Located at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, the Stephen J.R. Smith School of Business became its own faculty in 1963. It opened a campus in Dubai, United Arab Emirates in 2007 and was given its current name in 2015 after a substantial donation from a graduate.
The School’s principal location, Kingston, is a thriving small city of 170,000 people located on the northeast shore of Lake Ontario. It is less than a three-hour drive to Toronto, Montréal or Ottawa, and less than six hours to New York City or Boston.
There are nearly 2,000 students at J.R. Smith School of Business, with an approximate 75 per cent - 25 per cent split between undergraduates and graduates.
Undergraduates at J.R. Smith are served by the Queen's Bachelor of Commerce, a four year course that fosters skills around leadership, collaboration, cultural dynamics, personal presentation and communication. Students in their third year of the degree can pursue an international exchange option from one of over 95 business schools in over 35 countries.
The Queen's Certificate in Business has been designed for Queen’s University arts, engineering, applied science and four-year nursing students who want to gain fundamental knowledge in the key areas of business, in order to broaden their career options upon graduation.
The school offers four choices at MBA level, the full-time MBA programme, the executive MBA, executive MBA Americas and accelerated MBA for business graduates, with the final three allowing managers to study on the move.
Smith also offers the research-based programmes as an Msc in management, PhD doctoral programme in management, the professional master's programmes of management analytics, management in artificial intelligence; international business; management innovation and entrepreneurship; finance in Toronto, finance in Beijing and graduate diplomas in accounting and business.
Smith has a number of centres engaged in innovative activity. For example, the Scotiabank Centre for Customer Analytics is building a community of data intensive users encouraging innovation across industries to re-imagine customer experience. The Centre for Business Venturing looks at what makes a successful entrepreneurial venture for the long-term. The focus of the Centre for Social Impact is to foster outreach and advocacy, while The CPA Centre for Governance & Accountability strives to improve corporate governance in Canada
Notable alumni include: Kimbal Musk, entrepreneur and venture capitalist; Gordon Nixon, former president, CEO and director of the Royal Bank of Canada; John Stackhouse, Editor-in-Chief of The Globe and Mail; Bruce Sellery, business journalist and television presenter; Donald J. Carty, chairman at Virgin America, Porter Airlines and eRewards and Nik Nanos, Public opinion specialist and founder of Nanos Research.
