PhD – GlobalFocus

The battle for doctoral talent

Mark Smith describes the opening salvoes of a new competitive skirmish — recruiting, managing and developing the best doctoral students in business and management The business world has long been familiar with the “war for talent”, a term coined at the turn of the century by consultancy McKinsey & Co to capture the rising competition for talented employees. Indeed, business schools…

Sustainability-driven innovation

PhD programmes are under increasing pressure to train researchers who help to solve critical societal challenges. Sally Randles, Annemieke Roobeek, Sally Jeanrenaud and Simon Pickard propose that sustainability-driven innovation, a new model for collaborative PhD training and research, offers a valuable framework for inspiring new approaches Despite recent political turbulence in Europe, the US and elsewhere, the past 18…

PhDs and DBAs: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

Laura Maguire, Elena Revilla and Angel Diaz look at the differences (and even more the similarities) between the traditional PhD programme and the newer Doctor of Business Administration. In recent years there has been increasing criticism about how relevant PhD research is to the real needs of industry. At the same time, we are witnessing…

Castles in the Sky or More Reality?

Wolfgang Lassl offers some thoughts on the relationship between business academia and managers. The 16th century marked the end of medieval castles. The power of gunpowder turned their walls into paperboard and the rise of cities as the vibrant centres of society made rural castles irrelevant. So, are we now seeing similar changes with regard…

The Thoroughly Modern Doctorate

David Bogle highlights some of the key changes that have occurred in PhDs (and more that are to come) and their particular resonances to management and business education. Do we need more PhDs? What are they for? How can we make them more valuable to the knowledge economy? These are some of the questions that…

Reinvigorating the PhD

PhDs are increasingly under scrutiny for being ‘irrelevant’ and ‘lacking impact’. But given the right tools, Simon Linacre at Emerald Group Publishing believes that they still have much to offer. It may surprise some to know that the PhD, as it is today, only goes back to the 19th Century. As a result of education…