natural progression” to shift the focus to creating a Beedie School app. The team was guided in the project by Kietzmann; Moscato; Dan Shapiro, the dean; and Andrew Gemino, associate dean of undergraduate programs and associate professor of management information systems. After the course ended, Moscato continued to work with the students to perfect the app before its release five months later in spring 2011.

“Although the project was introduced to the students from ‘up top,’ the students really loved the idea and took it upon themselves to identify where and how an app could help improve their lives as students,” says Kietzmann.

The students decided that the Beedie School app should be an information hub. They wanted it to integrate the school’s Twitter and Facebook feeds with links to announcements about current research from school faculty and graduate students, says Justin Lee, a member of the student team.

Getting the word out. How well a school promotes its app is almost as important as how well the app is designed. These schools let their communities know about the app via publications, electronic newsletters, and Web sites, as well as at school events and student orientations. But they also emphasize that because word-of-mouth is so important, more creative approaches may be in order.

For example, it was a student working as an intern in the Beedie School’s marketing and communications office who suggested launching a student-directed campaign, says Moscato. The office acted on her advice, distributing promotional T-shirts with QR codes for the app as part of a student engagement contest. It also created postcards featuring the app and handed them out to incoming freshmen at the beginning of the school year.

Refining designs. ESCP Europe views its first campus app as a work in progress, says Allaire. She has included her contact information at the bottom of the ESCP Europe app’s download page with a note asking for feedback. She already is making adjustments for the app’s next version. Moscato uses Google Analytics to track how many users download Beedie’s app. Since its launch in early June through August, it had received 9,500 page views. He plans to track how students use the app to inform the design of future iterations.

A school might be tempted to pack its first app with as many elements as possible. But overloading an app with bells and whistles that students might not use could decrease its functionality and impact, says Glenn Wiebalck, associate director of technology operations, information and technology group, and interim CIO at Columbia. “Don’t try to do too much initially,” he advises. Instead, start with a few features that students say they want most—and then test, test, test to make sure those features work flawlessly before full deployment. That approach, says Wiebalck, is “how you’ll gain momentum for future releases.”

Tags: apps, awareness, Beedie, campaign, codes, iPhone, management information systems, Marketing, mobile, QR, Salina, School of Business, sfu, Siu, social media, student engagement, student recruitment, t-shirt, undergraduate

Since its launch in 2010, the Apple iPad has garnered a global reputation for being among the most innovative consumer technology products. According to a new study from Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business, however, that reputation is equally deserved in business – especially as firms leverage the popular tablet and others like it to improve operations and boost sales or customer service.

The recent study, entitled “Deciding When to Use Tablets for Business Applications”, published in the most recent issue of MIS Quarterly Executive, is authored by professors Leyland Pitt from SFU and Pierre Berthon of Bentley University, with Beedie School of Business graduate student Karen Robson.

Their research argues that like many disruptive technologies, tablet computers such as the iPad are already changing the face of corporate computing, and will likely have an even greater impact in the future. Pitt and colleagues provide a set of frameworks that can be used to identify when and where a tablet computer device and its applications within can add value to an organization – whether it be in areas as disparate as health care delivery, hospitality, or automobile marketing.

“Computer tablets like the iPad are probably the world’s first truly ‘personal’ computers and are already changing the face of corporate computing,” write the researchers. “By being on a constant lookout for good examples of applications in a wide variety of settings, and asking questions such as “How would that work in our business?” and “Could we do something similar in our organization?”, organizations can identify how applications on table devices can shorten, short-circuit and shape business processes, and thus create business value.”

The researchers maintain that in identifying possible tablet applications, organizations would be wise to learn from the successes of like-minded firms.

“Decision makers seeking to introduce tablets into their own organizations could therefore benefit by identifying successful tablet applications in other organizations, and adapting them for their own use.”

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Recommendations for Using Tablets in Business

The researchers provide five actions that Information Systems organizations can take to ensure that the deployment of tablets provides business benefits:

1. Regularly scan relevant media for effecitve, creative use of tablets in a range of business settings, including some websites they have found particularly useful: Engadget, CultofMac, Mashable, Wired, AppleInsider, TechCruch, and MacWorld.
2. Consider the Inscriptive (input) Informative (output) functions of information systems, and the interaction between them, to envision how tablets might enable these activities to be performed more effectively.
3. Explore opportunities of moving applications that are purely Isolative into the Contextive and Contextual space to provide customers with superior service and improve the productivity of employees.
4. Compare the 3 C-Abilities (Configure-ability, Consume-ability and Context-ability) of tablets versus other mobile devices, recognizing that even small changes in the technological capabilities of these devices may require changes in how organizations think about using these devices.
5. Envision the needs of customers and employees using relevant strategic or business process models. For example, the application that permits boarding passes sent to smartphones for air travelers was developed by understanding that travelers might not have access to a printer to print a boarding pass prior check in.
6. Envision employees accessing the organization’s information systems via mobile devices.

Tags: apps, Blackberry, computers, iPad, iPhone, Karen Robson, Leyland Pitt, Marketing, mobile devices, Pierre Berthon, tablets, technology