A new community of scholar-practitioners: KBS welcomes its founding Executive DBA cohort
Kemmy Business School has welcomed the founding cohort of its highly innovative Executive DBA in Leadership, Sustainability and Systemic Transformation to the University of Limerick. The launch marks an important moment for KBS: the beginning of a new community of scholar-practitioners and a further extension of our research ecosystem, creating new connections between academic inquiry, professional expertise and the complex organisational and grand societal challenges that increasingly demand new ways of thinking, knowing and acting.
Our founding cohort brings together an exceptional group of accomplished senior leaders, each bringing significant professional experience, complex questions and deep knowledge of their organisational and professional worlds. The Executive DBA creates an opportunity to bring that experience into sustained dialogue with scholarship; to question established assumptions, encounter different ways of knowing, and generate knowledge that is both academically rigorous and highly consequential for practice and society.
The first immersive residency brought that ambition to life. Professor Michael Morley, Dean of Kemmy Business School, opened the residency by situating the Executive DBA within the School’s wider commitment to engaged scholarship, responsible research and meaningful impact. Dr Catriona Burke, Academic Director and architect of the programme, set out its intellectual foundations and the important journey ahead: cultivating the critical, systemic and reflexive inquiry needed to engage seriously with complexity and uncertainty and move across and between the boundaries of scholarship and practice.
Those foundations shaped an intensive week of inquiry and dialogue with an outstanding group of internationally renowned scholars, including Professor Mike C. Jackson, Professor David Coghlan, Professor Ann Cunliffe and Professor Mats Alvesson. Conversations spanned systemic inquiry, engaged scholarship, evidence-based decision-making, reflexivity, liminality and leadership - challenging participants to examine not only the complex phenomena they seek to understand, but also the assumptions, perspectives and knowledge systems through which those phenomena are understood.
Central to the Executive DBA is the development of scholar-practitioners capable of generating responsible, original and actionable knowledge, while also developing the capacity for knowledge brokerage increasingly called for across research, policy and practice: connecting different forms of knowledge and expertise, working across disciplinary, organisational and institutional boundaries, and mobilising knowledge in response to complex organisational and grand societal challenges.
We are immensely proud to have welcomed this founding cohort to Kemmy Business School and the University of Limerick. A new community of scholar-practitioners is taking shape.
