Dr Gabriel J Byrne will conduct a research seminar from Monday, 12th to Saturday, 16th May. The seminar is open to post-graduate students and academic staff. The seminar will focus on proposal writing, conducting research and supervising research. See attached schedule.

Dr Byrne holds a PhD in Culture and International Business from the National University of Ireland; an MBA from Trinity College, Dublin; and a Bachelor of Engineering from University College, Dublin. He lectures at The Smurfit Graduate School of Business, University College, Dublin.

He has extensive experience in teaching postgraduate research programmes at MA, MSc, MComm, MIE, and Higher Diploma in Business and Entrepreneurial Studies Programmes at the Smurfit Graduate School of Business and supervising postgraduate research theses. He has developed a programme for supervising research by faculty and research students.

He helped develop and taught for a number of years the 'Innovation and Marketing' course for Masters of Industrial Engineering (MIE) programme. The programme is designed for CEOs and senior managers. The objective of the programme is to capture new aspects of business and marketing, important in the crafting of competitive advantage in the new knowledge economy. He was in 2001 elected Fellow of The Academy of Marketing Science.

He has also taught on the MSc programmes of the National University of Ireland in Singapore and Hong Kong and directed a course for the MBA programme at Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. He is an external examiner and visiting professor at several Institutes of Technology in Ireland and the UK.

He has consulted for the Government of Finland on the concept of innovation and in 2007 addressed the European Foundation on the topic 'A Proposal on Innovation Culture for the Knowledge Economy'. He has also presented widely at international conferences. His latest paper 'How personal and national cultures affect leadership style' was published in the 'Journal of Business Research' in February 2006.

Dr Bryne spent his early career with General Electric in general management, industrial marketing, and product departments in USA, Mexico, Europe and Africa. He received his initial management education at the General Electric Business School in New York.

The latter part of Dr Byrne's career has been spent in Ireland, combining teaching in academia and as a CEO of an industrial manufacturing firm whose products he developed to become the brand leader of their genre. He has consulted for firms in distress in the UK and for a period in the nineties was MD of Seco Warrick, a large furnace builder, based in Birmingham, UK. He strategically managed its rationalization.

His main academic interest relates to bridging the sciences of anthropology and business in order to apply cultural lenses to business issues, through the measurement of manager's personal values. He has developed a deep understanding of issues, such as strategic management, corporate strategy, firm performance, competitive advantage and leadership from the standpoint of the manager and his personal values.

He is now developing a human values methodologies and instruments to accomplish scientifically, strategic planning exercises for maximum firm performance, through the identification of human value patterns in successful innovators and entrepreneurs. This work also encompasses the scientific method of building maximum performance teams for sales, joint ventures and alliances.