Drs. Jim Stikeleather is a practitioner scholar with over 40 years' experience in large companies such as Harris, Honeywell, GTE, Perot Systems, MeadWestvaco and Dell along with starting multiple companies including one which reached 36th on the Inc. 500. Jim is a doctoral candidate at the Muma College of Business, University of South Florida, with expected graduation in 2017. He just recently left the role of Chief Innovation Officer at Dell to dedicate more time to his research on a positive theory of the role and responsibility of business in society and potentially deriving new models of enterprise and enterprise governance.

Jim has a BS in Computer Science from Texas Christian University and an MBA from the University of South Florida. He holds two patents, has authored and contributed to multiple books and articles on technology, innovation and analytics. He is an HBR blogger and speaks internationally.

DBAs, the emerging class of engaged practitioner scholars of business, live in a world of wicked problems which are difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, or changing requirements; which are difficult to recognize; which are multi and transdisciplinary in nature; and made up of many diverse and autonomous components which are interrelated, interdependent, with many interconnections, but must be studied as a unified whole. Support for such research in the academic world is strikingly narrow and tenuous. Will it evolve intellectually, in practice and structurally to support needed disciplinary integration and relevance to praxis?