Corporate Excellence Award

Dr. Dhjaku is a digital transformation enthusiast  with more than  25 years of expertise in information technology, in the Banking Industry. Valbona is the IT Manager at Credins Bank where she has led multiple transformation projects. Additionally, with a PhD degree in Informatics, from the University of Tirana, Albania Dr. Dhjaku also has been teaching at the University Of Tirana for more than 20 years, in computer science disciplines.

Dr. Katharine Wirsching is an Assistant Professor at the chair of management and organization at the University of Augsburg, Germany. Her research focuses on entrepreneurial ecosystems, corporate governance and innovation in family firms, female and immigrant entrepreneurship, and public policy. She is also a senior research fellow at the Institute for Development Strategies (IDS) at Indiana University at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA), USA.

David A. Bell is a faculty member of the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. He earned his Ph.D. in public and international affairs from the University of Pittsburgh, where he also received his MPA with a focus on nonprofit management, specifically of NGOs. At the undergraduate level, he studied public affairs management at Michigan State University.  His research interests include leadership and accountability involving public organizations, entrepreneurship and capital flow in developing countries, program evaluation, nonprofit management, organizational leadership, and cross-sector collaboration.  Bell is a member of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA), the Conference of Minority Public Administrators and the Consortium for International Management, Policy and Development. He has extensive management and executive experience at civil society organizations, including those that focus on human services and the banking industry.

David Sprott is the Henry Y. Hwang Dean and a professor of marketing in the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management. His research interests include retailing, branding, influence strategies, and marketing public policy. He received his Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of South Carolina and earned a BA in Business and an MBA from Kent State University. Prior to his arrival at the Drucker School, Sprott served as professor of marketing and dean of the College of Business at the University of Wyoming. At UW, he led a renewed strategic vision embracing the student experience, quality academic research, and economic engagement of the state. Previously Sprott served on the faculty at Washington State University for more than two decades and held the Boeing/Scott and Linda Carson Chair of Marketing, among other leadership positions; he was a recipient of an Outstanding Faculty Research Award from the WSU College of Business.

Sprott’s research has been published in leading scholarly journals, including the Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of Retailing. His teaching interests include retail management, leadership, brand management, consumer behavior, sales management, and research methods at the undergraduate, master, and doctoral levels.

Sprott is the author and co-author of numerous publications, including serving as co-editor of the Handbook of Research on Customer Engagement (Edward Elgar, 2019).

He is a member of several marketing and consumer organizations, including the American Marketing Association, the Association for Consumer Research, and the Society for Consumer Psychology.

Ryan Bailey is an Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship and Strategic Change at the University of Wyoming. Ryan possesses 12+ years of diversified industry experience in the government, healthcare, communication, retail, and energy sectors.

As a certified Project Management Professional (PMP®) and one of the first 500 industry practitioners to become a Certified Change Management Professional (CCMP™), he is an expert at managing both the technical side and people side of change. He has consulted on international and domestic projects for a broad spectrum of NGOs and Fortune 500 companies—e.g., RGP, Accenture, Walmart, Target, Comcast, Phillips 66, and others—on a variety of corporate and social entrepreneurship initiatives from $10K – $300M.

His industry roles have ranged from implementing new product launches and international market entries to creating training programs for prison inmates and managing correspondence with missionaries in 100+ nations. Accordingly, his research interests seek to bridge the gap between theory and practice regarding how firms and entrepreneurs can enact positive change through a variety of perspectives including social/commercial entrepreneurship, civic wealth creation, and value consumption.