The latest issue of UConn Business is now available. In this issue, we focus on making connections. Our feature article highlights the first graduating class of the Business Connections Learning Community. We also share with you “Green Business: Australia,” connecting UConn with faculty around the globe; “CEO Evolution,” a Stamford forum connecting Connecticut’s sharpest business leaders, and one alum’s story about connecting with students through giving.
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The best and brightest of UConn School of Business were honored Friday morning, April 25 at the 2014 School of Business Awards & Honors ceremony. Honorees, family and friends gathered in the Dave Ivry Seminar Classroom at the School of Business in Storrs for the annual celebration, where 2014 Student Hall of Fame Fellows were recognized, Ackerman Scholars were awarded, Faculty Awards were presented, and new members were officially inducted to the Beta Gamma Sigma honor society.Continue Reading
On the morning of Saturday, April 12, faculty, family and friends gathered at the Society Room in Hartford, Connecticut to celebrate the graduation of UConn’s Executive MBA (EMBA) Class of 2014.
Joe Connolly ’06 EMBA delivered the keynote address, “The Riddle of Leadership.” After briefly reflecting on his time in the Executive MBA program, Connolly advised the newly minted EMBAs that their journey toward successful leadership has really just begun. After acknowledging the importance of being equipped with the tools and technical skills of an MBA, he also emphasized the role of intangible skills and strong self-awareness.
“Effective leaders get identified because they get things done. They don’t make excuses. If they make a mistake, they fix it and move on. Leaders have a bit of a thick skin. They can take criticism. Leaders can connect with people. They can manage up and down. They communicate well,” he said.
Connolly shared that to learn and grow as leaders is a personal journey; that leadership is “not about you, but all about you at the same time.” He encouraged the students to explore their own beliefs, thoughts, and motivations, saying “…By learning to master and lead yourself you will be far better equipped to become the great leaders I know you all aspire to be.”
Congratulations to the EMBA Class of 2014: James Borzelli, Kevin Charles Brinson, John Cappelli, Russell Melvin Carson, Michael Eugene Casey, Michael John Chase, Jessica Beth Ficarra, Tara Ann Gerber, Stephen T. Haeckel, Allison Joel Hannah, Lisa Jacobi, Gregory J. Lancaster, Perry Chris Leros, Patrick Joseph Packard, Chris Perone, Ritesh Ashwath Rao, Alvaro Santos, Timothy Michael Sasur, and Caroline Elizabeth Ward.
Congratulations to Katharine Coulter, Shailee Desai, Giovanni Sornatale, and Patrick Stimola! The four undergraduates kicked off Husky Weekend by winning the final round of an annual campus case competition sponsored by The Hartford Financial Services Group on Friday, April 4.
The UConn team, who placed first in the preliminary round of the two-part competition on February 14 before advancing to the final round, competed against students from Quinnipiac, Boston University, Bentley, and the University of Hartford. The team was mentored by Cari Goldner ’13, Hartford Financial Services, and Kathy Hendrickson of the Business Career Center.
Congratulations to the winning team for an outstanding case presentation.
Bill Ross, ING Global Professor, and his colleagues, Sanjay Puligadda (Miami University) and Rajdeep Grewal (Penn State University) were awarded the coveted Lehmann Award for their article, “Individual Differences in Brand Schematicity,” Journal of Marketing Research (February 2012). The Lehmann Award (in honor of Donald R. Lehmann, Columbia University) is given annually to the best dissertation-based paper (within the past 2 years) in either of the two premier marketing journals, Journal of Marketing and Journal of Marketing Research. The article was Puligadda’s dissertation, which he completed at Penn State with Ross and Grewal as his advisers.
If you had decided to buy a camera, would you focus on which brands the store carried? Or, would you focus on the characteristics of the different cameras the store had in stock?
This paper suggests that if you are high in brand schematicity, you would be more likely to attend to the different brands the store carried, whereas if you were low in brand schematicity you would be more likely to attend to the characteristics of the cameras the store carried.
A schema is a set of expectations a person has about what will happen in a certain situation. Most folks, for example, have a schema for what they will experience in a fast food restaurant. Schematicity is the tendency on the part of consumers to process information using specific schema. People who are high in brand schematicity are likely to process products in terms of brands, not product characteristics, whereas people who are low in brand schematicity are likely to process products in terms of product characteristics not brands.
Don’t confuse brand schematicity with brand loyalty. Someone who is high in brand schematicity does not necessarily have a preference for a certain brand; instead, they have a preference to organize their thinking by brands.
In this article, Ross, Puligadda, and Grewal built a theoretical basis for brand schematicity and report on three studies that develop measures of brand schematicity; three studies that consider brand schematicity in the context of associated constructs and establish its predictive validity; and a final study that reveals that a consumer’s brand schematicity influences brand extension evaluations.
Logicbroker can now create the optimal prospect profile to further enhance its customer acquisition strategy as a consequence of our Master’s student team’s work. Continue Reading
UConn’s Operations & Information Management Department was recently ranked among the best business schools internationally—and #1 in the Northeast—for information systems research productivity over the last five years.
“These rankings are a clear indicator that we have one of the top research faculty groups in the country and around the world,” said Ram Gopal, professor and department head of OPIM. “Some of the most cutting-edge research in areas such as intellectual property rights, healthcare IT, auction markets, and advanced analytics is going on right here at UConn.”Continue Reading
Like the smell of flowers, fresh rain, and cut grass, ANTICIPATION is another thing that is in the air during the spring months, where everyone is anxiously awaiting announcements listing winners of various competitions held throughout the University. The CCEI Strategy Competition is one such event. We are currently calculating the scores from last night’s evening of presentations, and will have the announcement of the winners posted on our website and announced by email tomorrow, 4/23/14. Everyone did a great job, and congrats to everyone for having such great ideas, and making it to the finalist round – out of almost 60 entries, being a finalist is a victory in itself. 🙂
UConn MBAs Provide Operational Guidance to the World’s Largest Student-Led Social Responsibility Movement.
When you’re the world’s largest global health and sustainable development organization empowered by student volunteers, challenges arise. Fortunately, the UConn MBA program excels at approaching these types of challenges as opportunities for experiential learning, business process improvement, and making a positive impact.
The UConn MBA Case Challenge gives students the opportunity to strengthen their strategic decision-making skills as managers, understand and reflect the interplay between organizations and their environment in the formulation and implementation of strategies, and learn how an organization integrates strategic management with its operational functions.
For 2014, the Case Challenge focus was on non-governmental organizations (NGO’s). Invariably excluded from the mainstream world of corporate diaspora, NGOs are increasingly playing a vital role in providing support to communities which otherwise remain neglected and unable to sustain themselves due to the lack of access to basic necessities to engage in business or care.
Global Brigades has mobilized almost 30,000 graduate, undergraduate students and professionals through nine skill-based programs that work in partnership with community members to improve quality of life in under-resourced regions of Africa and Central America. The task for UConn MBA teams was to think through some of the implications of the complexity Global Brigades endures in its operational space and to review the following:
The winning team, Jaimin Bhatt ’15 MBA, Xiaoying Gan ’15 MBA, Ashish Kumar ’15 MBA, and Carlo Rivieccio ’15 MBA, presented Global Brigades with recommendations for segmenting its services into three distinct categories based on its core competencies, creating a stronger value proposition for donors, and diversifying income and investments.
“Our client representatives [Tanya Svidler, director of impact investing for Global Brigades, and Cole Hoover, director of the Global Brigades Institute] were very impressed with the quality of students’ presentations and recommendations,” said Rajendra Shirolé, MBA program director.
The Case Challenge is a program requirement for UConn MBAs. “In this exercise we were able to bring together all our newly learned academic knowledge and combine it with our practical experiences in order to deliver valuable recommendations to Global Brigades. I hope that we can continue to participate in such experiential activities as they solidify class learning,” said Kumar.
Bhatt added, “This was really a very exceptional experience.”
Save the date:
The MSFRM Program will be hosting its 3rd Annual Risk Management Conference on March 20, 2015 entitled “of “The many faces of Enterprise Risk Management (ERM)”. More details will be posted to the MSFRM website as soon as they are available.