My name is Andres Davila; I was born in Quito Ecuador in 1979. The economic crises of 1996 in South-America led to the changeover of an entire middle class into poverty: the dollarization of the economy implemented to halt the successive inflation and the devaluation of Ecuador’s Sucre (national currency) caused a sudden rise in the cost of living. This made it impossible for an entire segment of the population to access an education, a normal diet, healthcare and other basic services. The flow of emigration to the United States and Europe has steadily risen since then.
As a part of this movement, and after studying International trade at the University in Ecuador between 1998 and 2000, I chose in 2001 to continue my studies in France. In 2002, succeeding a year of accelerated French language courses at the Catholic University of Lyon, I obtained the right of entry to the last year of the Bachelors degree in management at Jean Moulin University in Lyon. During 2 years I learned some French managerial methods like the Socio-economic approach to management. In 2003 I graduated as an engineer in team and quality management with a master’s thesis in "Intercultural competence: usefulness and assessment method."
This first academic experience in a foreign country led my curiosity towards other learning and professional overseas experiences. Thus, in 2004 I received a scholarship to study at NMSU (New Mexico State University) as an exchange student for one year. In 2005, following my return from the United States to France and to continue my academic instruction in management, I decided to present a thesis project for the Ph.D in Management Sciences at the University Jean Moulin in Lyon. To achieve this project, I obtained the support of a small international company in Lyon. The company is a food trading enterprise headquartered in France. Other business units are also located in China, Thailand and Vietnam.
My background as a manager began with my integration in this small international company, at first within the unit in Lyon, followed by my integration into the main unit in Asia (Bangkok –Thailand) and continued with my arrival in Vietnam as a manager of the Ho Chi Minh branch. I returned to Lyon in 2007 to finalize my research and to continue working for the company until June 2007. In parallel, in my professional activities and research, I have presented several papers (all management related) at international conferences in France and the United States in French, English and Spanish, some are the following ones:
·Construire Un Langage Commun Dans La Petite Entreprise Internationale
·Building cross-cultural cooperation in a small size business. PHASE 1:
Organizational diagnosis, l’Academy Of Management (Award « AOM & Bentley College/HEC Outstanding Paper Award »)
·Costos ocultos y creación de valor de las pequeñas empresas internacionales
·Isomorphisme Dysfonctionnel D’une Petite Entreprise Internationale
·Evolution of Consciousness in Comprehending and Transforming Complex Systems
·Enhancing cross-cultural management: Is the contemporaneous cross-cultural management giving value to the cultural diversity
·L’apport d’un Management socio-économique dans la petite entreprise internationale
Once all the essential materials for my dissertation were collected, I set about writing the thesis from September 2007 until June 2008. I started writing it in China to better improve my knowledge of this country and to learn Chinese at Shanghai Jiao-Tong University until February 2008.
To give to my dissertation a more international spin, I accomplished the research work at the University Paris II - Panthéon-Assas with Marc Bonnet (Chair at AOM for the consulting division) and Frank Bournois; two well know professors in the field of international people management in France. This research and the accumulation of experiences in Asia, America and Europe, makes me aspire to pursue a career in the research field of International Management. This is now reinforced by two main experiences in the area of teaching and managing in the French higher education system. From 2008 to 2010 I have had the possibility to work in two different business schools in France. In the first one (ISEG Lyon) between 2008 and 2009, I was a pedagogical director in charge of 300 students. Nowadays, at ESCE, I’m a research professor in charge of the department of “International People Management”.
