Welcome to New Proudly Made in Africa Fellow: Dr Penelope Muzanenhamo

Message from Professor Ciarán Ó hÓgartaigh, College Principal and Dean of Business, UCD.

"We are delighted to welcome Dr Penelope Muzanenhamo as the new Proudly Made in Africa Fellow in Business and Development, based at the UCD Quinn and Smurfit Schools."

Penelope has studied the contribution of Brand Africa to Sustainable Development from a diasporan perspective. She holds a PhD from Warwick Business School (WBS) and two Masters degrees (in Strategic Management and in Business Administration) from the University of Innsbruck, Austria.

Dr Penelope Muzanenhamo Room Q108, UCD Lochlann Quinn School of Business, University College Dublin.

W: www.proudlymadeinafrica.org

On 10/Feb/2016 Penelope delivered a seminar titled "Why Africa"
She described the potential for shifting value added activities to different sites as a means of better distributing the resources of a value chain; to shift benefits towards primary producers. The supply chain / value chain perspective offers an intriguing way of looking the Global Sourcing phenomenon.

Impact sourcing or ethical sourcing raises the potential to make better use of the links between entrepreneur and enterprise motivation, social need, value production with region branding and the strategic goal of Country Selection for Global Sourcing. We consider why issues of location branding are typically not evident or employed by digital enterprises (software and service firms). Some authors have claimed that the notion of national culture and national myths surrounding professional identity should be significant determinants of levels of outsourcing activity actually appear to be largely ignored in the tech industry where it is rare to associate a product or service so closely with a location (country, culture, etc.).

Themes in Managing Global Sourcing

This site covers material for dealing with the following challenges...

• How should one manage sourcing relationships? (and how does this vary according to the mode?)
• Relationship development - Important stages of sourcing relationships.
• Formulating sourcing contracts and service level agreements.
• Relationship governance structures and practices.
• Risk management.
• Facilitating effective communication and learning in context of cultural diversity and distributed work.
• The enabling role of ICT across organisational boundaries.
• Identifying and addressing emerging relationship problems.
• What are the emergent trends in sourcing relationships that are likely to be important in the future?

Responsible Sourcing and Ethics of Digital Supply

A potential general theme is offered as a starting point for your Term-Paper.

Consideration of the ethics of digital sourcing highlights the issues of leadership, the person, connections, responsibility and responsible sourcing for technology services and business processes.
Topics of interest include:

• Issues of global, geographical separation, and teams
• Hybrid organisations
• Cultural clash and compatibility
• New trends, impact of emerging forms of organisation and technology
• Impact sourcing for social change
• Waste and value, sustainability
• Social responsibility

Research papers in this field could address areas such as:

• Raising awareness of issues surrounding the global sourcing of IT and Business Process capability.
• Study the role of NGOs in Ireland and the challenges they face in developing countries in raising the level of key human development indicators.
• Develop new ideas broadly aligned with the theme of sustainable responsible sourcing.
• Literature reviews.
• Desk research analysing aggregate social/economic indicators.
• Reversals in directionality of innovation; from developing countries into developed economies.
• Develop case studies of sourcing enterprises from the perspective of:
• suppliers
• clients
• consumers
• regulators
• mediators
• NGOs
• venture capital or other investment organisations
• government development agencies
• public services
• Option of general cases or research into any one or more of the main themes from the global offshore and outsourcing literature including:
• Sourcing models and decisions
• Country attractiveness
• Supplier capabilities and strategies
• Knowledge
• The client perspective
• The IT outsourcing lifecycle
• Governance and regulation
• Distributed teams

Irish Academy of Management CFP 2016

Abstracts of 1500 words are due by February 1st. If accepted, full papers (6,000-8,000 words) will be due by June 30th. Submission details and further information about the conference can be found on the conference website. http://www.iamireland.ie/annual-conference/2016-annual-conference-ucd.html

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The 2016 Irish Academy of Management Conference is being hosted by the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business, Dublin, from Aug 31st to Sept 2nd, 2016.

The conference theme is ‘Ireland 2016: Re-imagining business and the role of ethics’. 2016 is an historic year for Ireland as we commemorate the 1916 Easter Rising and Proclamation. The official commemorations invite us to remember our past and imagine a better future. As part of these commemorations, the 2016 IAM Conference will examine ethics in business - past, present and future. We invite papers and roundtable symposiums that explore the concept of ethics in its broadest sense and across multiple levels – individual, organisational, sectoral, national and international – and enhance our understanding of building a sustainable and ethical economy and society.

We welcome contributions from within business and management schools, but also from other disciplines across academia and from civil society, NGOs and practitioners.

While the conference will have a strong Irish and ethical focus, we warmly welcome international scholars and papers from all business disciplines on a wide range of topics.

Suhas Pathak, Sarth Systems

Suhas Pathak, based in Pune, India.
He has 30+ years of experience in the software industry including working in USA, Australia, UK, Belgium and Ireland.  Strong expertise in offshore product development, mentoring and project management areas.  Has learnt, adopted and respected the agile methodologies in software development and also provides training on Agile implementation to software companies. Experience with various business models working with customers for product and services development success. Connected with a strong pool of experienced technology experts in various technologies in India. Works with customers in Europe and the USA, successfully implementing a virtual remote sourcing model with production teams distributed between the USA, India and China. The model is based on close-coupled teams with which customers can enjoy the outsourcing advantages with in-sourcing benefits.

Suhas is happy to explore any collaboration for outsourcing any product work.

Contact details are:
website: https://sarthsystems.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pathaksuhas/

New Entrepreneur-in-Residence at UCD

Majella Murphy has taken up the Entrepreneur-in-Residence role for 2015-2016 at UCD's Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business. Her role is to support all students with an interest in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, whether considering entrepreneurship as a career path, if working on a new business idea, or to research entrepreneurship in Ireland and Dublin particularly. Drop in times (Room S209a) Monday mornings 9am-12.30pm or by appointment (majella.murphy@ucd.ie or 01-716 8819).

Majella will be organising a series of events including entrepreneurial journey talks, panel discussions on controversial topics, an entrepreneurship competition and an ecosystem open evening.

H-1b system in the U.S.A. opens a keyhole view

The H-1b system in the U.S.A. is analysed by Haeyoun Park, who highlights how dominant Indian offshore outsourcing businesses are in the competition for the limited number (85,000) of H-1b visas on offer from the government.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/06/us/outsourcing-companies-dominate-h1b-visas.html
The headline angle that Park follows most strongly is the complaint that the system operates in an almost unpatriotic way. Foreign multi-nationals benefit at the expense of smaller indigenous firms;

"squeezing out many American companies, including smaller start-ups" (Park, 2015)

However we can also infer that outsourcing's inherent contradiction is also evident, that distance really matters.

Source: New York Times article (link)

Why else would multi-national outsourcing firms seek to locate so many of their employees close to their client organisations? The 16,573 visas awarded to 7 outsourcing firms based in India reflect significant organisational operations in their own right.