UK’s Top Enterprise Academic Receives Professorship
A Swansea Metropolitan University academic has become a Professor of Creative Entrepreneurship following his pioneering research within higher education entrepreneurship. This research has had a global impact and is helping drive forward the British objective of developing a new generation of business leaders.
Art and Design lecturer, Professor Andy Penaluna, is on the Board of Directors of Enterprise Educators UK (EEUK), a government-initiated group that helps Universities to develop more innovative and enterprising students. A vote of over ninety UK Universities placed Professor Penaluna in the role of Assistant Vice Chairman, a position that will evolve into full Chairmanship in August this year.
The focus of Professor Penaluna’s work has been on the development of creative business skills, a subject that he has taught in Swansea for nearly twenty-five years, and one that is very much in demand by enterprising Universities who wish to give their students a head start.
Since 1987, Professor Penaluna has carried out pedagogical research at Swansea Met with the help of his students, including ground-breaking projects that enhance creativity through an understanding of how the brain works. With the help of Jackie Coates, an occupational therapist who has worked with brain injuries within the NHS, he has developed a series of tasks that activate both the logical left side of the brain and the creative right side. This encourages the student to cultivate creative ideas while also possessing the logical capabilities to make them work.
Professor Penaluna’s findings have challenged the accepted theories of business education and informed the international entrepreneurial research community on approaches to engaging and enhancing creativity in an enterprise context. This led to the award of the Best International Paper for Senior Researchers at the 2006 Internationalizing Entrepreneurship Education and Training Conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Professor Penaluna’s investigations have also looked at alternative academic methods in relation to intangible property rights and intellectual capital management, the results of which have been supported by the UK Intellectual Property Office. This work has recognised gaps in the international curriculum while informing an emerging agenda within entrepreneurship education. Professor Penaluna has since been invited to conferences and workshop around the world and has authored many academic papers about his work.
As well as his position within EEUK, Professor Penaluna is currently leading a research team for the Welsh Assembly Government’s Welsh Entrepreneurship Educators Network, undertaking a consultation exercise with the view of setting up a new course provision to better inform and enable entrepreneurship educators in Wales. He is Chair of the Higher Education Academy – Business, Management, Accountancy and Finance (HEA-BMAF) Special Interest Group in Entrepreneurial Learning and has also contributed to the Art, Design and Media – Higher Education Academy (ADM-HEA) Subject Centre. He is a founder member of the Wales Creative Pedagogy Centre and has also taken a lead role in the first ever National Entrepreneurship Educator’s Awards for HE and FE institutions.
Professor Penaluna said: “Wales has always had a lead in this kind of thinking and is well supported. All I have done is to listen to my students over the past twenty-five years and try to put myself in their position as much as possible. I like to say that I am a student of students and some from Swansea Met have gone on to do some amazing things.
“I believe that a balance has to be struck between research and practical student engagement within the emerging enterprise agenda. The two need to develop hand in hand to better inform teaching and learning strategies.”
Much of Professor Penaluna’s work is aided by his wife Kathryn, who herself is an Enterprise Manager at Swansea Met and is one of Europe’s only Entrepreneurship Fellows.
Professor Penaluna said: “My partnership with Kath works very much like the two parts of the brain. I have the right side creative ideas while she has the left side business acumen to make them work.”
Elin McCallum, Entrepreneurship Education Manager at the Welsh Assembly Government, said:
"This is a very exciting appointment, which really highlights the importance of entrepreneurship to education in Wales. I look forward to expanding our work with Professor Penaluna in his new role."
Swansea Metropolitan University Vice-Chancellor, Professor David Warner said: “Andy’s professorship is highly deserved. As a result of Andy’s work, Swansea Metropolitan University is now widely recognised as one of the foremost global institutions in creativity-based entrepreneurship education.”
Professor Penaluna works at Swansea Metropolitan University developing enterprise modules across the institution’s range of programmes. In addition, he supports students in the development of their exciting new business ideas.
Professor Penaluna is also an internationally renowned airbrush artist.
12th April 2010