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Staffing

The centre's staff includes four professors (three of which are Hamrin endowed chairs), and four associate professors. There are three post-doctoral positions and 8 doctoral candidate positions. The staff are integrated with the JIBS research departments of Economics, Business Administration and Law, giving the centre an inter-disciplinary foundation.

The centre is chaired by Professor Robert G. Picard. He and Associate Professor, Leona Achtenhagen, supervise the centre’s development.

Academic Staff

Professor Robert G. Picard

Robert G. Picard is Director of the MMT centre and a Professor in the Department of Economics at JIBS.

His research focuses on economic structures of media markets, media industries and firms, demand for media products and services, business models and strategies of media operations, productivity of media firms, financial performance, and government policies affecting economic aspects of media. His research has involved newspapers, advertising, broadcasting, and new media.

Picard is the author and editor of 20 books, editor of the Journal of Media Business Studies and is the founding editor of the Journal of Media Economics. He has been on the faculties of Turku School of Economics and Business Administration, California State University, Emerson College, and Louisiana State University. He has also served as a visiting professor at the University of Paris, Shanghai University, the University of Amsterdam, and the Catholic University of Portugal.

Picard has received numerous grants and contracts for research. He is a consultant to ministries and government agencies and numerous media companies and labour organisations worldwide.

Professor Karl Erik Gustafsson (Professor Emeritus)

Karl Erik Gustafsson is a professor in the Department of Business Administration, in the section of Entrepreneurship, Marketing and Management at JIBS.

Gustafsson was educated at the School of Economics and Commercial Law in Göteborg. He has held appointments since 1963, including a professorship in mass media economics, a chair financed by the Carl-Olof and Jenz Hamrin Foundation. Since 1993 he has served as an international reader at the Swedish School of Social Sciences, Helsinki University.

Gustafsson first studied advertising as a decision problem in business. In the 1970s he concentrated on mass media economics, first on newspaper industry structure and economics, and then on structure and economics of other media. In 1978 he formed a mass media economics research unit at the School of Economics in Göteborg. He regularly organised academic and professional symposia, and started a report series as well as a publication series.

During the 1990s Gustafsson served as an editor (together with Professor Per Rydén) of a four volume publication of the history of the Swedish press. He also wrote the final part of the fourth volume. Gustafsson was a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Advertising and an expert on mass media to the Swedish Encyclopaedia. Gustafsson has been a columnist in trade journals and has served in various positions in government commissions on mass media.

Professor Mary Alice Shaver

Prof. Shaver received her master’s degree from the University of Illinois and her doctorate from Indiana University. Her research focuses on advertising, advertising management, competition for advertising among media, and media management. She has previously held positions at Michigan State University and University of North Carolina. She has been president of the American Academy of Advertising and president of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Professor Rolf A. Lundin

Rolf A. Lundin is professor of Business Administration in the department of Entrepreneurship, Marketing, and Management. His research focuses on temporary organizations and projects. Currently he is involved in studying project organizing in media industries, in particular TV production companies.

Lundin holds a licentiate degree from the School of Economics and Commercial Law in Gothenburg and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Initially, he specialized in computer simulation and management science to later move on to organization theory and recently project management.

He has been a full professor since 1978 and served as dean at two business schools, Umeå School of Business at the University of Umeå and Jönköping International Business School. He is now concentrating on research.

Lundin was the founding editor of Scandinavian Journal of Management and serves as editorial board member and reviewer for several journals. He has published approximately 20 books and several journal articles and book chapters.

Associate Professor Leona Achtenhagen

Leona Achtenhagen is assistant director of the Media Management and Transformation Center and associate professor of Strategy & Organization at the Media Management and Transformation Centre and the Department of Entrepreneurship, Management and Marketing. She received her PhD from the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. She has held previous appointments at Warwick Business School, UK and the University of Bamberg, Germany.

Her main research and teaching are in the areas of strategy and organization studies as well as entrepreneurship.Currently, her research focuses onorganizing/strategizing processes of continuously growing fi rms, analyses of discourses transmitted by newspapers, as well as open source software development. Her research has been published in numerous book chapters and journal articles.

Associate Professor Lucy Küng

Lucy Küng holds a Phd and habilitation from the University of St. Gallen where she was Director of the Competence Centre for the Media and Communication Industries, an international research consortium/think tank examining strategic, management and organisational challenges facing the media industry, with partner companies including the BBC, Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, Discovery Networks, and von Holtzbrinck. She was responsible for development and delivery of MA and Executive MBA courses in Media Management at the University of St. Gallen.

She is the author of Inside the BBC and CNN: Managing Media Organisations. She also has extensive management experience in the media sector, and from 1988-1992 was Publishing Director at Random House UK, London.

Associate Professor Dan Shaver

Dr. Dan Shaver is assistant professor of media economics and management. He received an M.B.A. from Wake Forest University and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina. Dr. Shaver is a specialist in media management and digital media and his work has been widely published in academic journals. Before beginning his academic career, he was a journalist and newspaper publishing executive for Knight-Ridder, Inc.

Associate Professor Stefan Melesko

Dr. Stefan Melesko has a long and successful career in the media industry and related businesses. After he earned his MBA and Licentiate of Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics he became the managing director of the Swedish Association of Advertising Agencies. He joined the media industry at Dagens Nyheter as an advertisement director and after being sales and marketing director he was appointed deputy managing director of the group Dagens Nyheter AB (Marieberg) and chief executive of the morning paper Dagens Nyheter. After positions as managing director of a magazine publisher, senior vice president of one of the larger retail companies in Sweden and the managing director of the Bonnier Business Press he went back to academia and received a Ph.D. in economics at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg. The dissertation focused on strategic options in the newspapers industry in counter-acting the effects of business cycle fluctuations on company revenue streams and overall performances.

His later frequently published research work has dealt with the development of competitive, resource allocation and efficiency problems in the regional and local daily press. He has made comparative studies both nationally and internationally. Presently he is conducting a study of mergers and acquisitions in the Swedish regional press. These subjects and as well as other current problems concerning the media industry are covered in his numerous contributions as a columnist for the daily and trade press He is also a board member of media-related companies in a non-executive capacity.

His combined skills of research and executive experience is now being used in his present position as manager of executive education where the objective is to initiate interaction of the industry and the MMTC on current topics in the form of seminars and other types of courses for the management of media companies focusing on both editorial and commercial aspects.

Patrik Wikström, Research Manager

Patrik Wikström's research focuses on the dynamics of media industries, business modeling, and the strategic management of media firms. He is particularly interested in the entertainment media and often uses system dynamics modeling methodologies in his research work. He has published a number of book chapters and articles on the international music industry and is currently co-authoring a book on the "music industry in the digital age".

Patrik's Ph.D research at Karlstad University (2003-2006) was focused on strategic management issues in multinational music companies. During the project he was an affiliated doctoral researcher at MMTC. He also has a master's degree from the School of Technology Management and Economics at Chalmers University in Gothenburg.

Patrik has professional experience from the telecom and the media industries which includes work as business development manager and strategy consultant.

Leon Barkho, Publications Manager

Leon Barkho received his master’s degree in applied linguistics from the University of Mosul and his doctorate from Sweden’s Jönköping University. His research focuses on how global broadcasters position and differentiate themselves through the discourses they employ when covering the Middle East. Other research interests include media clustering and advertising in the Middle East. He has previously held positions at Reuters News Agency as bureau chief and the Associated Press as staff writer.