Dean's Report 2012 - 2022
Transforming a Business School for the Digital Era
2012-2022
There is no comparison for the speed at which technology and innovation are changing the world around us. Algorithmic trading, robotics automation, cryptocurrencies, deep fakes, high frequency trading, quantum computing, bioengineering — to print these words in an introduction is to risk they’ll be outdated by the time they’re read.
The changes these innovations have brought to the business world are of paramount importance and drastically reshape the workplace. Being able to seamlessly continue to operate remotely during the pandemic was a testimony of this, and something that will be having long-lasting effects in the way we work and do business. Yet even though this relentless pace of change and disruption has been well documented, business schools in
general have been slow to respond — hesitant to make far-reaching curricular changes, hire faculty with more technical backgrounds and ask themselves what value the degrees they confer will represent in the long term.
For the past 10 years, I’ve been fortunate to lead the School of Business at Stevens. During these years, we have implemented strategies and initiatives that have transformed the school from technology management to a leading business school at the intersection of business and technology, while also growing its impact on academia, industry, and our students. We have remained agile by developing continuous innovations to address the explosive growth of digital in business, while maintaining rigor and high standards in our academic offerings. We have invested in hiring top faculty and growing our connections with industry, while also focusing on the success of our students. We have worked on developing a culture of excellence, collaboration, transparency and inclusion, as the fundamental pillars in our academic community.
In the following pages we give some examples of the initiatives we implemented in the last 10 years to address the disruption we all see happening in business and business education. We hope that by sharing our stories, we are providing useful insights to our academic community for addressing the challenges we all face.
Gregory Prastacos,
Dean