The students are visiting Honduras as volunteers with the Microfinance Brigade through Global Brigades, a student-led global health and sustainable development organization, and will help a community bank called the Caja Rural. Ivey Assistant Professor Niels Billou is leading the project, which involves 30 Ivey students.

Another group of Ivey students has embarked on a 10-day trip to Israel to learn about the country and its economy. Ivey Assistant Professor Cara Maurer and 25 Ivey students are learning about business, history and culture in Israel through the trip.

For more on the trips, read the blogs  Ivey Adventure in Honduras and Israel Business Trip.

Mravyan has been invited to participate in the March 8 episode of The Pitch, a show which connects Canadian entrepreneurs with risk capitalists, and will pitch his business idea, SensiMat, before a panel of financiers and business experts. SensiMat is a device that helps prevent pressure ulcers (bed sores) in hospitalized patients, an issue that costs roughly $2 billion in Canada and $12 billion in the U.S.

Mravyan already pitched the idea to Dragons’ Den judge Kevin O’Leary, MBA ’80, during O’Leary’s visit to Western University on November 22 and the response was encouraging. O’Leary urged Mravyan to try out for a spot on Dragons’ Den for a chance to win funding.

For more on the show, please see BNN’s schedule closer to the date.

DesJardine is one of five semi-finalists selected to participate in the event at the TMX Broadcast Centre. He’ll be competing against teams from University of Calgary, University of Waterloo, York University and Cape Breton University for a chance to win $30,000 and an additional $30,000 for the school.

He said he entered the challenge because he believes he has the next great sustainability idea.

“A single good idea can change business and our future,” he said.

The competition will be webcast live.

Ajmeri represented the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers  community, a new group of individuals ages 20-30 who exhibit outstanding leadership and entrepreneurial skills, at the meeting on January 25.  For more information, see Western News article.

Photo by Adela Talbot, Western News

Geoff Beattie, President and CEO of Woodbridge Company Limited, a private holding company for the Thomson family, which owns news and information services including the Globe and Mail, discussed preserving family businesses and the role of the trusted advisor as the keynote speaker at the 8th Annual National Family Business Day Celebration at The Hilton in London on February 9. The event was hosted by the Canadian Association of Family Enterprise Southwestern Ontario and Ivey’s Business Families Centre.

“Family businesses often feel they have to be buccaneering and innovative because that’s how grandpa did it, but you can’t afford to act entrepreneurial once you have a large enterprise. You’re not in the business of making money, you’re in the business of managing money and that’s a different game,” said Beattie, who is also the Campaign Chair for Western University.  “You need to learn to manage and be adaptable.”

Beattie stressed the importance of having a “builder” mentality and a partnership structure for family businesses to prosper.

“Roy Thomson believed in building for the future. He didn’t take a short-term view. At the heart of what he was doing was creating something that would look after his family for years to come. He always asked the people in the organization where they thought the company would be in the next 10 years,” he said. “He also put in place a partnership structure. The only way to move forward is with a partnership structure where everyone has a voice at the table. We’d set ourselves up on two teams – the pros and the cons. It forces you to see both points of view. You can’t have a command and control environment.”

The event also included a family business panel session with Julian and Heidi Bayley of IceCuture Inc. and Randy Collins and Becky Gilmore of Collins Family of Companies.

The Collins Family of Companies that owns Ultimate Automobile and Hully Gully was named winner of the Family Enterprise of the Year award.

David Simpson, Executive Director of Ivey’s Business Families Centre, said the event was created to celebrate family businesses and their accomplishments.

“Family businesses often outperform other businesses,” he said.

Above: Geoff Beattie and David Simpson at the 8th Annual National Family Business Day Celebration

“I look for trusted companies that have proven to outperform in tough times,” he said.

Russo, a partner with Gardner Russo & Gardner, spoke about his global value investing philosophy during a presentation to George Athanassakos’ value investing students on January 26. For full story, please see Ben Graham Centre for Value Investing News.

The workshop, Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives of Sustainability, brings together faculty members and PhD students at Western from a variety of disciplines and is hosted by the Richard Ivey School of Business and sponsored by RBC and the Centre for Environment and Sustainability. It launched on January 19 and runs every second week until April 6.

“Diversity is fantastic because that’s where we get pushed. Some of my best insights come from someone I don’t know,” said Bansal. “We all come from our own tribes and have biases we don’t even see.”

Bansal kicked off the first session on January 19 with a discussion on how business and sustainability are connected. It brought together 30 people from various Western departments, including Biology, Engineering and Health Sciences.

Bansal outlined how the roots of business sustainability focused on increasing profits, then shifted to an emphasis on social responsibility and have since progressed to a concentration on the triple bottom line, where financial, environmental and social performance are all important.

She cited examples such as the Occupy movement where more attention has been on concern for society.

“We’re trying to find this new paradigm that’s more holistic,” she said. “The two missing variables are time and scale. There is a short-termism that’s happening in organizations. They need to embrace a long-term orientation, much like Pepsico’s CEO, Indra Nooyi, who says, ‘…we can no longer be focused on the short term, we must think long term…’.”

For more information on the workshop, please see Building Sustainable Value Research Centre’s Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives Of Sustainability.

Above: Tima Bansal at Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives of Sustainability workshop

The EMBA Class of 2012 raised $52,500 through various fundraising activities, such as barbecues, charity runs and raffles, and donated $47,220 to Dream School Foundation  to support Indian students’ education and $5,280 to Handi Care International’s centres for disabled children in southern India.

The students visited Dream School Foundation as part of their first study trip to India, which included stops at various sites in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, January 10-21. The donation to Dream School Foundation will go toward sponsoring 80 Indian students from poor and lower middle-class families in a pre-university program called Ten Plus  that will help make them eligible for professional courses or higher level studies.

Birgit Rameseder, one of the 57 EMBA students on the trip and co-ordinator of the fundraising project, said the students received a heartfelt welcome from Dream School Foundation.

“It was great to see the joy which the students had while attending school and it was impressive to hear about their future aspirations – engineers, doctors, astronauts. I am proud that we were able to add a little stepping stone to their goals,” she said.

Rameseder added that the experience brought her class even closer together and left a lasting impression.

“We harnessed the learnings from the EMBA program and brought it to reality to make a difference – one child at a time. It strengthened the class spirit and we were able to give back to the communities in which we work,” she said.

For more on the project see video and Times of India article.

The students spent a week during December holidays travelling throughout Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, and Santiago in Chile.

“The Ivey South America Study trip was a great eye-opener for me and went beyond my initial expectation,” explained Jean Kwong (MBA ’12), one of the 24 participants. “Prior to the trip, although I have done some initial research on Brazil and Chile, I was expecting the two countries to be similar enough to just be referred to as two Latin American countries. I could not have been more wrong.”

Trip participants met with several Ivey alumni at dinner in Sao Paulo, including: Joao Carmona (MBA ’97), Gian Taralli (MBA ’02), Nivtel Fernandes (MBA ‘04), Carlos Barbosa (MBA ’73), and Ari Berman (MBA ’99). The alumni shared their career experiences and gave advice on the challenges and opportunities facing Brazil.

Ivey alumni Joao Carmona (MBA ’97), Gian Taralli (MBA ’02), Roberta Raffaella (Gian’s wife), Nivtel Fernandes (MBA ‘04), Carlos Barbosa (MBA ’73) and Ari Berman (MBA ’99)

Ivey students are increasingly incorporating international study trips to develop on-the-ground exposure to the important economic, political and social issues countries face in emerging markets.

“There is, quite simply, no better way to gain an understanding of a country and to build contacts in that country than to travel there and be exposed to the widest variety of experience possible,” said MBA Program Services Director Larysa Gamula, who along with Professor Rick Robertson accompanied the trip.

The students visited the Canadian Embassy and Sao Paulo Stock Exchange, and toured the famous Christ the Redeemer statue located on a high point overlooking Rio de Janeiro. In Chile, they met with Ivey alumni leading Aquas Andinas, a water treatment facility, and Metro Santiago, the company that manages South America’s most extensive and efficient subway system.

“While Brazil and Chile are both growing economies,” said Kwong, “what makes one country more attractive for me as a business person and as a traveler really comes down to the each country’s unique culture – a concept that was difficult to grasp until I had experienced it first-hand. This understanding has also allowed me to better appreciate the in-class discussions around culture being at the core of any major internal and external business decision makings.”

Ivey’s South American Study Trip visits Aquas Andinas, a water treatment facility in Santiago, Chile

Temerty, who won  Canada’s Ernst & Young National Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2010, discussed his experiences of doing business in the Ukraine and other emerging markets, and his approaches to managing various types of risk, during a presentation to HBA students on November 29, as part of their Business Strategy in the Political World course.

Temerty said Northland Power initially developed a Ukrainian business merely to provide machinery for its Alberta projects. After witnessing the inefficient energy supply in Ukraine, Northland Power worked with Ukraine’s Energy Ministry to modernize the country’s energy system.

James Temerty discusses political risk in emerging markets

“I was captivated by the opportunity to do some good at a time when the crumbling infrastructure and changing economic systems required foreign investment and expertise,” he said. “It was a decision made by using my heart and not my head.”

Temerty outlined how Ukraine’s political turmoil and changing governments resulted in disputes, broken contracts and lost investment – which proved challenging for his company – but he forged on because he saw the potential for Ukraine to become a prosperous European state.

Guy Holburn speaks with James Temerty