Bissett Insider

7th Annual JMH LaunchPad Pitch Competition another huge success!

The JMH LaunchPad competition is in its seventh year of recognizing and rewarding MRU student entrepreneurs.  Hosted by the Institute of Innovation an Entrepreneurship, the annual competition has become a 300 seat sell-out event filled with investors, students, and community members who come to see the student entrepreneurs pitch their ventures for a chance at $80,000 in start-up funds (cash and in-kind services). The student entrepreneurs at Mount Royal University continue to impress  and lead in Calgary’s entrepreneurial community.

Participating students were: Gio Moros, E-Cash; Silvia Bezzi, Arielle Fitzgerald, Marc Nzojibwami, Mooch; Gurpartap Baidwan, Move N’Store; Luke Morstad, Outlier Surf & Adventure Co; Tarandeep Singh Kainth, Sharyeo; Kevin Wojcial, Venure Tech Innovations VR; Vladimar Taikov, WorkMore.

Congratulations to all of our student entrepreneurs! A complete list of results can be found here.

Bissett Assistant Professor, Tashfeen Hussain completes oral defense for his PhD

Congratulations to Assistant Professor Tashfeen Hussain who recently completed his oral defense of his thesis! Tashfeen’s thesis has been approved without revision through the Smith School of Business, Queen’s University. The title of the thesis: “Implications of firms’ interactions with debt markets”.

Tashfeen has also been selected to write a chapter on an upcoming book on Corporate fraud. The chapter is titled: “The spillover impact of corporate fraud”.

 

 

Venture Design Studio Winners

As part of the Innovation and the Entrepreneurial experience course (ENTR 2301), Venture Design Studios, students identify a problem and find an innovative solution using the Lean Startup methodology. Throughout the year, approximately 45 external experts provide feedback and insight to 500 participating students.

At the end of the semester there is Venture Design Studios finals where the top 7 teams pitch their ideas. This semester, the winning venture and people’s choice was Safe Stir,   an innovative and discrete stir stick that could identify whether a substance has been put into a drink.

The Venture Design Studio is a great example of an experiential course that seeks to drive the entrepreneurial skill-set of our students. Congratulations to these innovative students!

MRU hosts 2019 Sports Business Roundtable

After the failed Olympic bid, Mount Royal University professors, Dr. David Finch and Dr. David Legg , recognizing that the “business of sports is not just a business unto itself but rather a critical driver of  the future vision of our city”, determined that an in-depth discussion and a critical analysis of the regional sports environment was warranted. This was the impetus behind the inaugural and hugely successful,  Sports Business Round-table held at Mount Royal University on March 20, 2019.

The event was comprised of over 40 regional sport business leaders from a variety of private and public organizations representing a diverse cross-section of sports. The purpose of the round-table was to measure interest  in establishing a collective approach to furthering the vision and purpose of sport in the region and using this as the “catalyst” to position the City of Calgary and the Bow Valley Corridor into “Canada’s most livable region”.

Vigorous discussion ensued, a massive amount of comments were collected and a plan of action was formed! The information collected along with the post event feedback  has helped Dr. David Finch and Dr. David Legg determine the necessity of a strategic plan that will encompass collaboration, community engagement and  targeted evidence based research initiatives.

Going forward, an independent working group, [Sport Business Working Group] will continue to “examine the role of sport business ecosystem as a catalyst for delivering the larger community priorities in our region.” The Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship will continue to host, facilitate and administer the group. A community board will be recruited by Dr. Finch and Dr. Legg. This community board will provide guidance, offer support to ensure alignment across the “ecosystem” and aid in building formal and informal partnerships to drive public engagement.

For further information, contact Dr. David Finch at dfinch@mtroyal.ca or Dr. David Legg at dlegg@mtoyal.ca

Bissett Case club team wins prestigious CPA Business Challenge Competition!

Congratulations to our Bissett case club team for their incredible win in the CPA Business Challenge Case Competition this past March. Competing teams were from universities across the province including the University of Calgary, University of Alberta, University of Lethbridge, MacEwan University, SAIT, NAIT and Athabasca University.

The winning team, comprised of Bissett students Mia Bains, Lyra Mae Cosare, Lucas Mardones and Katherine Martens,  won the first place cash prize of $10,000 which is wholly sponsored by the Chartered Professional Accountants Education Foundation (CPAEF).

The judges’s comments referenced the winning teams “ability to organize and articulate their analysis in a poised, confident and competent manner.”

The second Bissett team of Shane Cuckow, Dea Devolli, Mishal Ira Ordonez and Jan Santiago also showed well with a strong presentation, narrowly missing qualifying for the final presentation round.

The success of our students is not only indicative of their talent and hard work but also of the accounting program and mentor-ship of our dedicated professors, that continues to produce students of high caliber.

A special thanks to the faculty for their continued support and guidance to the teams through the Accounting Case Club. They include Nicole Edge, Assistant Professor, Accounting and Finance; Rafik Kurji, Associate Professor, Accounting and Finance, and Simon Magennis, Associate Professor, Accounting and Finance.

Thanks to all and congratulations!

Bissett Finance Professor Osama El-Temtamy has paper accepted to conference in Greece

Bissett School of Business would like to congratulate Osama El-Temtamy on having his paper accepted for presentation at the the 7th Spring Conference of the Multinational Finance Society in Chania, Crete, Greece in April 2019. Osama’s paper is entitled: Oil Price Plunge: Are Conventional and Islamic banks equally vulnerable?

Abstract:

“Oil Price Plunge: Are Conventional and Islamic Banks Equally Vulnerable?”
Ghulame Rubbaniy – Zayed University, United Arab Emirates
Osama El-Temtamy – Mount Royal University, Canada
A. W. Khan – University of Evansville, USA
Abida Perveen – Comsats University Islamabad, Pakistan

In response to the recent debate on the vulnerability of the banking industry to oil price plunge, this article investigates the effect of oil price plunge on credit and insolvency risks of banking industry at aggregate level, across banks’ specializations and at country level. Our findings show that falling oil prices significantly increase the credit risk for the banking industry in the GCC region and particularly for banks operating in Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates; however, falling oil prices do not affect credit risk of Islamic banks. Our analysis shows that black gold’s price plunge does not increase the insolvency risk of GCC banking industry nor across bank specializations and across Gulf countries using both accounting-based and market-based proxies of insolvency risk. We argue that bailout packages by the wealth funds to the GCC banks is a probable reason for counter intuitive protection against solvency risk due to negative oil price shocks.