Dr. Gabriel J Byrne holds a PhD in Culture and International Business from the National University of Ireland, an MBA from Trinity College Dublin and a BE from University College Dublin. He lectures at The Smurfit Graduate School of Business, University College Dublin.

Dr Gabriel J Byrne’s teaching authority is based on a career of over 40 years in international business and academia. He spent his early career with General Electric, USA, in general management and industrial marketing, in product departments across several US states, Mexico, several European countries and Africa. His early management education was initiated at the General Electric Business School, Croton, New York.

The latter part of Dr. Byrne’s career has been spent in Ireland, combining teaching in academia and as a CEO of an industrial manufacturing firm whose products he developed into the brand leader of its genre and as a benchmark gas measuring standard for the semiconductor industry worldwide. Dr Byrne, in conjunction with his academic career, has consulted to firms in distress in the UK and for a period in the nineties acted as MD of Seco Warrick, a large furnace builder, based in Birmingham, UK, to strategically manage its rationalization. Dr Byrne has developed a general research interest in the subject areas of International Marketing, Export Marketing, Leadership, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Competitive Advantage and Cross Cultural Business issues.

He has developed and taught for a number of years on the Masters of Industrial Engineering (MIE) degree programme ‘Innovation and Marketing’. The programme is designed for CEOs and senior managers. The objective of the programme is to capture new aspects of business and marketing, important in the crafting of competitive advantage in the new knowledge economy. He has directed the end of programme course for the MBA, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia at the Advanced Management School of the Smurfit Graduate School of Business and acts as a consultant to this South American university’s business consultancy department.

He is extern examiner and visiting professor to several Institutes of Technology in Ireland and the UK. He directs doctoral research students. He has consulted to the Government of Finland on the concept of Innovation and in 2007 addressed the European Foundation of the EU on the topic ‘A Proposal on Innovation Culture for the Knowledge Economy’ His main academic interest relates to bridging the sciences of anthropology and business in order to apply cultural lenses to business issues, through the measurement of managers’ personal values. In this way he has developed a deep understanding of issues, such as, strategic management, corporate strategy, firm performance, competitive advantage and leadership from the standpoint of the manager and his personal values.

At the present time he is developing human values methodologies and instruments to accomplish scientifically, strategic planning exercises for maximum firm performance, through the identification of human value patterns in successful innovators and entrepreneurs. This work also encompasses the scientific method of building maximum performance teams for sales, joint ventures and alliances. Dr Byrne’s teaching and consulting interests are in the following areas- Good leadership practice Leadership and SME Business Success Leadership and firm performance Crafting Sustained Competitive Advantage Export competitive strategy Export corporate Strategy Marketing insights to export performance Insights into Strategic Management Insights into corporate strategy.

Dr. Byrne has extensive practice and experience in the direction of teaching postgraduate research programmes at MA, MSc, MComm, MIE, and Higher Diploma in Business and Entrepreneurial Studies Programmes at the Smurfit Graduate School of Business and in the direction of postgraduate research theses. . In this context he has developed Master Class Programmes in the supervision of research for faculty and research students. He has also taught on the MSc programmes of the National University of Ireland in Singapore and Hong Kong. Dr.Byrne has presented widely at international conferences. His latest paper ‘How personal and national cultures affect leadership style’, was published in the Journal of Business Research February 2006 In 2001 Dr. Byrne was elected Fellow of The Academy of Marketing Science.