Russell Belk, who is widely considered by academics around the world to be “the father of qualitative marketing”, was selected as the inaugural recipient of the newly established Dean’s Research Impact Award at Schulich. The award recognizes faculty members who have demonstrated excellence in research and whose work has had a major impact on management education.

Professor Russell Belk is presented with the inaugural Dean’s Research Impact Award by Schulich Dean Dezsö J. Horváth at Research Day on Jan. 30

Professor Belk, who holds the Kraft Foods Canada Chair in Marketing at Schulich, was presented with the award during Schulich’s 2013 Research Day fair held on Wednesday, January 30. In addition to a luncheon and a panel discussion on “Rethinking Business for the 21st Century”, the event featured detailed poster presentations highlighting new management research projects by many of the school’s leading scholars, several of which have been carried out in collaboration with researchers from other leading universities around the world. Dezsö J. Horváth, Dean of the Schulich School of Business, and Robert Haché, Vice-President, Research & Innovation at York University, delivered the opening remarks.

Professor Belk’s selection as the recipient of the Dean’s Research Impact Award reflects a brilliant and productive career that has generated approximately 18,000 citations, many honours and awards, and the publication of more than 500 articles, books and edited volumes. He is a past recipient of the prestigious Paul D. Converse Award, has held two Fulbright Fellowships as well as honorary professorships on four continents, and is a past recipient of the Sheth Foundation/Journal of Consumer Research Award for Long-Term Contribution to Consumer Research.

The work of Professor Belk will also be featured in a forthcoming 10-volume retrospective, Russell Belk, Sage Legends in Marketing, published by New Delhi: Sage, which will include an interview with Belk and reprints of 160 of his academic papers, along with comments from three other scholars.

“Professor Belk has produced an extraordinary volume of top-calibre research of the sort that keeps Schulich among the world’s leading business schools in management research,” said Dean Horváth. “We are very pleased that our students continue to benefit from Professor Belk’s excellent scholarship and teaching.”

Robert Kozinets, Professor of Marketing and Chair of Schulich’s Marketing department, had this to say about Russell Belk: “He is an amazing colleague, not only in terms of his recognition, but the quality and quantity of his work, the incredible variety of his co-authors, the open-mindedness of his approach, the consistent scholarly interest in social rather than corporate betterment and the generosity he extends to new, international and growing scholars. He truly deserves every honour he has achieved, and more.”

Approximately 100 people attended the inaugural Schulich Research Day and examined detailed poster presentations highlighting new management research projects by a number of the School’s leading scholars

Among the Research Day presentations were:

• “Homelessness: The Role of Accounting in Structuring Poverty,” by Cameron Graham, Associate Professor of Accounting;
• “Modern Slavery as a Management Practice,” by Andrew Crane, George R. Gardiner Professor of Business Ethics and Director of the Schulich Centre of Excellence in Responsible Business; and
• “Timing a Smooth and Efficient Retirement Income Plan: To Drawdown the TFSA, RRSP or Neither?,” by Moshe A. Milevsky, Associate Professor of Finance, in collaboration with Thomas Salisbury and Huaxiong Huang of York University’s Department of Mathematics. 
  

The poster session provided guests with a place to meet for collegial discussion and networking, as well as the opportunity to learn about Schulich’s research expertise, while engaging with academics and practitioners from the research community. Some of the research looked at homelessness and the role of accounting in structuring poverty; timing a smooth and efficient retirement income plane; logic violations – emotions, institutional expectations and the dynamics of emotive institutional work; and making markets work for poor producers in least developed countries.

To view all the poster presentations, click here.

Pauline Shum, Associate Professor of Finance and Director of the Master of Finance (MF) Program at Schulich, explains her latest research findings on leveraged ETF rebalancing and intraday share price volatility

“One year after establishing a niche MBA in Global Mining Management, York University’s Schulich School of Business has received its first major gift to expand the program,” wrote The Globe and Mail on Friday, November 30.

Inmet Mining Corporation announced a one million dollar gift to the Schulich School of Business at York University to support Schulich’s new MBA specialization in Global Mining Management on Friday.  The Inmet gift will be fulfilled by four annual payments of $250,000 in each of the years from 2012 – 2015.

“The donation from the Canadian-based, globally-active mining firm is one sign of the growing importance of specialty MBAs to business – in this case the mining industry’s concern about a shortage of top executives – and to Canadian business schools as they seek to expand on the mature MBA market in Canada,” wrote The Globe.

The Inmet gift will be used to further the growth and development of the Global Mining Management specialization through increased teaching capacity, academic research, industry outreach and scholarships.  The specialization is the most comprehensive management education program of its kind and was established to meet the mining industry’s concerns about a looming shortage of mining executives to manage the  industry’s growing complexities and challenges in the coming decades.  Graduates of the Global Mining Management specialization will not only work in the mining and resource-related industries, but will also pursue careers with financial institutions, engineering companies, and consulting, accounting, legal firms and other sectors that service the mining industry.

“Schulich’s MBA specialization in mining is helping to prepare future business leaders for a key industry in Canada and around the world,” said Dezsö J. Horváth, Dean of the Schulich School of Business.

“Inmet is taking a leadership position in addressing a significant need for the entire mining industry,” said Richard Ross, Director of Schulich’s Global Mining Management program and an executive-in-residence at the school.  “This gift from Inmet is a major step for Schulich’s Global Mining Management program in meeting its vision of developing and mentoring the next generation of business leaders in one of the world’s most vital and challenging sectors.”

Jochen Tilk, President and Chief Executive Officer of Inmet commented “We understand the critical need for sector-specific training and study, and are pleased to recognize the grounding being offered  through Schulich’s Global Mining Management program.  We are particularly proud to support the focus on corporate responsibility, since skills in this area have become essential for a well-rounded mining executive.”

The Inmet gift was announced by Jochen Tilk at a private luncheon and reception attended by senior academics and industry representatives.  Following the reception, Tilk delivered the opening keynote address at the Schulich International Case Competition, which focuses on community engagement in the mining industry.  Inmet is the core sponsor of this year’s case competition and Craig Ford, Inmet’s Vice President, Corporate Responsibility is one of the competition’s judges.

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Canada has a golden opportunity to capitalize on its ability to deliver higher education globally, wrote Dezsö J. Horváth, Dean of the Schulich School of Business and Tanna H. Schulich Chair in Strategic Management, in the Financial Post on Wednesday, November 6:

As global trade has increased, Canada’s share of exports and foreign direct investment has been slowly but steadily declining. Our country’s competitiveness in the global arena also continues to fall — we now rank 14th in the world, down from ninth in 2009, according to the World Economic Forum.

But Canada has a golden opportunity to make up lost ground by capitalizing on one area where we have the potential to be an economic powerhouse: higher education. The fact is, education is a knowledge-intensive export. It also happens to be a service we’re very good at providing: The best Canadian colleges and universities deliver education programs at a level that few other countries can match, available in both official languages. A number of our universities consistently rank among the best globally, as do a number of Canadian business schools and specialized programs in disciplines and fields ranging from aquaculture to computer animation.

Already, higher education is Canada’s eighth-largest export sector, contributing some $7.7-billion to the national economy in 2010, according to Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada. (Education exports include foreign students studying in Canada, as well as the delivery of educational programs in foreign countries by Canadian-based schools, whether by satellite campus, institutional partnering or online learning.) To cite one example, in 2008 Canada’s No. 1 export to China was not wheat or oil but education, bringing in $1.3-billion in revenues. 

Yet so far, Canada — with a market share of about 5% — has barely tapped into the growing demand for higher education. With global enrolment in higher education expected to grow from 3.3 million students in 2008 to approximately eight million by 2025, the Canadian economy has much at stake. We have all the right ingredients to become a leading supplier to Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, where new demand is emerging faster than many countries in those regions can meet it. Along with Canada’s excellent schools, multicultural welcome mat, stable financial system and high quality-of-life cachet, we can become a world leader in higher education, right alongside the U.S. and the U.K., which together command about one-third of the global market. If we don’t step up to supply the new demand for knowledge, other hungrier countries will.

In terms of the number of foreign students enrolled in higher education, Canada currently places fourth among English-speaking countries, behind third-place Australia. It’s time for Canada to tear a page from the lesson book of Australia and the U.K., which have been immensely successful in marketing abroad by employing a countrywide, unified approach to the branding and marketing of their higher education offerings. Our ad hoc, province-by-province campaigns and highly fragmented approaches have not served us well.

International students inject badly needed funding into both our post-secondary education sector and the national economy. Because foreign students pay a lot more in tuition on average than Canadian students, they provide a critical revenue stream that can be reinvested to maintain and enhance the quality of faculty, infrastructure and programs at Canada’s post-secondary institutions, allowing our schools to remain globally competitive. These higher fees contribute significantly to our national economy: In a 2009 report prepared by Roslyn Kunin & Associates for Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, international students enrolled in post-secondary studies in Canada pumped $6.5-billion into the Canadian economy and helped generate more than 83,000 jobs. And if we doubled or tripled our intake of international students, the economic spinoffs would likewise grow significantly.

Bottom line: Canada could easily expand our global market share in the decade ahead. In fact, this is already happening for Canadian business schools, which have experienced the fastest growth worldwide in foreign student applications in recent years, according to the OECD, largely as a result of friendly visa conditions. While the U.S. and U.K. have been closing their doors to foreign students by curtailing visas and making it harder to stay and work in those countries after graduation, Canada relaxed its rules in 2008 to allow international students enrolled in a two-year master’s or MBA degree program to work here for three years following graduation.

Canadian business schools in particular have taken a more transnational approach by providing degrees in foreign markets. The Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario, for example, has been delivering an executive MBA in Hong Kong and the Schulich School of Business at York University has been delivering an MBA in Mumbai. When Schulich’s new Hyderabad campus opens in 2013, Schulich will be uniquely positioned as the first foreign school in India to deliver a standalone MBA when that country fully opens its doors to foreign educational institutions.

As the Canadian government considers how to make higher education a key plank in Canada’s global economic strategy, it should explore ways to align our education goals with our immigration and trade policies. Foreign students can augment our access to the skilled knowledge workers that the Canadian economy needs to grow, for instance. Student visas could be further enhanced to offer a more expedient pathway to landed immigrant status and eventual citizenship.  And future trade agreement negotiations should seek to open up new markets for Canadian education exports.

Canada’s successful adaptation to the new global education age will require a new way of thinking, one that not only seeks to bring in more students but also to expand into rapidly growing, untapped markets.

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After 24 years at Schulich, Dezsö Horváth is Canada’s longest-serving business school dean. He didn’t get there by thinking small, wrote Canadian Business on October 31:

When it comes to teaching about sustainability, Canadian business schools are a study in contrasts, wrote The Globe and Mail on Tuesday, September 18. For some, weaving social, environmental and ethical issues into the core curriculum is an explicit priority, with sustainability engrained in course work, research chairs and other initiatives. For others, not so much, according to the 2012 survey of MBA programs by Corporate Knights magazine.

“We’re seeing growth in the top half of schools,” says Jeremy Runnalls, managing editor of the magazine, which examined programs at 35 schools this year. Others, he says, “are much more interested in larger buildings, getting more big-name professors and pursuing an old-school way of building up their MBA programs.”

The survey looks for sustainability topics in course offerings, faculty research and student activities. This year, one-third of MBA programs appear to make no mention of sustainability while only another 31 per cent offered a course on ethics, according to the survey. “That is unacceptable to us,” says Mr. Runnalls.

Since the magazine’s first survey in 2003, York University’s Schulich School of Business has led the pack – and did so again this year.

Starting in the early 1990s, Schulich offered endowed chairs in ethics and business and sustainability, adding one on corporate social responsibility in 2003. Dean Dezsö Horváth estimates that three-quarters of his faculty incorporate “triple bottom line” issues of profits, social impact and environmental responsibility in their teaching.

“We call it ‘responsible enterprise,’ ” he says, a term to encompass the disparate concerns facing companies. “Economic issues, in today’s world, are not isolated from social, political and environmental issues.”

As evidence, he cites the 2008 financial meltdown that emphasized the integrated nature of the global economy and the danger of short-term results that reward the few at the expense of the many.

Changing global circumstances have implications for teaching business, he argues.

“Those schools which are not incorporating it [sustainability] in their curriculum and take it seriously are not training people for the 21st Century,” says Dean Horváth. “Increasingly, they are not going to have graduates who are going to be attractive.”

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It’s time for Canadian businesses to wean themselves off traditional industries and tried-and-true markets, to instead develop – and commercialize – innovative technologies and ideas, and sell them to new markets around the world, writes Schulich’s Dean Dezsö J. Horváth, Tanna H. Schulich Chair in Strategic Management, and Matthias Kipping, a professor of policy and chair in business history, in The Globe and Mail on Thursday, July 5.

Canada is truly blessed. It has an abundance of natural resources coveted by other nations, which include metals, oil and gas, as well as water, and it shares its only border and a free trade area with the world’s most prosperous economy. For Canada’s companies and its economy, however, these are mixed blessings.

In the natural resources and mining sectors, Canada has indeed been a world-class player, spawning a dense ecology of highly skilled human resources providing technical, financial, legal, accounting and consulting services that make Toronto the global hub of the mining industry and Calgary a world leader in oil and gas.

Our finance industry has been world-class too: Canada’s banks are rated among the world’s best, as are – often overlooked – our life insurance companies, which have played a leading role in both developed and emerging markets since the late 19th century.

As for the United States, although some Canadian firms have prospered by setting up shop south of the border, others returned with bloodied noses and sizable losses. The key point is Canadian companies have been too fixated on the United States – both the winners and the losers might have done better by going abroad to markets in Latin America, Europe and Asia.

Relying on past successes and old trade patterns has kept us from moving more quickly into global markets, beyond North America and into the knowledge- and research-intensive industries of the so-called “third industrial revolution.” Instead, Canada has clung to the manufacturing jobs of the second industrial revolution, often in foreign branch plants, which are increasingly moving to lower-cost countries.

Rather than trying to stem the inexorable exodus with billions of dollars in subsidies, particularly in the troubled auto industry, Canada’s federal and provincial governments would do better to invest in those industries and activities that can propel the country and its companies into a leading role in the global economy of the 21st century.

To find out what needs to be done, continue reading the article in The Globe and Mail…

Dezsö J. Horváth has been reappointed to lead the Schulich School of Business for an unprecedented sixth term. Dean Horváth was first appointed in 1988, making his tenure one of the longest at any business school in the world.

Dezsö J. Horváth

“I am pleased to have been appointed to a sixth straight term as Dean of the Schulich School of Business,” said Dezsö Horváth. “Over the years, my colleagues and I have managed to position Schulich as a significant force in management education globally. The entire Schulich community – our faculty, students and staff, our alumni, advisory board members and donors alike – have been instrumental in making this happen. Equally transformative has been the generous and unwavering support provided by Seymour Schulich over many years, which has given us the confidence to expand our global footprint and to compete at the highest level. I look forward to taking on the challenges and capitalizing on the opportunities that lie ahead as we strive to enhance our School’s standing as one of the world’s leading centres of management education.”

“One of the world’s longest serving business school deans, Prof Horváth’s next term – starting in July 2013 – will extend his tenure until 2016,” wrote the Financial Times of London on June 29. “Should he complete this period, it would represent a deanship longer than Donald Jacob’s remarkable 26-year tenure (1975-2001) as dean of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.”

“Prof Horváth’s stewardship has overseen many significant developments at the school, not least its relocation in 2003 to the $104m Seymour Schulich Building – named after the school’s benefactor. Notable among his tenure’s achievements have been the launch of the successful Kellogg-Schulich Executive MBA – ranked 11th in the FT EMBA Ranking 2011 – and of the Schulich MBA in India, launched in partnership with the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research in 2010.”

Dean Horváth first came to Schulich in 1976 as a visiting professor from the University of Umeå, Sweden, where he had also completed his MBA and PhD in management. He was named an associate professor at York in 1977 and became a full professor in 1981. He currently holds the Tanna H. Schulich Chair in Strategic Management.

In 2004, Horváth was named Dean of the Year by the Academy of International Business (AIB), the world’s leading association of scholars in the field of international business. This award is given in recognition of “outstanding leadership in various aspects of internationalization, including programs, research and curriculum development, and outreach.” And in 2008, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada for his academic leadership and sustained commitment to business education.

On becoming Dean in 1988, Horváth worked with internal and external stakeholders to position Schulich as “Canada’s Global Business School™”. Since then, Schulich has opened satellite centres in Beijing and Shanghai, China; Mumbai, India; Seoul, South Korea; Mexico City, Mexico; São Paulo, Brazil and Moscow, Russia and formed academic exchange agreements with more than 80 leading international business schools in close to 40 countries.

Under Dean Horváth’s leadership, Schulich has risen steadily in global rankings. Schulich’s MBA program is ranked #2 in the world by the Aspen Institute (a Washington, DC-based leadership think tank) in a global survey that identified which schools are doing the best job of preparing future business leaders for the environmental, social and ethical complexities of modern-day business. Schulich’s MBA program is also ranked among the world’s leading schools by The Economist, Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek and Expansión (a Time Warner publication based in Mexico City). The Kellogg global network of EMBA partner schools, which includes the Kellogg- Schulich EMBA, is ranked #5 in the world by The Wall Street Journal, and the Kellogg-Schulich EMBA is ranked #1 in Canada by the Financial Times of London.

The reappointment for Dean Horváth’s new three-year term was approved by the executive committee of the Board of Governors of York University and will take effect July 1, 2013.

After countless nights studying, researching and working hard to enrich their knowledge and hone their skills, the Class of 2012 graduated from the Schulich School of Business at York University’s Convocation ceremony on June 14.

“The business world of tomorrow will be even more global in scope and intensity than it is today,” said Dean Dezsö J. Horváth in his Convocation address. “At Schulich, our responsibility has always been to map out the kind of business world that our graduates will be working in now and in the future, and then give them the tools and skills they will need to manage and succeed in that world. “

“Our number one priority is to deliver business degrees that are designed for the 21st century ­– and I believe we have done this. We have given each of you the business fundamentals that will allow you not only to survive – but to thrive – in this changing environment.”

One person who is not only surveying the emerging business landscape, but also playing an active role in shaping it, was presented with an honorary doctor of laws degree at the ceremony – Dominic Barton, Worldwide Managing Director, McKinsey and Company.

In his Convocation address, Mr. Barton discussed the forces which he believes, over the next two decades, will fundamentally re-shape the global economy – from the rise of emerging economies in Asia, Africa and South America to the rapid changes in technology to increased strains on natural resources –and have important implications for how the Class of 2012, as the next generation of business leaders,  approach their responsibilities.

“It’s not so much about what you do as a leader – how you spend your time, align your organization, and lay out strategy,” he said. “It’s about who you are as a person – your character.”

He advised graduates to develop three attributes: be resilient, find purpose and, above all, be interesting.

“You are going to be leading in one of the most interesting times in history,” he said. “The requirements that we need from you to make this a successful century are high, so I not only wish the best, we need you to be the best leaders you can possibly be.”

Several Master’s-Level graduates who have already demonstrated their leadership potential during their time at Schulich were presented with awards at Convocation:

Chance Moran

• The Graduate Business Council (GBC) Academic Achievement Awards are presented to graduating MBA, IMBA or MPA students with the highest graduating average. Chance Moran (MBA ’12) was presented with the Gold Medal for achieving the highest graduating average, Rebecca Schoenhardt (MBA ’12) received the Silver Medal and Shaun Quennell (MBA ’12) received the Bronze Medal

Rebecca Schoenhardt

• Satsuko Van Antwerp (IMBA ’12) was presented with the Lorna Wright IMBA (International MBA) Graduation Award. This award is presented to a graduate who has made selfless contributions to the development of the IMBA program through community service within the faculty and demonstrated active participation in student life

• Michelle Hassen (IMBA ’12) was presented with the Charles S. Mayer IMBA Medal of Excellence. This medal honours the student graduating from the IMBA program who has demonstrated not only academic excellence and language ability, but who has also contributed significantly to student life within the School and to the ongoing excellence of the IMBA program

Dean Horváth, Keith Loo and Alexandros Athanasopoulos

• Keith Loo (MBA ’12) and Alexandros Athanasopoulos (MBA ’12) were presented with the Tim Dye Memorial Scholarship for demonstrating a commitment to student life through involvement in extracurricular activities, student government or volunteer positions

• Phil Baron (MBA ’12) was presented with the CoreNet Global Scholarship in Real Property. Sponsored by the International Association of Corporate Real Estate Executives, this award is presented to an MBA student in the Real Property specialization who has made a significant contribution to the success of the program through the activities of the Real Property Development Association

• Sherena Hussain (MBA/JD ’12) was presented with the Hennick Medal for Academic Excellence. The medal is awarded to the top student graduating from the MBA/JD program with the highest cumulative grade point average over their two degrees
  

  Kendal Bradley

• Kendal Bradley (MBA ’12) was presented with the Graduate Business Council (GBC) Academic Achievement Award. This award is presented to the graduating MBA, IMBA or MPA student who has contributed the most to his/her program
• Derek Ludlow (IMBA ’12) was presented with theAmit Kumar Graduation Award for Academic Excellence, which is awarded to the graduating IMBA student who has achieved the highest cumulative grade point average over the five terms of the program
  

  Sudeep Garg

• Sudeep Garg (MBA ’12) was presented with the Graduate Award for Outstanding Contribution. This award is presented to the student who demonstrated dedication to both the Schulich School of Business and fellow students. The recipient must have made a positive impact on student life through involvement in extracurricular activities such as student government, student publications, clubs, sports or other events and activities
• Ashlee Goodfellow (MPA ’12) and Emma Walker (MBA ’12) were presented with the H. Ian Macdonald Award in Public Administration. This award is presented to the MPA student with the highest GPA in his/her core courses who demonstrate financial need

“I am proud to know you; proud of all that you have accomplished during your time with us,” said Dean Horváth in his closing remarks at Convocation. “And I expect great things of you in the years ahead.  The 21st century is yours.  It is now your turn to manage and move forward, to build and to grow.”

Congratulations to the Class of 2012!

Let’s look back on some of the tremendous achievements made by the Class 2012 throughout the 2011-2012 academic year:

• Phil Baron (MBA ’12), Luke Chisholm (MBA ’12), Max Vo (MBA  ’12) and Wes Myles (Post-MBA Diploma in Advanced Management ‘12) won the Kent Roberts Trophy at the prestigious MIT Commercial Real Estate Case Competition in Boston

• Callie Pak (BBA ’12) and Timothy Mark (iBBA ’12), as well as Joanna Silva (BBA anticipated ’13), defeated participants from some of Canada’s top business schools to win the 2012 L’Oréal Brandstorm marketing competition. As national champions, the Schulich team participated in the international finals in Paris, France where they were semi-finalists. All three of the team members are now working for L’Oreal. Timothy and Callie were hired as full-time employees and Joanna is a summer intern

• Izabella Lukow (iBBA ’12), Jennie Li (iBBA ’12) and Robbie Gizzie (iBBA ’12) were also finalists at the L’Oréal Brandstorm national championships in Montréal. Only six out of 70 teams were selected to compete in the national finals

• Maxwell Vo (MBA ’12), Anastasia Malina (MBA ’12) and Sarah Hsu (MBA  ’12), as well as Amber Lam (MBA/JD  ’14), won the ARGUS Software University Challenge in Houston, an online case analysis competition using Argus DCF Valuation Software, a widely-used real estate valuation tool within the real estate industry

• Phil Baron (MBA ’12), Luke Chisholm (MBA ’12) and Jamil Bundalli (MBA ’12) beat competing teams from the Rotman and Rogers business schools to win the second annual Developers’ Den case competition, hosted by the Schulich School of Business and RealNet Canada. Judges for the event included some of the top names in the real estate industry

• Rebecca Schoenhardt (MBA ’12), as well as Shane Dixon (MF Candidate Fall ’12), Sean Moore (MF Candidate Fall ’12), Malcolm MacQuarrie (MF Candidate Fall ’12), and Zac Wang (MF Candidate Fall ’12) made it to the Canadian regional finals of the CFA Institute Research Challenge. The annual competition is designed to promote best practices in equity research through mentoring and intensive training in company analysis and presentation skills

• Latursia Kathiraveluppillai (BBA ’12), Arnold Lai (BBA ’12) and Karen Tran (BBA ’12), as well as Shelley Li, won gold at the CMA Ontario 7th annual Case Competition. Teams were required to strategically advise a fictional company’s senior management on a change management plan using web-based simulation software

• Michelle Hassen (IMBA ’12) and Rafal Smerd (MBA ’12), as well as Deanna Wu (MBA Candidate Fall ’12) and Jeff Butchereit (MBA ’13), won the inaugural Schulich International Case Competition in Sustainability. Held November 25-26, the competition asked enterprising MBA students to solve a complex issue facing one of the world’s most vital and challenging sectors, the mining industry

• Schulich MBA student Daniel Warner (MBA  ’12) was named the winner of the Media & Communication category at the inaugural Notable Awards that brought together Canada’s top young professionals

• Ashlee Goodfellow (MPA ’12), along with Schulich MBA students Sein Weir, Rafik Dawood and Bori Csillag, won the Rotman Corporate Social Responsibility Case Competition in January, making this the second year in a row that a Schulich team has won this national competition

• Geoffrey Matthews (MBA  ’12) finished in first place and won $10,000 at the Oxford Properties Group 2011 Real Estate Research Competition. Participants were asked to complete an essay that responded to the following question: “The Canadian office market declined less in the financial downturn than the US and UK office markets. Why?” Schulich MBA student Christopher Edey finished second and took home a prize of $2,500

Tapping into the increasingly fashionable market for business analytics, Canadian business school Schulich, at York University, is to launch a masters degree in the subject in September 2012, wrote the Financial Times of London on Friday, May 25.

The 12-month MSc in Business Analytics programme will involve a semester working on a data analysis project which is directly applicable to the corporate world. Making sense of the ever-increasingly amount of available data is becoming a priority for companies in sectors as diverse as online retailing, banking, publishing and healthcare.

The article reports the new program is one of several specialized masters degrees offered by the School, including a specialization in global mining management, which will launch this fall, and an MSc in Accounting , which will launch in September 2013.

Toronto is the mining finance capital of the world, says [Schulich Dean Dezsö J.] Horváth, with more than 1,500 mining companies and industry leaders situated there. The specialisation is intended for future investment bankers, investors and consultants as well as those who intend to work in the mining industry.

Please read the full article in the Financial Times of London…

In life, as in commerce, a Plan B is often a strategic necessity, wrote The Globe and Mail on Friday, April 27th.

The maxim also holds true for York University’s Schulich School of Business as it prepares to open a campus in India in September, 2013.

Construction is under way for the $100-million campus in Hyderabad, but India’s Parliament has yet to pass the Foreign Educational Institutions Act that would permit Schulich and other foreign higher education entities to operate stand-alone facilities in the country. Earlier this month, Kapil Sibal, India’s minister for human resource development and responsible for the legislation, urged swift passage of the bill after almost two years of delay, according to The Times of India.

Amid uncertain Indian politics, though, the legislation may not be in place when Schulich’s campus opens next year.

That’s why business dean Dezsö Horváth has his Plan B – a twinning arrangement with a local Hyderabad school, as required under current Indian rules.

“I am going to India to make Plan B a full reality, just in case,” says dean Horváth, who heads there next month to choose one of four possible partners.

With or without the Indian legislation in place, Schulich will take in 60 students in 2013 and teach the same curriculum as in Toronto for the two-year MBA. If the Indian bill is not approved by 2014, Schulich would send Hyderabad students to Toronto for a semester to complete their degree (and comply with Indian rules).

Assuming passage of the bill, Schulich would accept 120 students in 2014 and grow to its maximum enrolment of 360 students by 2017, with a 60-40 split of Indian and international students, respectively, who spend two years in Hyderabad to earn their MBA.

Without the new legislation, however, Schulich would be forced to slow its intake of students in Hyderabad because they would have to come to Toronto for a semester to complete their degree. In effect, the longer India takes to approve its legislation, the slower the pace at which the Schulich campus reaches capacity. In the meantime, Schulich needs to work with a local partner.

“I have been asked, ‘Why don’t you violate the rules?’” says dean Horváth. “I want to stay here for the long term and so I will live up to the rules.”

Schulich, one of several international business schools eager to plant the flag in India, is not putting up its own money to build the 15-acre campus near the Hyderabad International Airport. Instead, GMR Varalakshmi Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Indian infrastructure giant GMR Group, is paying for the project and will hand over the campus to Schulich for $1 a year.

The school’s experience in India offers an object lesson for Canadian business, says Schulich’s James McKellar, who is overseeing development of the new campus.

“We have been in India for 15 years,” says Prof. McKellar, who shares dean Horvath’s confidence about ultimate passage of the legislation. “We knew the situation and we knew we had to have a Plan B.”

The message for Canadian business, he says, is: “Get out in the world and learn how to do business with these other countries.”

As important, he adds, “You should in no way disrespect the government and laws of those [overseas] countries. It is not in your interest.

“Just work at it and people will begin to help you,” says the professor, who accompanies dean Horváth to India next month.

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