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A DCU student team last night won this year’s national Enactus Ireland competition, an annual competition which brings together students, business leaders, academics and alumni to celebrate social enterprise.

The announcement was made at a virtual event on May 28th.

This year’s presenting team was Alethea Williams 1st year DCU Business School, Eoin Treacy 4th year DCU Business School , Suzanne Jackson 1st year DCU Business School, Emily Fulton 1st year DCU Business School, Jack Parkes (SALIS), Kevin Cogan (School of Computing). The team were led during the year by Enactus DCU Chairs, Thomas Bird (DCUBS) and Ruth Lombard (Nursing), with Noel Hatton (DCUBS) as video-editor.

The main projects presented were:

Dyslexie (dyslex.ie) aims to provide customized solutions for people with dyslexia, in a user-friendly way. Users complete an online questionnaire, which identifies the exact modifications that will maximise the user experience. With this data, the software automatically tailors the visual and textual formatting of any web page. Dyslex.ie customises the background colour, line-spacing, and font style and size to enhance users’ reading experience. It also offers syllable-splitting, word-to-image functionality, and paragraph delineation. The result; users’ reading speed and accuracy increases significantly. After rigorous testing and consultation with key dsylexia experts, Dyslex.ie will have its official launch at the end of June, rolling out to schools, corporates, and individuals. The team is finalising the development of our IOS and Android app to make Dyslexie widely accessible, enabling users to persevere and thrive through the challenges of Covid 19 and beyond.

 

ReNu – a sustainability initiative with a focus on Irish biodiversity and native agriculture. This year, with the partner Easy Treesie they have already planted over 100 native Irish trees.
Access Ireland, a software that improves accessibility for wheelchair users nationally, which has already been awarded €1000 seed funding from the Dublin Bus Community Spirit Initiative.
Second Scoop has continued to empower international protection applicants through a series of workshops and events, working alongside Talent Garden, Colgate Palmolive, and Bank Of Ireland.

SpeakEasy, a project that works with primary, secondary, and university students to enable them to find their voice and be heard.

Commenting on the win, Assistant Professor Roisin Lyons said:

I could not be prouder of EnactusDCU this year. They have had to deal with changing committees, the closing of the university due to covid19 and the move to a virtual competition process – and have adapted brilliantly to all. In fact, they scaled up their efforts and even created an initiative called UpsideSocials to help cheer students up during this time. They are excellent leaders, with a passion for social entrepreneurship, and the projects they have developed have real potential to help many people. We look forward to seeing our team scale the projects over the summer and represent Ireland in September. While the current lockdown has its challenges, it also has some special moments. Yesterday, the entire EnactusDCU team and faculty advisors watched the judges announcement together on a zoom meeting and were joined by some EnactusDCU alumni who showed their support.

 

Enactus DCU will go forward to represent Ireland at the Enactus World Cup this coming September.

A bunch of DCU Business School students took part of the Creative Minds Hackathon in association with the US Embassy and DCU Ryan Academy over the weekend, with some securing the winning ideas.

Three MINT students, Orla Ainsworth (MINT1), Jack Brophy (MINT1) and Ellen Harkin (MINT2) and Olaide Oladimeji (INTB1) were on one of the winning teams ‘Líonra (@LionraHq), a peer-to-peer platform that facilities refugee integration through skills exchange and knowledge sharing’. The aim of project is for newly located refugees to develop a network and create friends in their area through social events during an 8-week programme. Such events would be tailored to the refugees’ interests and would always include locals in the area to ensure that a network of friends is being developed. This also ensures the refugees work on developing their English.

Daniel Kyne from the group ‘Future Roots’ and Oisin Beaudelot from ‘RefReach’ both MINT1 students also took part.

This is only the start of their projects. Congratulations to all our students and wish them luck as they progress their ideas further!

A team within the DCU Centre for Family Business was commissioned by Fingal County Council to complete this case study. The Family Business Report, Lessons in Resilience and Success: a Snapshot of Multi-generational Family Businesses in Fingal, Dublin was produced by Martina Brophy and Eric Clinton. Their study follows twelve family businesses which are all multi-generational, family-owned and head-quartered in Fingal. Through conducting interviews with these individuals they were able to distinguish needs, challenges and strengths that come with running a family business.

 

“Family businesses are a complex and highly resourceful business type. Knowledge, learnings, resources, values and traditions pass across generations of a family: often, what is found are strategic resources and capabilities that can make a family firm distinctive and competitively advantaged,” writes Dr. Eric Clinton in this study.

 

The report provides a snapshot of 12 multi-generational family businesses in Fingal with family involvement ranging from second to fourth generation. Between them they employ over 3,500 and have turnovers ranging from €1.5 million to in excess of €100m per annum.

Business & Finance, Ireland’s leading business magazine, have covered the topic in an article, Talent in Family Business. Dr. Eric Clinton, Director of the DCU Centre for Family Business, covers a variety of topics within the topic of family business from how much family should get involved to how important it is to become a cohesive team.

Families have an effect in the businesses day-to-day happenings whether it is positive or negative. Thus, through the Family Business study Clinton and Brophy come together and provide information and recommendations on how to run a successful family run business.

 

Check out what the DCU Centre for Family Business is all about:

 

 

 

 

EF327 High Technology Entrepreneurship students from the MInT and MWB programmes recently pitched their final business plan ideas to a panel of industry representatives.

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The EF327 Module introduces students to the theory and practice of entrepreneurship in the context of high technology venture creation. This is a practical module where students will form business teams and gain first hand experience of the creativity, leadership, planning, and team management skills involved in initiating and developing a new venture.

Industry panel members included Geraldine Lavin (Lecturer in High-Technology Entrepreneurship, DCU ), Laura Clifford, (Commercialisation Support Officer, DCU), James Kelliher (Digital Portal Manager, Electric Ireland) Andrea Linehan, (Commercial Director, Grid Finance) and Paddy Quinlan (Accelerators Coordinator, DCU Ryan Academy).

The panel selected the following as the ideas to receive awards:

  • Most Scalable Idea Award – DropTour
  • Best Customer Validation Award – Stash
  • Best Use of Digital Technology Award, sponsored by Electric Ireland – Tap Networking
  • Best Video to Secure Peer to Peer Funding Award, sponsored by GridFinance – SMDJ Technologies (FRANC)
  • Highly Commendable Award – CMeNow

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For more information on Marketing, Innovation and Technology in DCU Business School click here.

DCU Business School invites applications for PhD scholarships. These scholarships will provide support for fulltime PhD study and are open to applicants who students register in Year 1 of the full time PhD programme in the Business School in DCU in September/October 2016. Our PhD programme combines scholarly theory-building with a strong applied focus. Research scholars work under the supervision of an academic expert and are an important part of DCU Business School’s vibrant research community.

The scholarships will allow to undertake research in one of the following specialist disciplines:

  • Accounting
  • Economics, Finance, Entrepreneurship
  • Human Resource Management and Organisational Psychology
  • Management, Operations, Information Systems
  • Marketing

For full details, please view the guidelines for applicants.

Picture the scene.  You’re sitting opposite your boss in the end- of-year performance review meeting.  It’s been a big year for you; you’ve worked really hard and you and your team have delivered great results, in some areas even exceeding targets despite a very difficult business climate.  Your boss looks up and smiles.  “You’ve done a great job this year Brian” she says “I am going to put you down as a 4”.  “A 4!” you cry indignantly “why not a 5? .  “Now you know that nobody really gets a five here…..”.   After further pointless argument you leave the room, determined to reduce the time and effort you put in next year.

The experience described above is not atypical; for many years an end of year appraisal — in which a numeric rating or descriptive equivalent on a scale is communicated from managers to their direct reports — has been the key event in the annual performance management calendar.  The ratings were perceived as a requirement for demonstrable compliance with employment legislation, especially if a problem arose with a particular employee.  Ratings were also perceived as providing “objective” inputs on which important remuneration and promotion decisions could be based and defended.

Once ratings were accepted as necessary, a substantial consulting industry arose to help organisations design and implement their own performance rating process.  Reports advised the adoption or change from five point scales to four and back again, and from numeric scales to descriptive equivalents – e.g., a 3 becomes “meets expectations”, a  4 “exceeds expectations” etc.   Significant resources were allocated to training and retraining managers to implement these processes.   While all of this was happening, academic research focused largely on studies of what rating systems and processes worked best, while too few studies looked at the bigger question of whether ratings should be used at all.

2015 has seen some really important changes in attitudes to performance ratings, in what may become an irresistible trend.  Most recently, HBR reports that “The move away from conventional, ratings-based performance management continues to gain momentum.  By November 2015, at least 52 large companies had shifted from the practice of once-yearly performance appraisals; estimates are that hundreds of other companies are considering following suit. A wide range of industries are represented.”

Ironically, the catalysts for this rethink have been Deloitte and Accenture, two consulting firms who would have been to the fore in the provision of advice on implementing ratings in the past.   Accenture have completely abandoned annual performance reviews for their 330,000 employees with immediate effect, confirming that “We’re going to get rid of probably 90 percent of what we did in the past”.   Deloitte announced in a HBR article in April 2015 that “we realize that our current process for evaluating the work of our people—and then training them, promoting them, and paying them accordingly—is increasingly out of step with our objectives”.  Both firms say they are adopting new processes that will involve more frequent feedback –“nimbler, real-time, and more individualized—something squarely focused on fueling performance in the future rather than assessing it in the past.”

There seems little doubt that few will shed a tear if the types of meetings described in the introduction become a thing of the past.  As researchers, we can’t but be excited about finding ways to make the performance management process more relevant to today’s business needs.  Of course, there is always a danger that those who embrace these trends without due consideration may be in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  It’s worth remembering  that there is substantial research evidence to support retaining key aspects of the performance management process such as goal setting, where research clearly shows that employees who are working to achieve specific, challenging but achievable goals will be on average 16% more productive than others doing the same work, in the same conditions but without such goals.

Watch this space.

Dr John McMackin is a lecturer in our Human Resource Management and Organisational Psychology group in DCU Business School. He holds an MBA from Columbia University, New York and a PhD from the University of Oregon. His area of research is around change management, leadership development and strategic innovation.

For more details about the DCU Executive MBA, currently accepting applications, please visit the DCU Executive MBA course page.

PhD Scholar of DCU Centre for Family Business (CFB), Vanessa Diaz will present at The Academy of Management Annual Meeting, the premier conference for scholarly management and organisation. Ms Diaz is a co-author on the paper entitled Innovation Capability in Family Firms: An Integration Approach.

The Academy of Management Annual Meeting, attracting over 10,000 academics and scholars, will be held in Vancouver, Canada August 7-11th, 2015.

The paper, accepted in April this year, looks at a sample of 1,205 family SME manufacturing firms across Europe, and examines the impact of innovation on the future growth of these firms.  The authors review innovation in terms of technology development, operations, management and transaction capability.

The authors are Dr. Eric Clinton (Director of CFB), Professor Justin Craig (Adjunct Professor of CFB), Dr. Michael Dowling (Associate Investigator in CFB), Vanessa Diaz (PhD scholar of CFB) and Catherine Faherty (PhD scholar of CFB).

This year, Opening Governance is the theme of the 75th AOM Annual Meeting. The conference invites members to consider opportunities to improve the effectiveness and creativity of organisations by restructuring systems at the highest organisational levels.

As the business world continues to recover from the ravages of the recent recession, many experts now warn that we are far from returning to a business-as-usual scenario. Whether it is Rita Gunther McGrath of Columbia Business School telling us that we have entered a new “transient advantage” era, Joseph Badaracco of Harvard calling it a new “Schumpeterian” recombinant economy or Scott Anthony of Innosight (Clayton Christensen’s consultancy arm) terming it the “great disruption,” few expect the old assumptions and formulas that brought success in the past to continue to be effective in the coming decades.

Richard Dobbs, James Manyika and Jonathan Woetzel of McKinsey have just published a new book called No Ordinary Disruption (New York: Public Affairs, 2015) in which they have identified “the four global forces breaking all the trends.” The four are (1) the shifting locus of economic activity and dynamism to emerging markets like China and India, and, more particularly, to about 400-500 cities within those markets, in what they call a “new age of urbanization”; (2) the acceleration in the scope, scale, and economic impact of technology, where the effects of ongoing, rapid advances in processing power and connectivity are being amplified by the big data revolution, the mobile Internet and the “proliferation of new technology-enabled business models;” (3) global demographics and the aging of the human population, where more than 60% of the world’s people already live in countries with fertility rates that have fallen below replacement rates; and (4) ever-increasing global economic interconnectedness and the  expansion in the flows of capital, people and information associated with it, where “south-south” flows between emerging markets have doubled their share of global trade over the last ten years. Taken together, these four shifts are producing “monumental change.”

To take just three examples of how rapidly and radically the world as we have known it up to recently is being transformed, in December 2014 “Cyber Monday” generated $2.65B in online shopping, but just a few weeks earlier on November 11th, China’s “Singles Day,” Alibaba recorded the world’s highest ever single day e-commerce trading total of $9.3B; earlier, in February 2014, Facebook acquired a 5-year old start-up for an amazing $19.3B, and in September 2014, the Indian Space Research Organization successfully put a spacecraft into orbit around Mars, and for a total cost of only $74M, less than it took to produce the award-winning film, Gravity.

The big implication from No Ordinary Disruption is that all CEOs and corporate strategists will have to learn to “reset” the intuitions that up to now have been guiding their perceptions about future opportunities and challenges. “We have to rethink the assumptions that drive our decisions on such crucial issues as consumption, resources, labour, capital and competition.” According to the McKinsey authors, the era we have already entered is full of promise, but also more volatile and “deeply unsettling,” and for business leaders, the intellectual integrity to be willing and able to see the world as it really is, and the humility and persistence to keep learning, have never been more needed. The recent past is no longer a reliable guide to even the next 5 to 10 years, and imagination, not just experience, is now at a premium.

Professor Brian Leavy is a Professor of Strategic Management at DCU Business School and teaches strategy on the Executive MBA programme. Prior to his academic career, he spent eight years as a manufacturing engineer with Digital Equipment Corporation, now part of Hewlett Packard. Brian’s teaching and research interests centre on strategic leadership, competitive analysis and strategy innovation, and he has published over 80 articles, chapters and book reviews on these topics, nationally and internationally. 

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To attend our upcoming taster evening click here

The National Transport Authority (NTA) has appointed Anne Graham, an Executive MBA Graduate of DCU, as its new chief executive.

Anne, a chartered engineer, previously served as director of public transport services within the authority.

She has also worked as an area manager in the southwest area of Dublin city and with local authorities in Dublin as a civil engineer.

DCU Business School wish her every success in this new role!

Find out more about the DCU Executive MBA

Congratulations to Catherine McManus (BSc in Marketing Innovation and Technology 2014) who has won the Marketing Society of Ireland LePere award.

This annual award was set up in commemoration of the late John LePere  and is open to undergraduate marketing students from all Dublin universities, awarded to the student with the highest grade in a marketing module in final year who has gone on to study marketing at postgraduate level.

Catherine is currently studying for her Masters in Marketing at DCU Business School.

Speaking at the event, Joanne Lynch, Programme Director of the MSc in Marketing commented “We are delighted that Catherine has been recognised by the Marketing Society for academic excellence. She is a very worthy recipient of the LePere Award. This is the third year in a row that a DCU student has won this Award with Catherine following Karl Davitt (2013) and Sinead Foy (2012), which highlights the high calibre of our marketing graduates”.

Pictured above are Catherine McManus and the Chairman of the Marketing Society Mark Nolan