Conor Vibert

Tech Start Up Co-Founder and Business Professor

Well, 2017 is as good a year as any to start writing a blog. 2017 marks my 20th year as a Business Strategy professor at the Fred C. Manning School of Business of Acadia University. It also is symbolic for being the year where a special project is relaunched. I refer to our collection of streamed multimedia teaching cases that we have been creating for just under 15 years and that we now stream through CaseNet.ca. This has been a team effort for many years with Acadia U. colleagues such as Dave Sheehan and Michael Sheppard working with me to build and deliver the content. My plan is to use the blog to offer ideas on a number of different topics.

To begin, we have a lot of really interesting insights from the over 600 business leaders that we have filmed over the years. These interviews have taken place in 14 countries and have covered topics as diverse as how a senior banking executive, Dave McKay of the Royal Bank of Canada manages e-mail correspondence to how Birkir Holm Gudnason and his colleagues at Icelandair dealt with volcanic eruptions in 2010 to how some Japanese businesses responded to the Great East Japan earthquake of 2011 to how a winemaker, Ben Swetnam of Avondale Sky Winery deals with a batch of bad wine. So I intend to share some of points that have stood out in my mind from past interviews and from those we will build in the future.

Second, I am going to share the story of CaseNet.ca. This will include how it arose, how it is different, and where we are headed with it.

Third, I am going to offer some thoughts on teaching with cases, specifically streamed multimedia cases. This is an important differentiator for us in the very crowded higher education landscape. We are believers in this form of pedagogy and I am going to explain why.

Fourth, from time to time I am going introduce some talented and hard-working individuals who are blazing trails in different areas of endeavor. Some will be academics, some will be managers or entrepreneurs and others will simply be individuals with and good story to tell.

Fifth, I have been teaching without a textbook since 1998. One of my goals is and has been to help students and others learn about company behavior using free, publicly available online information sources and databases. From time to time, I am going share some of my thoughts about how to better understand what companies are up to.

Finally, if an issue arises in the popular press or elsewhere that I am passionate about, I’ll type some thoughts and share them. First on this list will be one of my favourites, corporate culture.

Conor Vibert (PhD.) is an innovative user and researcher of new educational technologies, a practitioner of flipped classroom teaching methods, a developer of evidence based instructional techniques and a creator of streaming video multimedia cases. He trains individuals to use online information sources to understand company behavior and has published a number of books on the topic. Over 600 video interviews with entrepreneurs, managers and executives around the world position him as a unique source of knowledge of business behavior.