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By Stephanie Mullins
This article published first on the EFMD Global Blog on October 16, 2024. 

As business schools face an increasing number of challenges, this offers an opportunity to practice what they preach to students when it comes to adapting to change. We spoke to Anthony Brabazon, Dean of the UCD College of Business, to learn more about his role and professional journey, area of research, and thoughts on the future of business education.

Please introduce yourself and your career to date.

I was certainly imaginative as a child and at various times wanted to be a scientist, an astronaut, a pilot, amongst half a dozen other occupations. Being a business school academic was not on my list!

Books were piled high in the house as I grew up. My father was a bookseller and, given his own interest in business, there were a plentiful supply of books dating back to the 1930s covering accounting/finance, marketing/sales, and general management. Even as a youngster, I found the idea that the world around us is critically shaped by the activities of organisations and markets fascinating. This steered me towards the world of business and, unsurprisingly, I followed this course as an undergraduate and postgraduate student. On graduation, I worked with KPMG.

After qualification as an accountant, I was on the point of moving to a finance role in the industry when University College Dublin (UCD) advertised for lecturing positions in the Department of Accountancy in the then Faculty of Commerce. That piqued my interest as I had enjoyed my time as a student and reading academic literature. Rationalising that it would not ‘terminally’ damage my career if I joined UCD for a year and then discovered that industry was my true calling, I made the jump.

On announcing that I was leaving KPMG, my then-boss told me that I’d last ‘six months maximum’ as I was ‘too commercial for academia’! He also reassured me that I could have my job back if I returned. Nearly thirty-five years later, I am still at UCD. Subsequently, I took a leave of absence to undertake further graduate study and doctoral training in the US and UK, complementing my professional training with a marination in the fields of statistics, operations research, and complex adaptive systems.

Beyond my research and teaching activities, I was fascinated in my early career as to how business schools actually worked as an organisation. Eager to learn more, I held up my hand to take on different roles over time including programme director for our Master of Accounting programme, director of the construction project leading to the opening of our undergraduate School of Business in 2002 (the Lochlann Quinn School of Business), and service as Head of Research for the then UCD College of Business and Law.

In 2011, I moved into an Associate Dean role, running our graduate business school: UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business. This was an exciting time as the school was expanding its enrolment, its programme portfolio, and also investing significantly in physical and digital infrastructure.

The six years I spent running UCD Smurfit School were a fantastic learning experience, and an opportunity to work with a great team of colleagues across the school ‘to make things happen’. In 2017, when the post of College Principal and Dean became available, I felt I was as ready as I could be and applied, remembering the wise advice I’d received from an experienced, serial Dean – “You can never be fully ready so don’t expect to be”. In my second term as Dean, I’m still learning.

Looking back, I was fortunate in that every few years the opportunity to take on new challenges arose. Another factor which has made the journey interesting concerns transformational changes in the College, as it has grown and matured from being (pre-1980s) largely focused on domestic undergraduate business education, to its current positioning as a globally connected, research-intensive business school.

The UCD College of Business now consists of four ‘schools’; a dedicated undergraduate business school, a dedicated graduate business school, a well-developed presence in executive education via ‘Smurfit Executive Development’, and an overseas campus in Singapore. The College encompasses over 6,000 students drawn from over 80 countries, within the wider UCD community of nearly 40,000 students.

What do you enjoy most about your role at UCD College of Business?

The diversity of the job and the opportunity to work with incredible colleagues as we collectively endeavour to have a transformative impact on the lives of our students and society. No two days on the job are alike, being filled with a continuous flow of interactions with students, colleagues, alumni, advisory board members, and with a multiplicity of other external stakeholders and connections.
While there are always day-to-day operational items to be taken care of, for me, the key value add of a Dean is to ensure that there is a sense of direction and continual advancement amongst the School community. The collective is the essence, as business schools move forward together, or not at all.

In terms of transforming the opportunities and outcomes for our students and indeed of the economy, the College of Business has a somewhat different history and positioning to that of most business schools in larger countries. With a foundation predating the creation of the Irish state (we recently admitted the 114th annual cohort to our core undergraduate business programme – the B Comm), UCD and the College of Business by virtue of their scale have had a dominant role in contributing to nation-building and in the shaping of the modern Irish economy. The rate of growth of this impact has accelerated over the last thirty years.

Following key strategic decisions taken in the mid-1990s to truly internationalise, the College has been on a consistent path, growing and diversifying its faculty and student population, becoming truly research-driven and co-creating new programmes with key industry partners.

A key mantra within the College and wider university is that we seek to ‘bring the best of world to Ireland and the best of Ireland to the world.’ The College was also one of the earlier European business schools to embrace Triple Crown accreditation, and to participate in the various rankings processes. Doing so promoted an outward-looking perspective, also embedding a culture of continual improvement and entrepreneurial thinking.

An outcome to this journey has been the creation of a strong base of well-educated alumni, supporting the growth of domestic Irish firms seeking to globalise their operations, and supporting the growth of multinational firms located in Ireland. With over 90,000 alumni across more than 120 countries, the College has close links with firms in key sectors such as technology, healthcare/pharmaceuticals, financial services, food business, and professional services.

The College community very much considers itself an active inhabitant of its ecosystem, shaping and being shaped by the environment, through our educational and thought-leadership activities. The opportunity to play a part in the creation of these transformative impacts is a real high point of the job, as is meeting with our students and alumni and listening to inspirational stories of their personal development and career successes.

What is your research area of focus?

I was fortunate to spend quite a portion of my earlier research career attached to UCD’s Complex Adaptive Systems Institute (now the UCD Discovery Institute) where I was inspired and energised by daily engagement with research colleagues from all across the university and with the many visiting researchers.

The Institute was loosely modelled on the Santa Fe Institute, being a true melting pot of interdisciplinary research, as well as acting as an incubator for new research centres and funding proposals of scale. Along with a colleague, Prof. Michael O’Neill, I co-founded a research centre in the Institute (the UCD Natural Computing Research and Applications group) and this group formed the nexus of quite a breadth of ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ research projects over the years, variously funded by research bodies and industry partners. The research group later transferred to the College of Business where it sits today.

Broadly speaking, natural computing concerns the development (and real-world application) of computational algorithms using metaphorical inspiration from systems and phenomena that occur in the natural world, recognising that many of these phenomena are in essence ‘solving a problem’, implicitly embedding sophisticated computational capabilities.

The resulting algorithms have proven application as problem-solvers across domains as diverse as management science, bioinformatics, finance, marketing, engineering, architecture, and design. Neural networks, the bedrock of current generative-AI technologies, are perhaps the best-known family of natural computing algorithms. There are many more and each has specialty areas of application.

Another area of my research over the years has concerned agent-based modelling of technological innovation and financial markets.

What challenges do you believe business schools will face in the coming years? How can business schools tackle these challenges?

The environment facing business schools is certainly very dynamic and provides a great opportunity to practice what we preach in terms of recognising, adapting to, and leading change. Business school conferences are replete with discussion sessions and presentations on the ‘challenges’ facing schools including the quest for continued relevance in the eyes of students, employers, and industry research partners; challenges in recruitment of faculty with the changing and multi-faceted skillsets needed for a successful academic career in the years ahead; the declining levels of state funding for higher education in many countries; the appropriate utilisation of new technologies such as generative-AI to support educational and research activity; a narrowing of political and social discourse concerning globalisation in many countries; and the uncertainties arising from geopolitical tensions and conflict.

While this is a lengthy list, the reality is that many organisations face similar challenges in some guise. Perhaps the most significant of these challenges is that of ensuring continued relevance, with deep discussion underway across the business school community concerning purpose, how best to meet the needs of our learners, and societal impact.

It is notable that business schools struggle with these themes in a way that it is not really paralleled in other university disciplines which also have strong practitioner foci such as engineering, medicine, law, education, or social work. Of course, there are important differences between each of these disciplines, but business schools as a community have further work to do to truly integrate practitioner formation and research practices, or indeed to build a comprehensive track record of impacting on policy/regulatory formulation via underlying research.

On the positive side, the demand for business programmes remains exceptionally strong underscoring the value that they provide to our students. The dynamic environment is also creating a significant demand for continual educational upskilling over people’s career journeys.

On the supply side, the cleaving of the traditional tie between a fixed physical location and educational service delivery, and our enhanced ability to use technology to create novel learning/assessment environments, is opening up a host of new possibilities for innovative schools. It also opens up risks of ‘doing nothing’. Being average (or worse) is and will be a risky strategy going forward.

What are your hopes for UCD College of Business and the future of business education?

In spite of the challenges, I’m very optimistic for the future. The global demand for high-quality business education is strong and growing, as are the opportunities for entrepreneurial business schools. Across the world, we are seeing tremendous positive impact on people’s lives resulting from improved educational provision in many countries, and real impact from technology with societies being able to advance incredibly within decades rather than over centuries. This is unlocking human potential at a rate never before seen.

Of course, even a glance at the daily global news reminds us that much remains to be done to build a truly better world for us all. I firmly believe that the business school community has a crucial contribution to make to this journey in terms of developing future generations of leaders and citizens who can drive sustainable value creation, within a framework where this is shared in a fair and just way in society.

Under our current strategy, ‘Creating a better future together’ (2022-2026), we are investing heavily for the future, in our faculty, facilities, investment in thought-leadership activity, and crucially in building ever-closer connectivity with our alumni community and key external stakeholders. Our vision captures our ambition for the College community pithily in its last line as follows; ‘We will lead rather than follow.’