Service industry expert heads Business School

19 March 2007

Service industry expert heads Unitec Business School

Unitec New Zealand has announced the appointment of Dr Toni Hilton as head of the Unitec Business School.

Dr Hilton came to New Zealand from the UK in 2005 to take up a head of department role at AUT, but says the Unitec Business School position was an opportunity too good to pass up. Dr Hilton believes that one of the key challenges facing business schools today is to keep pace with the changing face of the business world.

This has lead to an increasing emphasis on working in partnership with industry to ensure that students gain the latest knowledge, she says.

“The business world wants graduates who are work ready and needs to be able to rely on business schools to provide appropriate ongoing professional development. In the past, business schools tended to focus more on the acquisition of knowledge rather than the application of that knowledge to current practice.

“I believe employers want business graduates who can balance discipline-based knowledge with generic skills, such as the ability to work in a group environment and communicate effectively. The dynamism of the business world places huge demands on business organisations and it is important that our graduates are able to contribute from day one.“

Originally graduating with a law degree, Dr Hilton pursued a marketing career in the UK and Europe’s fast-moving consumer goods sector in the 1980s. She joined the University of West England’s Bristol Business School as a senior lecturer in marketing in 1991, before becoming principal lecturer and head of the School of Marketing. Dr Hilton is still a visiting fellow at the university, with a brief to facilitate international collaborative research and teaching opportunities, particularly between staff at Bristol and her New Zealand-based colleagues.

Dr Hilton brings with her a wealth of consultancy and research experience within service industries and says that all businesses benefit from adopting, and adapting, practices originally developed within the service industry. “Service industries cover the broadest spectrum of business, from small professional service firms through to large public sector organisations, not forgetting financial services, non-profit and charitable organisations along the way.

“Even manufacturing organisations are increasingly adopting business practices developed within the service industries as they refine their relationship management and post-sales service strategies.”

In the UK, Dr Hilton provided consultancy, education and research expertise to a wide variety of service-based organisations including The Law Society, the Probation Service, the National Health Service, law firms and charitable organisations. Her PhD thesis – completed at Nottingham University – examined the relationship between lawyers and clients. This work has been published in the International Journal of the Legal Profession and Services Marketing Quarterly.

Dr Hilton’s consultancy and research into the non-profit and public sectors has been published extensively, and she also sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing.

She says that the not-for-profit sector may be more inherently complex than commercial business, simply because there are more stakeholders involved, but that does not mean that business theory is irrelevant. “It provides a more challenging context for the interpretation and application of business theory, and the public sector is increasingly adopting commercial practices within its operations in order to deliver greater value to the public users and payers.

“Practitioners within all of these different types of business organisations draw upon the same body of theoretical knowledge and they are frequently confronted by very similar strategic business problems, which provides a firm basis for practitioners to learn from each other while pursuing academic qualifications.”

ENDS

© Scoop Media