Meet Professor Daved Barry

Professor Daved Barry, most recently from Copenhagen Business School,  joined JIBS last week and will be a part of MMTC.

Daved grew up in New York and got his PhD in Strategic Management and Organizational Psychology from the University of Maryland. Finding the existing theories of organisation studies and strategic management a bit dry, he invented new ways of making the subjects more lively and moving by drawing from the arts, design, and the humanities. He continued this exploration while advancing his career at Syracuse University, the University of Auckland, Victoria University of Wellington and Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

“For me, art has to be unusual, moving, and create a tension between taken-for-granted forms of understanding and new, possible forms of understanding,” says Professor Barry. “If you take art seriously, as a mind-set and practise, it can be used to open up our understanding of things like leadership, innovation, and business development.”

At JIBS, one of Professor Barry’s hopes is to build a business studio, where faculty and students from the areas of business, technology and communication can apply creative methods from design, the arts, and humanities to various industry problems and questions, finding new connections and solutions together. Professor Barry has co-developed similar business studios in both Lisbon and Copenhagen, where he for instance taught courses where half the students were design students and the other half MBA students. At CBS, companies and government organisations would bring cases and the students would work out creative solutions which were often implemented.

“A business studio is where you make to learn, rather than learn to make. The making is experimental, and the environment is one where you can fail safely.”

Daved Barry will be employed partly by JIBS and partly by the Herenco concern, which is also involved in the business studio project.