The International Academic Forum (IAFOR) > People > International Academic Advisory Board > Business & Economics

Business & Economics

  • Harry Hill
    Harry Hill
    Japan United States Friendship Commission (JUSFC), Japan
  • Fan Li
    Fan Li
    LePing Social Entrepreneur Foundation & Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR), China
  • Dr Philip Sugai*
    Dr Philip Sugai*
    Doshisha University, Japan
  • Daniel Kjellsson*
    Daniel Kjellsson*
    Future Talent Council, Sweden
  • Dr Grant Black
    Dr Grant Black
    Chuo University, Japan
  • Professor Will Baber**
    Professor Will Baber**
    Kyoto University Graduate School of Management, Japan
  • Dr Sarah Louisa Birchley
    Dr Sarah Louisa Birchley
    Toyo Gakuen University, Japan
  • Professor Johannes Moenius
    Professor Johannes Moenius
    University of Redlands, USA
  • Professor Anshuman Khare**
    Professor Anshuman Khare**
    Athabasca University, Canada
  • Dr Tingting Ying**
    Dr Tingting Ying**
    Ningbo University of Technology, China
  • Dr Tom Houghton**
    Dr Tom Houghton**
    Curtin University, Australia

* attached to more than one section
** journal editor

The role of the International Academic Advisory Board is to provide advice and expertise in support of IAFOR’s mission and activities. Members are appointed by the President of IAFOR to one or more academic sections, depending on their individual area(s) of expertise.

Membership of the IAAB is for three years, renewable once, and is by invitation only. Journal Editors are ex-officio members of the Board for the length in which they serve.

The IAAB is organised into three academic divisions, and then further into sections, each of which has a Chair responsible for academic programmes and publications, and who serves as a representative on the Academic Governing Board.

I – Education & Language Learning

II – Social Sciences & Sustainability

III – Arts, Humanities, Media & Culture

Harry Hill
Japan United States Friendship Commission (JUSFC), Japan

Biography

A passionate and dynamic business and civic leader, Harry Hill served as President and CEO of Oak Lawn Marketing, Inc from 2006 until 2017. During Hill’s tenure, the company grew from ¥15 billion to ¥68 billion in sales while creating numerous best-selling products that became household names. Operating as Shop Japan, a retail company marketing healthy lifestyle products to Japanese consumers, the company created several long selling product brands, and created new niche categories such as contour overlay mattresses, home fitness, ceramic cookware and steam cleaning products. Hill and his management team created a powerful corporate culture based on the vision of “enriching lifestyle worldwide.” While President and CEO, Hill also managed one of the largest M&A transactions of 2009, when NTT Docomo took a 51% share in OLM. In September 2017, Hill stepped down from the company’s day-to-day operations, but remains active as an independent outside director focusing on new business development.

Hill has both founded and contributed to several start-up companies. He currently sits on the board of Ten Ten Technologies as an outside director.

Hill is an engaged business and civic leader. Since 2013, he has been serving as Co-Chair of CULCON, a bi-national group advising the U.S. and Japanese governments on educational and cultural exchange between Japan and the United States. He also serves as Chair of the Japan-US Friendship Commission. Hill is an active member of the ACCJ. The Japanese Cabinet recognized Hill for his role in promoting gender diversity and named him a Male Champion of Change. Hill has a particular passion for HOPE International Development Organization, a Japanese NPO, which provides clean water for the neglected poor. The organization also responded to the challenges of 3/11 by creating the Genki Japan fund, which helped 77 different groups and individuals rebuild their livelihoods. One of the recipients best encapsulated Hill’s philosophy, “If we get help to rebuild our livelihoods, we can rebuild our homes and communities ourselves.”

In both business and civic activities, the themes of self-reliance, empowerment, education and an optimistic vision for the future drive Hill. In Japanese, his favorite words are the homonym Souzou (想像/創造). The first characters mean imagine and the second characters mean to build. Hill’s management and leadership philosophy are based on imagining unrealized potential that is tempered with the concrete blueprint to achieve. The two words must co-exist for sustained success.

Hill is a sought-after speaker and guest. He has appeared on numerous TV shows focusing on the themes of business, leadership and family. He has given numerous interviews, written a six-month guest column for the Chunichi and Tokyo Newspaper, and delivered speeches to business groups, universities and civic groups. He has also published a book in Japanese called Long Selling Marketing.

Fan Li
LePing Social Entrepreneur Foundation & Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR), China

Biography

Fan founded Global Links Initiative with Robin Rowland in 2003, a nonprofit organisation headquartered first in Tokyo and then in Shanghai that fostered practical links among social entrepreneurs around the world. In 2004, GLI first brought the concept of social entrepreneurship to China.

Fan was a founding member of the China-US Strategic Philanthropy Partnership (CUSP), a leading network that promotes research, exchange and collaboration between the philanthropic sectors of China and the United States, she worked with CUSP from 2010 to 2016. Fan connected and advised partnership building between two leading social enterprises in Japan and China from 2009 to 2012, which resulted in the first China-Japan social joint venture in sustainable farming.

Fan is co-editor-in-chief of the Chinese version of Stanford Social Innovation Review. She is also editor of the groundbreaking book, A New Horizon: 10 Stories of Social Entrepreneurs in China (HongKong, 2010). Her translation of Kazuyoshi Fujita’s book, Radish Revolution, was one of the best sellers of the SanLian Publishing House in 2013. She currently serves as International Advisor for the LePing Foundation in Beijing. Fan’s work as Senior Fellow at the IAFOR Research Centre leads efforts to grow the East Asia Social Innovation Initiative, a cutting-edge network for research, dialogue and knowledge sharing on social innovation in East Asia.

Dr Philip Sugai*
Doshisha University, Japan

Biography

Dr Sugai is a Professor of Marketing within Doshisha University's Graduate School of Business where he currently teaches Marketing, eMarketing, Marketing Research, and Sustainable & Responsible Marketing. Dr Sugai also served as a Visiting Professor for Stanford University from 2015 - 2017, where he taught Innovation in Japan at the Stanford Overseas campus in Kyoto. Prior to joining the Doshisha University faculty, Dr Sugai taught at the International University of Japan in Niigata where he also served as Dean and Associate Dean of the IUJ Business School for six years.

Dr Sugai is the author of two books, The Value Plan and The Six Immutable Laws of Mobile Business (John Wiley & Sons) and has published case studies with Ivey Business School Publishing on KITKAT Japan, AGL, Hatsune Miku and Walt Disney Internet Group.

He received his Doctorate degree from Waseda University and his M.B.A. in Marketing and Operations Management from New York University’s Stern School of Business. He has worked as a marketing executive at American Express, Muze, Inc., and Lightningcast, Inc., and currently serves as a marketing advisor and marketing strategy consultant to companies both in Japan and globally.

*Dr Philip Sugai is attached to more than one section of the International Academic Advisory Board.

Daniel Kjellsson*
Future Talent Council, Sweden

Biography

With a background in journalism, Daniel Kjellsson, is the Managing Director of Future Talent Council; a global membership organisation of senior corporate talent leaders, policymakers on labour and education and university leadership from around the world.

The organisational vision statement of the Future Talent Council is to help improve human capability and opportunity for all talent everywhere, and to create and enable, cross-sector collaborative opportunities for educational, corporate and governmental leaders who can effectively influence change.

Daniel Kjellsson has been serving as a Senior Advisor to Corporate University of Sweden, the business school faculty of Stockholm University Foundation, on innovation, digitisation and educational technology, since 2008.

Kjellsson is the founder of multiple initiatives in the cross-sectors of journalism, media, education and technology, such as the Swedish National Association for Digital Publishers, Stockholm Talent Summit (gathering global talent acquisition technology parties), Sydney Stockholm (agency developing an editorial charter for corporate communications) and ExecUni (developing online learning opportunities for human workers in jobs at high-risk of automation).

Based in Sydney, Australia from 2012 to 2017, Kjellsson was involved in the media, foreign policy and diplomacy effort to free Al Jazeera journalist Peter Greste from what ultimately became a 400 day detention and prison term in Egypt. Kjellsson is a vocal supporter of journalist’s safety around the world.

He lives in Stockholm, Sweden with his wife Charlotte and two children.

*Daniel Kjellsson is attached to more than one section of the International Academic Advisory Board.

Dr Grant Black
Chuo University, Japan

Biography

Dr Grant Black is an associate professor in the Faculty of Commerce at Chuo University, Tokyo, Japan, where he has taught Global Skills and Global Issues since 2013. Grant is engaged in diverse roles as a global manager, systems builder, executive leader and university professor. His research and teaching areas include global management skills, intercultural intelligence (CQ) and organisational management. He also has taught Japanese Management Theory at J. F. Oberlin University (Japan), and a continuing education course in the Foundations of Japanese Zen Buddhism at Temple University Japan. Previously, he was Chair of the English Section at the Center for Education of Global Communication at the University of Tsukuba where he served in a six-year post in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. He holds a BA Highest Honors in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara; an MA in Japanese Buddhist Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles; and a Doctor of Social Science (DSocSci) from the Department of Management in the School of Business at the University of Leicester. Dr Black is a Chartered Manager (CMgr), the highest status that can be achieved in the management profession in the UK. In 2018, he was elected a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute (FCMI) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA). Grant is President of Black Inc. Consulting (Japan), a business & university global strategic management firm based in Tokyo which helps individuals and organisations achieve their global targets. He is the director of the newly formed Nippon Academic Management Institute (NAMI) and the author of the forthcoming “Education Reform Policy at a Japanese Super Global University: Policy Translation, Migration and Mutation” (Routledge, 2021). He serves as a Vice-President and Auditor for the International Academic Forum (IAFOR).

Dr Grant Black is a Vice-President (at large) of IAFOR. He is a member of the Business & Economics section of the International Academic Advisory Board.

Professor Will Baber**
Kyoto University Graduate School of Management, Japan

Biography

Will Baber has combined education with business throughout his career, teaching business students in Japan and Europe and working in economic development for the State of Maryland and language services in Washington, DC. In his work he has frequently encountered cross cultural conflicts and synergies. He studies these issues as an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Management of Kyoto University. His research interests include cross-cultural adaptation and the impact of expatriates on the workplace.

Professor Will Baber is a member of IAFOR’s Academic Governing Board and Auditor of the organisation. He is Chair of the Business & Management section of the International Academic Advisory Board.

**Professor Will Baber is Associate Editor of the IAFOR Journal of Business & Management.

Dr Sarah Louisa Birchley
Toyo Gakuen University, Japan

Biography

With an undergraduate degree in Geography, an MA in Education (TESOL) and a Doctorate in Education, with a focus on Management, Sarah Louisa feels extremely comfortable working in an interdisciplinary environment. She teaches courses in Organisational Behavior, Professional Skills, Global Business and Management at Toyo Gakuen University, Japan. She is also the Japan representative for GlobalWelsh, an organization working to harness the power of the Welsh diaspora to facilitate inward investment in Wales and the development of the next generation of Welsh entrepreneurs.

Dr Birchley’s research fields include, Transnational Entrepreneurship including Diaspora Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Education, and Education Management. Her most recent research is concerned with Japanese self-initiated expatriate entrepreneurs working in Southeast Asia, where she and her colleague, Kazuko Yokoyama conducted research supported by a Japanese Government Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) 2017-2019 (JSPS 17K03948) in Hong Kong, Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Indonesia, China, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Results of this study can be found in her recent publication, Transnational Entrepreneurship: Japanese Self-Initiated Expatriate Entrepreneurs in South East Asia, published by Springer (2019).

Professor Johannes Moenius
University of Redlands, USA

Biography

Johannes Moenius is the William R. and S. Sue Johnson Endowed Chair of Spatial Economic Analysis and Regional Planning and the director of International Business Initiatives at the University of Redlands School of Business. He joined the faculty in the fall of 2005, where he teaches courses in international business. Before that he taught at the Kellogg School of Management. He was also a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo. He is originally from Germany, where he studied Management Science at Bamberg University. Then he studied Economics at the Technical University in Dresden, Queen’s University, Canada and the University of California, San Diego, where he received his Ph.D. In his research, he is interested in how domestic and international institutions affect international trade. Besides the effect of legal institutions on trade, he has written several papers on the effects of technical standards on trade flows and the dynamics of comparative advantage, for which he visualized his results in an online atlas using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). He recently applied GIS to the analysis of the housing market in Southern California. He has also worked on the dynamics of network effects in platform technologies and competition between political parties. He has presented his work in more than 70 talks that he gave at universities, conferences, and government institutions. His work appeared, amongst others in The Review of Economics and Statistics, Japan and the World Economy, and the International Journal of Industrial Organization.

Professor Anshuman Khare**
Athabasca University, Canada

Biography

Professor Anshuman Khare is Professor in Operations Management at Athabasca University, Canada. He joined Athabasca University in January 2000. He is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow and has completed two post-doctoral terms at Johannes Gutenberg Universität in Mainz, Germany. He is also a former Monbusho Scholar, having completed a postdoctoral assignment at Ryukoku University in Kyoto, Japan. He has published a number of books and research papers on a wide range of topics. His research focuses on environmental regulation impacts on industry, just-in-time manufacturing, supply chain management, sustainability, cities and climate change, online business education, transformation brought about by digital technologies, etc. Anshuman also serves as Associate Editor of International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education published by Emerald and International Journal of Applied Management and Technology.

**Professor Anshuman Khare is Guest Editor of the IAFOR Journal of Business & Management.

Dr Tingting Ying**
Ningbo University of Technology, China

Biography

Dr Tingting Ying is a Lecturer of Finance at Ningbo University of Technology and a Visiting Teaching Fellow at Nottingham University – Ningbo Campus, China. She received her PhD in Finance from University of Nottingham, UK. Her teaching areas are in the areas of corporate finance, financial statement analysis, and economics. Dr Ying’s primary areas of research interests include corporate governance, accounting and financial crime analysis. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Services and Standards and also has a Certified Financial Analyst designation.

**Dr Tingting Ying is the editor of the IAFOR Journal of the Social Sciences.

Dr Tom Houghton**
Curtin University, Australia

Biography

Dr Tom Houghton is Director of the MBA (Oil & Gas) at Curtin Graduate School of Business, Australia, and was previously a Research Fellow at the University of Strathclyde, UK. His principal field of research is sustainable energy economics and he has a keen interest in energy for development, having established a training program in Renewable Energy for Developing Countries with UNITAR. Dr Houghton is a Visiting Professor at Nagoya University of Commerce and Business, Japan, where he provides courses in sustainable energy to MBA students. Before joining Strathclyde he spent more than five years in the power industry and a further eight in the banking sector, latterly as director at the Japanese bank Nomura. With colleagues in Asia and the United States, he established a consulting company in the renewable energy sector in 2011. Dr Houghton holds an MEng from Imperial College, an MBA from London Business School and a PhD from the University of Strathclyde.

**Dr Tom Houghton is the editor of the IAFOR Journal of Sustainability, Energy & the Environment.