Walter R. J. Baets is Director of the Graduate School of Business of the University of Cape Town, and Unesco Chair in Education for Social and Sustainable Entrepreneurship at Euromed Management, Marseille. Before joining Euromed Management, he held academic positions in Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain. He graduated in Econometrics and Operations Research at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) and did postgraduate studies in Business Administration at Warwick Business School (UK). He was awarded a PhD from the University of Warwick in Industrial and Business Studies and a Habilitation of Paul Cezanne University, Aix-Marseille III, France.
He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Aix-Marseille (IAE) and GRASCE (Complexity Research Centre) Aix-en-Provence. He held visiting teaching positions at ESC Rouen, KU Leuven, RU Gent, Moscow, St Petersburg, Tyumen University, Purdue University and Narsee Monjee (Mumbai, India). Most of his professional experience was acquired in the telecommunications and banking sector. He has substantial experience in management development activities in Russia and the Arab world.
His research interests include Innovation and knowledge; Complexity, chaos and change; The impact of (new information) technologies on organisations; Knowledge, learning and artificial intelligence; On-line learning, workplace learning and pedagogical innovation; A quantum interpretation of management.
He is a member of the International Editorial Board of the Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Information & Management, and Systèmes d’Information et Management. He has acted as a reviewer/evaluator and chair for a number of International Conferences (e.g. ECIS an ICIS) and for the EU RACE programme, and was guest editor of a special issue of Accounting, Management and Information Technology on Complexity in Management. He has published in several journals including the Journal of Strategic Information Systems, The European Journal of Operations Research, Knowledge and Process Management, Marketing Intelligence and Planning, The Journal of Systems Management, Information & Management, The Learning Organization and Accounting, Management and Information Technologies. He has organised international conferences in the area of IT and organizational change.
Walter Baets is the author of “Organizational Learning and Knowledge Technologies in a Dynamic Environment” published in 1998 by Kluwer Academic, and of “Complexity, Organisations and Learning: the quantum interpretation of business”, published in 2006 with Routledge. He co-authored with Gert Van der Linden “The Hybrid Business School: Developing knowledge management through management learning”, published by Prentice-Hall in 2000 and “Virtual Corporate Universities”, published 2003 by Kluwer Academic. Along with Bob Galliers he co-edited “Information Technology and Organizational Transformation: Innovation for the 21st Century Organization” also published in 1998 by Wiley. In 1999, he edited “Complexity and Management: A collection of essays”, published by World Scientific Publishing. Recently his latest book was published with Springer (2005): “Knowledge Management and Management Learning: Extending the Horizons of Knowledge-Based Management”. Recently he co-authored with Erna Oldenboom: Rethinking growth: social intrapreneurship for sustainable performance (Palgrave MacMillan, 2009). He is series editor for the Palgrave Macmillan Series on Diversity, Leadership and Responsibility.
