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Allan Gray Chair in Values Based Leadership and Director of the UCT Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town

Prior to being appointed as the Director of the UCT Graduate School of Business, Prof Baets was Professor of Complexity, Knowledge and Innovation, Associate Dean for Research and MBA Director at Euromed Marseille Ecole de Management. Previously at Euromed Marseille he was Director of Graduate Programmes. Before joining Euromed Marseille, he held the Philips Chair in Information and Communication Technology and he was director of NOTION (the Nyenrode Institute for Knowledge Management and Virtual Education) at Nyenrode Business University in the Netherlands. He has held academic positions in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Spain.

He graduated in Econometrics and Operations Research at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) and did postgraduate studies in Business Administration at Warwick Business School (UK). He was awarded a PhD from the University of Warwick in Industrial and Business Studies and a Habilitation of Paul Cezanne University, Aix-Marseille III, France.

He pursued a career in strategic planning, decision support and IS consultancy for more than ten years, before joining the academic world, first as managing director of the management development centre of the Louvain Universities (Belgium) and later as Associate Professor at Nyenrode University, The Netherlands Business School. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Aix-Marseille (IAE) and GRASCE (Complexity Research Centre) Aix-en-Provence. He held visiting teaching positions at ESC Rouen, KU Leuven, RU Gent, Moscow, St Petersburg, Tyumen University, Purdue University and Narsee Monjee (Mumbai, India). Most of his professional experience was acquired in the telecommunications and banking sector. He has substantial experience in management development activities in Russia and the Arab world.

His research interests include: Innovation and knowledge; Complexity, chaos and change; The impact of (new information) technologies on organisations; Knowledge, learning and artificial intelligence; On-line learning, work-place learning and pedagogical innovation; A quantum interpretation of management.

He is editor in chief of the International Journal of Complexity in Leadership and Management, a member of the International Editorial Board of the Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Information & Management, and Systèmes d’Information et Management. He has acted as a reviewer/evaluator and chair for a number of International Conferences (e.g. ECIS an ICIS) and for the EU RACE programme. He has published in several journals including the Journal of Strategic Information Systems, The European Journal of Operations Research, Knowledge and Process Management, Marketing Intelligence and Planning, The Journal of Systems Management, Information & Management, The Learning Organisation and Accounting, Management and Information Technologies. He has organised international conferences in the area of IT and organisational change.

Walter Baets is the author of Organisational Learning and Knowledge Technologies in a Dynamic Environment published in 1998 by Kluwer Academic, and of Complexity, Organisations and Learning: the quantum interpretation of business, published in 2006 with Routledge. He co-authored with Gert Van der Linden The Hybrid Business School: Developing knowledge management through management learning, published by Prentice-Hall in 2000 and Virtual Corporate Universities, published 2003 by Kluwer Academic. Along with Bob Galliers he co-edited Information Technology and Organisational Transformation: Innovation for the 21st Century Organisation also published in 1998 by Wiley. In 1999, he edited Complexity and Management: A collection of essay, published by World Scientific Publishing.

His most recent books are Knowledge Management and Management Learning: Extending the Horizons of Knowledge-Based Management, published with Springer (2005); and Rethinking growth: social intrapreneurship for sustainable performance (Palgrave MacMillan, 2009) co-authored with Erna Oldenboom. In 2013 he published (with Erna Oldenboom) Values Based Leadership in Business Innovation (Bookboon)

Experience

  • –present
    Professor of Complexity, Knowledge and Innovation and Director of the UCT Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town

Grants and Contracts

  • 2014
    Role:
    Allan Gray Chair in Values Based Leadership and Director of the UCT Graduate School of Business
    Funding Source:
    National Research Foundation