MSBM to host international conference on Business and Management

The Mona School of Business and Management (MSBM), based at the University of the West Indies, Mona, will be staging its first international conference on Business and Management, from January 7-9, 2015 at the Holiday Inn Sunspree Resort in Montego Bay, Jamaica.

The conference is being held under the theme, “Breaking the Barriers: Enterprise, Competitiveness, Growth and Development."

Anthony Hylton, Jamaica's Minister of Industry, Commerce & Investment, will be opening the Conference, while David Storey, Professor at the Department of Business Management and Economics at the University of Sussex, UK will deliver a keynote address on January 9.

Professor Storey is one of the most cited authors on small business and is the highest ranked non-US scholar in Entrepreneurship. From 2001 to 2005 he served as UK Secretary of State for Trade & Industry, as a Member of the Small Business Council which advised the government on small business policy-making.

According to the conference organizers, Professor Storey’s presentation will focus on key strategies for making Jamaica more entrepreneurial. In a pre-conference statement, affirming that approach, he promised to "draw upon my experience in advising governments throughout the world on effective policy measures to stimulate enterprise in all sections of society."

Other prominent speakers and participants at the conference will include Minister Arnaldo Brown, Grace Kennedy CEO, Don Wehby, Marlene Street-Forrest, General Manager of the Jamaica Stock Exchange, Professor Densil Williams, Executive Director of the MSBM, Mark Kerr- Jarrett, Managing Director of Barnett Limited,   Grantley Stephenson, Chairman and CEO of Kingston Wharves Limited, Indera Sagewan-Alli of the Trinidad-based Centre for Competiveness, Megan Deane CEO of Creditinfo Jamaica Limited, Kadamawe Knife of the Office of Entrepreneurship, and Parris Lyew-Ayee, of Mona GeoInformatics.

“The aim of the conference is to attract national, regional and international scholars who are writing and researching on issues in the discipline and its sub-disciplines as well as the practitioners who are grappling with these issues on a daily basis. This is the first of a series that will frame scholars and practitioners as partners in the task of rigorously interrogating business and management theory and practice in the light of Caribbean reality,” according to Professor Williams, speaking in his capacity as Executive Director of MSBM.

Researchers, business practitioners and public sector representatives from over seventeen countries are expected to be at the event.

A major feature of the conference will be a session titled “From Shipping to Logistics: Trading in the Information Age”.