[Fabilioh! Dec 2022] Expanding Innovation, Sustainability, and Inclusion
16 Dec 2022
Roberto Galang, PhD (AB Communication 1994) has been a faculty member of Ateneo de Manila University, teaching classes in strategic management, Philippine history, communications research, and organization theory across multiple departments throughout the decades.
After working for nine years at the World Bank Group, he returned to Ateneo this June 2022 to take over as Dean of the John Gokongwei School of Management (JGSOM). He has infused the school with a bolder mission: to enlarge the footprint of the university in innovation, sustainability, and inclusion.
JGSOM, he asserts, will focus on these three significant pillars. "The Philippines faces a competitive challenge as many of our existing firms remain transfixed in traditional ways of doing business: brick-and-mortar retail, paper-based transactions, wasteful production techniques, and exclusive business models. We need to create a framework that produces more disruptive entrepreneurs; we need to have them work with this new digital and tech-enabled corporate environment that we find ourselves in," he says.
The importance of teaching and learning in a global society is more significant now: "We need to do more blended programs, more digital programs while enhancing our own traditional offerings. We need to provide the skillset to our students so that they can create the tech-enabled companies of tomorrow or work for corporations and organizations that they can also disrupt. "