Royal Roads Doctor of Business Administration launch

Royal Roads University’s brand-new Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) program began online on January 20, 2020.

Unlike conventional doctoral programs, the DBA program allows students to align their passions and professional experiences with their doctoral research. Throughout the program, the DBA student research will focus on today’s and tomorrow’s challenges and help organizations, industries, and communities address messy and complex problem situations. The solutions are rarely simple or straightforward and often rely on knowledge from multiple disciplines. In 2013, Mats Alvesson and Jorgen Sandberg argued that management research had lost its way due to the total dominance of incremental gap‐spotting research, which resulted in a severe shortage of influential management research. While the DBA program at RRU values conventional, incremental gap-spotting and discipline-based research, it recognizes the importance of innovative scholarship and knowledge production modes that go beyond the boundary of a discipline. Through their research, DBA students will build their brands as subject matter experts and scholar-practitioners who can, and will, lead changes in their field of practice, industry or community.

As part of the DBA foundation phase, students attend a 2-week residency on-campus. The residency is designed around workshops and events that promote meaningful and purposeful learning conversations between students, faculty members, and staff. On February 17, 12 fantastic DBA students arrived on campus to kickstart the research, which will include:

1. scaling up agile methodology;
2. supporting communities through Indigenous business incubators;
3. exploring methodologies to analyze search and rescue (SAR) services in the Antarctic;
4. examining the best cost-effective inventory control strategies in the O&G sector;
5. improving accountability and cost controls in healthcare organizations;
6. examining factors to adopt micromobility in urban populations;
7. exploring the impact of organizational change management on employee behaviors;
8. exploring the applications of social impact bond (SIB) in post-secondary education;
9. examining strategies to deal with nursing recruitment and retention;
10. investigates the costs and benefits of improving governance;
11. exploring strategies to align project activities to strategic objectives in the higher education sector; and
12. analyzing corporate risks and solutions related to insider threats in the Canadian government.

Curious to know more about our DBA students and their field of research? Read their bios. On February 28, you can meet them in person. Join the DBA student presentations from 9:00 am – 1:00 pm in the LIC Centre for Dialogue as they present their initial research proposals. More event details can be found here.

For more information, please contact DBA Program Head, Dr. M. Hassan Wafai or DBA Program Coordinator, Kim Poduch.