Ivey Next – Fall 2022 Progress
I’m excited to share this update on Ivey Next, our new strategic plan. It’s six months since we launched Ivey Next, and our team has been working hard on implementing our ambitious goals.
At the cornerstone of Ivey Next, is our new purpose statement: To inspire leaders for a sustainable and prosperous world. It reminds us that good business and good leadership has a long-term view, and considers the consequences of our actions to the many stakeholder constituents that make up a community.
Ivey’s renewed mission statement challenges us to address the critical issues facing organizations and society. Much of our focus since Ivey Next was launched has been on building our capacity to address critical issues. Pertaining to this topic, we have increased resources and established new organizational structures to support research on critical issues. Over 80 per cent of articles published in 2022 were aligned with critical issues. On the curriculum side, we are currently baselining how critical issues are embedded in our programs today, and have begun to enhance program curriculum on critical issues to better arm our students with these topics in the future.
To remind everyone, Ivey Next has six strategic goals, collectively driving organizational transformation to deliver on our purpose, our mission and its impact.
First, we’re advancing world-class research by increasing workload capacity by 20 per cent and hiring 15 additional research faculty. We have distributed internal funding of $1.2 million for research and have another $300,000 for further distribution. And we’re increasing our focus on translation and dissemination of thought leadership.
Second, we are innovating business learning and our student experience with the addition of several new teacher-scholars focused on advancing teaching innovations and research on pedagogy. Ivey Publishing is working on new and innovative case content, including a significant digital component. We are conducting a degree portfolio review to identify optimal mix, size, and scope of our degree programs and consider new programs we should be developing to address our target market. Some early decisions include a September 2022 expansion of the HBA program from eight to 10 sections and the addition of a new Graduate Diploma in Sustainability coming out in 2023.
In terms of global citizenship, our third goal, we have strengthened Ivey’s engagement with critical international organizations and welcomed eight Ukrainian students through our Academic Shelter Program. We’ve begun inventorying our international partnerships and enhanced pre-program engagement to support incoming international students.
Lifelong learning is our fourth goal and we are developing pilot projects for innovative, high-impact learning with EMBA alumni and new HBA alumni. And we’re working with Ivey’s outreach initiatives to build up their potential for lifelong learning.
The last two goals, fostering an inclusive culture and building organizational agility, are foundational to our success. We are making good progress on both. The diversity of our faculty has broadened significantly with our recent new hires and we are changing our recruitment to increase accessibility of our programs to a more diverse applicant pool. And we’re embedding EDI in learning modules, foundational practices, and planning tools.
We’re adopting a more agile organizational structure, policies, practices, and technology to keep Ivey positioned to deliver on our mission. Early projects include developing a comprehensive data governance plan, tools to improve management of faculty, and a salesforce implementation to enhance our advancement processes.
Our work is just beginning. For more information on progress on specific goals and to review our next steps explore this website.
I hope you will join us on our continuing journey toward Ivey Next.
Dean Sharon Hodgson,
Lawrence G. Tapp Chair in Leadership