MSM’s new DBA School Director – reflections and ambitions

Since the beginning of this year, MSM’s DBA School has a new Director. Dr. Pascale Hardy has joined MSM’s faculty in the joint position of Director DBA School and Director of Online Education, an acquisition that highlights MSM’s commitment to both strengthening its DBA Program and enhancing its blended and online programs on the DBA as well as MBA level.

Illustrating her cosmopolitan background, Pascale holds a PhD degree from Università Gregoriana in Italy, an MBA from the Open University in the United Kingdom and two MScs, one in Social Sciences from the Université Libre Bruxelles in Belgium and one from the Libera Università di Communicazione e Lingue in Italy. She has worked extensively in senior and professorial positions in France, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the Netherlands and has made a career in leading and managing the development of professional doctorates.

Pascale also has a broad research experience, playing a leading role in international research projects with partners such as the European Commission, the United Nations, the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and a wide range of other organizations from developed and developing countries. Her own research interests revolve around the themes of organizational learning and capabilities and knowledge creation and transfer. Her work on knowledge management and e-learning has been published in Computers and Education and research on knowledge creation and transfer was presented at the 2016 Academy of Management Conference in Anaheim, California, in the United States of America. Pascale is currently working on a number of research projects that explore entrepreneurship and marketing strategies in the context of Nigerian service organisations and the implication of creativity and innovation strategies on product development.

Pascale’s commitment to working on DBA education and research stems from her conviction that they are crucial for the long term survival and viability of business organisations. She finds her work at MSM exciting because, she says, ‘it contributes to meaningful solutions of real time problems encountered by the contemporary business organisation.’ For her, MSM, as one of the oldest and most international business schools in the Netherlands, is the perfect place to make such a contribution. One of Pascale’s main motivations to apply at MSM was the solid accreditation and high ranking of its DBA program – currently number two in the world. Moreover, having established an international career, MSM’s many partnerships with top tier universities around the world particularly appealed to Pascale.

Reflecting on her first six months as Director of MSM’s DBA School, Pascale especially appreciates MSM’s multicultural environment, its entrepreneurial spirit and its forward looking position when it comes to blended and life-long learning formats. She is inspired by the fact that, despite the high work load in a relatively small management school as MSM, MSM’s faculty is publishing in top tier journals and conferences. Accordingly, Pascale’s ambitions for the future of the DBA School she is now directing, are, in her own words ‘to offer a world class DBA in which students present their research into top conferences as well as publishing their doctoral research into academic or practitioner oriented journals.’