"Leaders for the Digital Economy" Overview & Video

Leaders for the Digital Economy was adopted as the Smith Schools tag line in 2003.

It means different things to different people and you have to really take the words apart to have a true understanding of the vision, says Smith School Dean Howard Frank.

Leadership: The position or office of a leader; capacity or ability to lead; a group of leaders; guidance, direction.

Digital: A description of data, which is stored or transmitted as a sequence of discrete symbols from a finite set, most commonly this means binary data represented using electronic or electromagnetic signals.

Economy: The system of production and distribution and consumption; the efficient use of resources; frugality in the expenditure of money or resources; an act of economizing; reduction in cost.

This whole world is being transformed, the world of the very near future is a digital world where everything is digital, the processes are digital, the products are digital, the services are provided digitally, and the economy is generated by digital products and services, says Frank.

Building Leaders?

You can take somebody who has a capability to lead an organization and you can give them knowledge, thought patterns and skill sets so their inherent leadership capabilities will be maximized/optimized and turned towards leadership in this new digital world as opposed to leadership in the old analog world, says Frank.

The theme of the business school is the convergence of a business and technology. Technology is transforming society, the economy, the way we do business so it must transform the Smith School, it must be reflected in the curriculum and the way we do research and in the way we deliver services, says Frank.

Smith transformed in incremental steps, says Frank:

• In our first step, we transformed the programs of the school what we teach.
• In the second step, but in parallel, we transformed our research agenda, pointing our research towards the issues that will arise and are arising from this new convergence of business and technology.
• And the third step, which again was parallel but also hard, we transformed the infrastructure of the school and we went from you know an average infrastructure with the usual kinds of things that youd find in any business school to a place which is not just wireless, but state-of-the-art.