After my trip to China (and a short stopover in London) I headed to, Providence Rhode Island, for my first OBTS Teaching Society for Management Educators Conference. I try and attend one research and one education/educators conference each year. This helps to inform both my practice and research, plus helps to link and develop innovative education research. I submitted to the conference based on a recommendation of a colleague, who had previously attended an OBTS conference in 2016. The conference was held at Providence College who did a fantastic job of hosting the event. The accommodation was nice (my first time staying in student halls, although we did not share rooms) and the breakfast and lunches were nice with the whole student cafeteria opened up and on offer. After coming back from China I was happy to just eat pizza and BBQ chicken all day.
I ran a session on applying innovation in the classroom, which was scheduled for the first morning of the conference. This worked out quite well as the conference was very sociable and ran late into the evening on most nights, so I was happy to get my session out of the way and relax and engage with the conference. I attended several very useful sessions, the highlight being a session on stacking cups applied to scaling up entrepreneurial businesses. The conference was mainly focused on traditional management subjects rather than enterprise and entrepreneurship, so the amount of directly relevant sessions was limited. But it was good to see all the different sessions and see how others teach management.
Robin Bell 