Valerie Lindsay is a Professor of Management, and Associate Dean for Graduate Programs (SBA) at AUS. She earned her PhD in International Strategy from the University of Warwick in the UK. Dr Lindsay moved to the UAE in 2012, and was appointed as Dean of Business at the University of Wollongong in Dubai. She joined AUS in 2015. Prior to this, she held several academic positons at the University of Auckland and Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, as well as at the University of Warwick in the UK. Her administrative positions have included several years as Head of Department and as a business school Associate Dean and Dean.

 

Dr Lindsay's research interests lie in the areas of international strategy, strategic management and entrepreneurship, with a particular focus on SMEs, and business in Asia. More recently, Dr Lindsay has engaged in UAE-based research in areas such as Emiritization and women in leadership. Dr Lindsay specializes in qualitative research methodology, and has had considerable experience using computer-assisted quantitative analysis software, including NVivo and Atlas-ti. Her work has been published in leading journals, including Management International Review, Organizational Dynamics, Industrial Marketing Management, and Journal of World Business.

 

Before joining academia, Professor Lindsay was a research scientist in immunology and biochemistry, and then moved to the area of business. Among various roles in the latter, she was the New Zealand Marketing Manager for ICI Pharmaceuticals. Dr Lindsay also worked in two New Zealand government departments in the areas of trade and tertiary education. She has consulted widely in strategy and marketing in industry and in government over many years.

Since 2012, I have tutored, mentored and coached beyond 500 professional doctoral students (mid to seniors, aged 35 to 70) both with the University of Liverpool Management School’s Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) program (UK), and since 2016 also with DoctorateHub. This allowed me to understand how to tackle problems at scale, be it the tame, the complex, or the wicked.

500+ students also implies 500+ workplace-based problems which I had the chance to look at. And while working with such an array of problems allows for quite some learning, it also has shown to me that very often it is quite exhaustive for such grown up and seasoned research novices. In response to this, we thus decided to set up the DoctorateHub, so to provide training, mentoring, and coaching services to all those that struggle to get their workplace-based issues identified, analysed, understood, written up in a thesis, and ultimately resolved. 

I am also one of the DoctorateHub’s Co-founders with a particular focus on strategic development and building up of the various DoctorateHub support services that we provide. 

With this I am looking forward to work with you, wherever you are in your doctoral research journey.

Dr. Dermot Kennedy is a Senior Director at Adobe, a software multinational that sells software as a service by means of its web site www.adobe.com. From humble beginnings when he joined Adobe back in 2002, the organization has grown to its current state where Adobe is doing business in over 230 countries around the world. Adobe’s annual revenue reached $15.7 billion in 2021. Adobe wants to provide web marketing content for its customers around the world cost efficiently and in a manner that presents one consistent brand. Adobe also wants to provide web marketing content that is culturally and linguistically appropriate for these customers. Global web content is developed at headquarters and is intended to be suitable for use locally or else to be adapted for local use. What happens in practice is that web content developed at Adobe headquarters in California, though meant to be for the worldwide organization, is frequently not either suitable for direct use or for adaptation by Adobe’s local marketing teams. Dr. Kennedy’s doctoral research has been focused on finding balance and harmony between these frequently conflicting global and local marketing perspectives. Dr. Kennedy completed his doctorate in 2022.