Ivey Next Update – Spring 2024
I am very pleased to share this Ivey Next update outlining progress on our strategy since its launch in March 2022. Across the School, teams have worked diligently to embrace our critical issues and move our ambitious goals forward. This update shows our significant progress and outlines what’s next.
Ivey’s renewed mission statement, a core component of Ivey Next, challenges us to address the critical issues facing organizations and society and become the go-to place for thought leadership, knowledge, and actionable insights on these matters. Much of our emphasis these last two years has been on building our capacity to address critical issues as we have focused our research and learning on Canada’s place in the world, evolution of work, and sustainability.
The research in critical issues is attracting much-needed donor support. An important recent announcement is the creation of a new $3-million Evolution of Work Chair, held by Rob Austin, for further work on reimagining talent and use of technology.
Donor endowed Chairs are really important for us to attract and retain faculty. To accelerate interest in supporting these chairs, in the F25 budget we have put aside $10 million to establish four $5-million Matching Endowed Chair programs for Chairs in critical issues. The Chairs will be aligned to research areas of most interest to the donor and will be 100-per-cent matched by Ivey.
In addition to the Chairs programs, we established a Critical Issues Steering Committee, which launched the Critical Issues Challenge Fund allocating up to $1 million in internal funding for significant projects. To date, seven innovative research projects have been funded at $836,380, and several of the projects have also received additional subsequent support through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
We also committed to embedding critical issues into curriculum to better arm our students – future leaders – with knowledge and problem-solving skills in these areas. There are new courses on sustainability, social impact, equity, and artificial intelligence, and more offerings are planned for next fall. Equally important, all current portfolios of courses are continually renewed to explore and embed critical issues.
Outreach is an important part of Ivey’s critical issues initiative. Recent efforts included the day-long symposium, The Future We See, that brought together some of Canada’s top business leaders for a discussion of future trends, challenges, and opportunities. We also launched a new critical issues online knowledge hub, Impact: Ideas that Ignite Change, featuring Ivey’s research and thought leadership. Our new Impact Live event series builds on the success of our previous Idea Forums and launches this spring.
Integral to Ivey Next are our values: courage, community, inclusivity, and integrity. This past year, the Culture and Inclusion team hosted Ivey Values Studios for staff, faculty, and students – a community project dedicated to transforming our values from concepts to actions. As part of the values studio work, each team created a poster that distills the actions they have committed to, which will ultimately come together in a graphic novel this spring.
There’s much more to report, so we’ve created this comprehensive online update outlining progress on our six goals:
- Advance world-class research;
- Innovate business learning and student experience;
- Foster an inclusive culture;
- Develop global citizens;
- Create a lifelong learning ecosystem; and,
- Build organizational agility.
I encourage you to explore the site and read about our progress. It has taken our entire community coming together and committing to move our strategy forward. I’m very proud of what we’ve achieved in just two years and confident we will continue to move forward toward Ivey Next.
Sharon Hodgson