By Philip A. Cola, PhD, Associate Director, Academic Affairs, DM Programs
Earlier this year, I was re-elected to serve a second term on the Board of the Executive Doctor of Business Administration Council (EDBAC). This will be for an additional three years or through May, 2024. This has been a wonderful learning experience for me in running the board elections each spring (unless my name was on the ballot) where the identified directors of the 65 member DBA programs from all over the world participate in an election for the board members.
Currently, the board is represented by 13 elected members including a designated alumni member. Of these 13 members, 7 members come from DBA programs based in the United States and 6 members come from international DBA programs in Canada, France, Belgium and the United Kingdom. It is truly a diverse group of practitioner scholars coming together to form this meaningful community. I have also been involved in updating various aspects of the EDBAC by-laws, reviewing applications for new EDBAC member institutions, chairing the doctoral consortia at the Engagement Management Scholarship (EMS) meetings, and of course participating at length in the planning of the EMS meetings conducted and\or managed in Antwerp, Cleveland and Miami over the past three years. Next year’s meeting is now set for September 8-10, 2022 and will take place at the Universidad Pan Americana in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Though data is still coming in, by all accounts to date, the recently completed EMS conference, at Florida International University (FIU) was a big success. More than 230 people registered from all over the world and of those approximately one-third were able to attend the conference in person in Miami. The EDBAC is recommending that future conferences adopt the hybrid model that was utilized this past year at FIU as the Board feels that hybrid conferences are likely the wave of the future and certainly the near-future. The Board will work with the organizers in Guadalajara to ensure that the cost to attend is reasonable for both in-person and virtual attendance and that the hybrid model utilized will bring value to any attendee.
Once again, I was able to help organize the Doctoral Consortium and to participate as doctoral consortium faculty. The doctoral consortium had 66 attendees that presented their work across 10 groups mentored by 22 faculty members. I was partnered with Ceridwyn King, PhD from Temple University and we both very much enjoyed getting to know the eight students assigned to our group of which 3 were based in the United States and 5 Internationally (i.e., Mexico, Canada, Lebanon, the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia). Together we gave a lot of positive and constructive feedback that should help propel the students forward in their doctoral journeys. The students have been reaching out for further clarifications and to thank us for our time and efforts.
The Weatherhead DBA Program had 6 students participate in the doctoral consortium at FIU this year. They were Curtis Merriweather Jr., Michael Cauley, Vijaya Parameswaran, Todd Dutkin, Luis Almanza, and Roman Terekhin. Kalle and I are very proud of each of these students for the extra time, effort and resources that they dedicated to participation. By all accounts, that are available to me post conference, each of the students found that participation was valuable in order to receive feedback on their research. Also, it remains clear that the Weatherhead DBA Program continues to be very strong and highly regarded relative to the rigor surrounding our research method and design approaches.
The annual EMS meeting concludes with an EDBAC board meeting and it was at this meeting that the Board made a number of suggestions for continuing to improve the EMS annual conference. The two suggestions that I put forward were as follows:
1) Ensure that the Doctoral Consortium is predominantly about doctoral student presentations and feedback from faculty. This year there were a number of talks for the doctoral students and two short periods of time for their presentations and discussion with faculty. We will in the future go back more toward an agenda as follows:
a. Opening keynote address;
b. Three hours of student presentations and feedback;
c. Lunch;
d. Three more hours of student presentations and feedback and;
e. Closing remarks.
This will ensure that every student is allotted sufficient time for discussion about their research.
2) I also made a suggestion that we change the approach to the Alumni Consortium which has been a series of presentations or panels from alumni. I felt that we could readily include those types of presentations and panels from alumni into the regular conference proceedings and then utilize the alumni consortium as a venue for alumni to present their research and receive feedback from faculty. This would mirror the activity of the doctoral consortium and provide an outlet for alumni to discuss research ideas with faculty at EMS. The EDBAC Board all felt that this was a reasonable suggestion and that such would engage alumni from more DBA programs in a more meaningful way.
I would love to hear your feedback on these ideas, or other ideas that you have about the EDBAC or the EMS Conference, and you can send me a note or your thoughts at pac4@case.edu which I can share anonymously with the EDBAC Board as “student or alumni feedback”.
