By Harry King
NUI Galway has recently announced four professional appointments in the J.E Cairnes School of Business and Economics. Professor Esther Tippmann was appointed professor of Strategy, Leadership and Change, Professor Jonathan Levie was appointed professor of Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, Professor Alma McCarthy who was appointed professor of Public Sector Management and Professor Kate Kenny was appointed Professor of Business and Society.
Professor Esther Tippmann, who previously taught at UCD and was a Research Fellow at Grenoble Ecole de Management in France, has researched the area that resolves around strategic challenges of global organizations, which include multinational companies and scaling or high-growth ventures. She is currently a Senior Editor for “The Journal of World Business” and is also involved in editing “The Journal of International Business Studies and Long-Range Planning”.
Professor Jonathan Levie, who was previously a professor in the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, is an expert in entrepreneurial ecosystems and entrepreneurial growth and he hopes to provide leadership across NUI Galway’s eco–system of entrepreneurship and innovation. He has held research and teaching jobs in London Business School, Babson College, INSTEAD (Graduate Business School) and University College Cork. He is also the current head of a research and innovation committee for the Global Research and Innovation Committee.
Professor Kate Kenny has held a research fellowship at both Cambridge and Harvard University. Kate’s work and research focuses on identity, affect, power and whistleblowing. She has co-authored the books “Understanding Identity and Organizations” and “Whistleblowing: Toward a New Theory.” She currently serves on the editorial board of two FT50 journals. Her work has been in published in a range of journals that include “Organization Studies” and “Gender work and Organizations”.
On the other hand, Professor Alma McCarthy’s area of expertise involves public sector leadership and human resource development. Similar to Professor Kenny, Professor McCarthy has co-authored books and also a series of articles in highly renowned business journals. She is a member of the America Academy of Management and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, among other organizations. She is also currently leading a senior civil service leadership development evaluation project and report. Complementing this, she is the Principal Investigator for the science foundation research project, which is gathering data in a large range of countries.
Whilst all four of the new appointees are extremely busy, SIN managed to briefly grab hold of Jonathan Levie and asked him about his style of teaching when it comes to a creative field like entrepreneurship. “I’ve been teaching entrepreneurship for 35 years and my approach is ‘useful learning’. Entrepreneurs are keen to learn, but only if it is useful to them, and I think students feel the same. In the classroom, I use what works with entrepreneurs, and run my classes so that students get to feel what being entrepreneurial feels like, either by working with entrepreneurs, for example on live consultancy projects, or actively working on new ways of creating economic, social or environmental value. In the future, I’d like to enable much more interdisciplinary learning, where students doing very different subjects get to work together on real research projects that could create useful outputs for society.”
The school has said that these appointments reflect a multi-year action plan that the School has developed to cement its position among the top business schools in the country, and also as a global Business School.
