Greetings from the Director

 

By Kalle Lyytinen

Becoming a practitioner scholar covers building competencies in many domains and achieving all of them in a relatively short time is always a challenge. We briefly introduced and discussed all those competencies in our article “The Impact of Executive Doctoral Programs on Management Practice with Morgan Bulger and Paul Salipante in Engaged Management ReView in (2018) (https://commons.case.edu/emr/vol2/iss1/2/) where we reviewed the development of the competencies among our alumni and students based on their interviews. 

The article differentiates six competencies covering the program’s personal impact on: 1) cognitive development; 2) academic contribution; 3) practical impact; 4) career mobility; 5) identity transformation; and 6) community belonging. In our efforts to shape and improve the impact in those competencies the primary, and most visible one, has always been the cognitive development that later crystallize in academic and practical impact such as new books and publications in academic contribution and new solution approaches, knowledge products or participation in and influencing significant policy decisions in practical impact. For constantly improving cognitive development and its assessment, we have carried out cyclical and systematic curriculum reviews and integrated new research approaches or new content in a systematic manner to our curriculum. One such milestone will be achieved this year when we start executing a new revised curriculum, which introduces several significant changes that we expect to shape both cognitive development in methods, but also allowing better focus on how the DBA students grow better prepared for academic contribution and practical impact. To this end, we are introducing new sessions and workshops into the program that develop and hone their academic and practical contribution.

The developments in these competencies manifest ultimately in identity transformation and changes in community belonging. One element in such identity transformation is how to promote students’ active engagement in practitioner-scholar communities which allow students to build their own voice and standing in various academic and professional communities and to learn to establish relationships and new forms of belonging and contribution in such communities. Over the history of the program we have contributed in many ways to such practices and built arenas for identity transformation and opportunities for community belonging. We were one of the founders of the Engaged Management Scholarship conference and organized its inaugural conference 13 years ago. The conference has since then become an intellectual home and primary meeting place for practitioner-scholars, DBA students, faculty and alumni interested in and focused on problem driven engaged management research. Every year several students, faculty and alumni attend this conference and contribute to its continued success. We expect the same for this year’s conference which will be held in Calgary September 7-9, 2023. 

We have also actively supported and expected our student’s participation in Academy of Management meetings or other major academic events as part of their journey towards practitioner-scholar identity. One element of this experience and development is that we expect our students to prepare and submit a conference article for review during their study, and if accepted, present it to an academic audience. This has resulted over the years in successful and instructive presentations in many leading academic conferences such as AoM, AAA, AMA, ICIS, INFORMS, or Decision Sciences with good results. One experience of such engagements has been the student’s increased confidence in their research and also formation of academic identity by being able to participate in scholarly debates and discussions as a fully fledged participant. Many of our students have successfully continued in this trajectory and become active members and leaders in several of the Academy of Management Divisions. To serve a similar goal we later created the Engagement Practitioner Scholarship at Case initiative which engages both our students and alumni in academic research and related community building involving presentations, workshops and so on. This arrangement offers a more flexible, grass-roots approach to continue to maintain academic identity and participate in the ‘invisible college’ of academics while working in practice.

A recent addition to our efforts to establish and promote identity transformation has been the creation of research partnerships and collaboration with other universities and their practitioner oriented doctoral students. To this end, we ran an initial PhD research workshop in January 2020 just before COVID-19 pandemic with PhD students of Aalto University’s (Helsinki, Finland) department of Industrial and Engineering management (DIEM). The department is one of the leading academic departments in Europe in areas like entrepreneurship, technology management, human resources and IS/operations research topics with a large number of industrial PhD students working within companies. The first experience with 7 students was so successful that we renewed the visit in January 2023 after COVID. Five PhD students (and two of their spouses)  from the 12th cohort of PhD in DSS attended a joint one day PhD seminar with six PhD students from DIEM department on January 28, 2023  as part of their fourth residency. 

The residency included also a sightseeing tour around Helsinki and a visit to Kone Corporation and their innovation group, and a one day joint workshop on QCA method and its use. The residency allowed an intense social bonding and learning both within the Case students, but also with the PhD students within Aaltos’ DIEM department. The workshop prepared students well to present and discuss their overall PhD study to an academic audience and to engage with constructive discussions of other student’s presentations.  We plan to continue such visits with the PhD cohort in future and examine possibilities to organize similar experiences for DBA cohorts somewhere in the future.  Included below is a picture of the dinner with the visiting PhD cohort in Helsinki.

I wish you all the best for the coming academic year and look forward to seeing both acquainted and old faces and some new faces from the 2026 incoming cohort.

 Sincerely

 --kalle lyytinen