Beedie School of Business

Beedie School of Business News

On November 22, 2011, Wideman Education Foundation (WEF) hosted their third annual Project Management Career Speaker Event to high school students at Simon Fraser University’s Surrey campus. Among the speakers was Rich Brodowski, Project Manager with the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. He described his PM experience that involved providing governance to Bell Canada’s Olympic Program, ONE that involved, voice, data, logistics and business functions for the winter games. Joan Vincent, President of the Wideman Education Foundation, […]

Beedie School of Business News

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.