Dr. Kyle Murray— The Vice-Dean at the University of Alberta School of Business and Leading the School Wide Initiative Around Blended and Experiential Learning

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Guest: Dr. Kyle Murray, Professor of Marketing and Vice Dean at the University of Alberta School of Business

Interviewer: Sahr Saffa, Chairperson, C-Tribe, and VP of Canadian Operations, AutonomIQ

Show Notes

““The biggest misconception that people have when it comes to understanding what it is that people do is a lot of people see professors just as teachers. What you don’t realize is that a lot of professors, including myself, we don’t teach a lot (maybe one or two courses a year) we spend a lot of time doing research, publishing that research in journals and occasionally in books and in my case, also doing some administration in managing people. Currently, we have 500 employees that I have oversight over. When people see professors just as teachers, that has some real consequences because whether it’s donors or the Government of Alberta (or whoever is providing funding) they don’t always have a good understanding of what it is the university actually does—that a lot of time is spent on research. That can have an impact on the way we think about funding universities and the misconceptions we have about professors.

“What’s really changed in the last 5 or 10 years is funding for universities is getting tighter and tighter so we rely, more than ever, on the support of our alumni and the business community in order to offer a world-class education that’s really driven by that intense research culture. Often what separates us from other universities and colleges in Canada and around the world, is we generate the research—and in many cases write the textbooks that other schools teach from— and that’s really the value of having that research intensive focus here. That differs significantly from us just teaching something that may derive from other countries.”

Bio

Dr. Kyle Murray is the Vice Dean and a Professor of Marketing at the Alberta School of Business. He held a previous role as the Director of the School of Retailing at the University of Alberta before making the transition to Vice-Dean. Kyle began his career as an Assistant Professor at the Richard Ivey School of Business and he has been a visiting professor at INSEAD (France), Monash Business School (Melbourne, Australia), and the Dublin Institute of Technology (Ireland). Dr. Murray holds a B.Sc. in Psychology and Ph.D. in Marketing and Psychology are from the University of Alberta.

Kyle’s research examines human judgment and decision making, using the tools of experimental psychology and behavioral economics to better understand the choices that people make. He’s currently working on complex behavior change challenges in business and society, including the Canada-wide BIOrg project.

His research has applications in consumer marketing, customer loyalty, e-commerce, and pricing. He has consulted in these areas for clients including the Competition Bureau of Canada, Consumers Council of Canada, General Motors, Industry Canada, Johnson and Johnson, Leger, The Research Intelligence Group, LoyaltyOne, and Microsoft.

As Vice Dean, Kyle is responsible for providing leadership and overseeing the day to day functioning of the School, including more than 500 full and part-time employees. This includes strategic planning, budget and finance, human resources, information technology, facilities management, and administrative oversight. He’s also leading the School-wide initiative for blended and experiential learning.

This episode is brought to you by the C-Tribe Festival. C-Tribe re-imagines the festival experience with the goal of bringing together innovative and creative people and proactive thinkers. By integrating a business conference with music performances, trendy fashion shows, intimate roundtable discussions, culinary experiences, wellness sessions, and artistic activations.C-Tribe curates inspiring environments that help catalyze action.

This episode is also brought to you by AutonomIQ: leveraging AI to remove the biggest bottleneck when building software. Without getting too technical, AutonomIQ teaches computers and algorithms to test your software so that your most expensive engineering talent doesn’t have to.

Edmonton, AB | July 21 - 23

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Dr. Kyle Murray— The Vice-Dean at the University of Alberta School of Business and Leading the School Wide Initiative Around Blended and Experiential Learning

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