The corporate brand and strategic direction: Senior business school managers’ cognitions of corporate brand building and management

This revelatory study focuses on top Financial Times (FT) ranked British business school managers cognitions of corporate brand building and management. The study insinuates there is a prima facie bilateral link between corporate branding and strategic direction. Among this genus of business school, the data revealed corporate brand building entailed an on-going concern with strategic management, stakeholder management, corporate communications, service focus, leadership, and commitment. These empirical findings, chime with the early conceptual scholarship on corporate brand management dating back to the mid-1990s. These foundational articles stressed the multi-disciplinary and strategic nature of corporate brand management and stressed the significant role of the CEO. As such, this research adds further credence to the above in terms of best-practice vis-à-vis corporate brand management. Curiously, whilst senior managers espouse a corporate brand orientation, corporate brand management is seemingly not accorded a similar status in the curriculum. Drawing on general embedded case study methodological approach, data was collected within eight leading (FT-ranked) business schools in Great Britain at Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Bradford, Cranfield, Warwick, Lancaster and City (London) Universities. Each of these eight British business schools can be deemed as ‘top’ business schools by virtue of their inclusion in the influential Financial Times (FT) worldwide list of top business schools. The primary mode of qualitative data collection was the 37 in-depth interviews with business school Deans, Associate Deans and other senior faculty members and other managers

The Role of Academic Deans as Entrepreneurial Leaders in Higher Education Institutions

To help address enrollment and financial challenges institutions of higher learning may benefit by having a better understanding of entrepreneurial leadership orientations, or skills, of academic deans. This study revealed several significant correlations between the self-reported entrepreneurial orientations of academic deans in upstate New York, working in independent colleges and universities and certain demographic characteristics of their positions. Academic deans reported “team builder” and “proactive” as their two highest ranked, self-reported entrepreneurial characteristics, while “risk taking” was ranked as the lowest characteristic. The results indicated a significant correlation between certain variables applicable to academic deans’ positions, such as years of experience and job expectations, with the self-reported entrepreneurial orientations of such academic deans

Lead-free piezoelectric materials and composites for high power density energy harvesting

© 2018 Materials Research Society. In the emerging era of Internet of Things (IoT), power sources for wireless sensor nodes in conjunction with efficient and secure wireless data transfer are required. Energy harvesting technologies are promising solution toward meeting the requirements for sustainable power sources for the IoT. In this review, we focus on approaches for harvesting stray vibrations and magnetic field due to their abundance in the environment. Piezoelectric materials and piezoelectric-magnetostrictive [magnetoelectric (ME)] composites can be used to harvest vibration and magnetic field, respectively. Currently, such harvesters use modified lead zirconate titanate (or lead-based) piezoelectric materials and ME composites. However, environmental concerns and government regulations require the development of a suitable lead-free replacement for lead-based piezoelectric materials. In the past decade, several lead-free piezoelectric compositions have been developed and demonstrated with promising piezoelectric response. This paper reviews the significant results reported on lead-free piezoelectric materials with respect to high-density energy harvesting, covering novel processing techniques for improving the piezoelectric response and temperature stability. The review of the state-of-the-art studies on vibration and magnetic field harvesting is provided and the results are used to discuss various strategies for designing high-performance energy harvesting devices