On October 1, 2013, Dean Robert (Bob) Kennedy began his role as the ninth dean of the Ivey Business School. Bob comes to Ivey from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, where for the past 10 years he has led the William Davidson Institute (WDI), a non-profit research and educational institute that focuses on business and policy issues in emerging market economies. During the same time, Bob served as the Director of the Ross School Global Initiative and as the Tom Lantos Professor of Business Administration at Ross, teaching corporate strategy and international business courses in the MBA, EMBA, and Executive Education programs.

A well-known scholar, speaker, and educator, Bob Kennedy’s research focuses on the opportunities and challenges facing businesses in developing countries. He has been widely published in leading economics and strategy journals. His teaching materials, including more than 120 articles, chapters and cases are used at every one of Business Week’s top 25 U.S. business schools.

With two Baccalaureate degrees in political science and economics from Stanford University, a Master of Science in Management from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and a PhD in business economics from Harvard University, where he also taught for several years, Bob brings to Ivey a wealth of global management education experience.

He has also held various international management positions with firms that include Enterprise Investors in Warsaw, Poland and The Chase Manhattan Bank in New York.

Bob sits on the advisory boards of numerous organizations active in the education and/or economic development sectors, including Ivey Management Services, Laurus Edutech Ltd. (India), the Global Business School Network (GBSN), the India-based private equity firm ChrysCapital, the Malaysia-based private equity firm Creador and the NextBillion family of websites.