David T. Croasdell, Ph.D. is the Charles and Ruth Hopping Professor of Entrepreneurship and an Associate Professor of Information Systems in the Department of Accounting and Information Systems at the University of Nevada, Reno. He also serves as the University’s NCAA Faculty Athletics Representative; he has served as Academic Director for the Mandela Washington Fellows Initiative for Young African Leaders and was the Founding Director for the Sontag Entrepreneurship Competition at the University of Nevada, Reno. Dave and his colleagues engage students to encourage and develop innovative ideas.
Dr. Croasdell works hard to foster relationships with the broader community. Dave is founding member of Entrepreneurship Nevada – a local portal for developing business networks and identifying entrepreneurial resources. He also sits on the board of Business Assembly working to support local startups and help develop business strategies. Dave has mentored numerous students and teams since first becoming involved in entrepreneurship. He has also pursued three of his own startup ventures. He has also served on the organizing committee for TedX University of Nevada since its inception in 2012.
Dr. Croasdell has taught courses locally and abroad on Data Communications, Current Technology, Global Entrepreneurship and Global Technology Management. His academic research interests are based on managing distributed knowledge systems. His work includes exploring ways to foster Global Entrepreneurship through underlying network infrastructures. His research interests are in Knowledge Equity, Knowledge Networks, Knowledge Management, Organizational Memory, and Inquiring Organizations. Dave’s research focuses on understanding and utilizing information technologies to enable knowledge work in organizations. Research publications have primarily focused on how organizations store and access corporate knowledge assets (organizational memory) and how the organizations use those assets to improve themselves (organizational learning). More recent publications explore the nature of knowledge, knowledge management as a research discipline, and methods to effectively measure knowledge management success. To paraphrase Carla O’Dell, organizations must know what they know (and what they don’t know) to be truly effective.
He is co-chair of the research track on Knowledge Systems for the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences and an Associate Editor of three academic journals. Before embarking on his academic career, Dr. Croasdell worked as a technical staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
In BAN 709, students explore leadership styles and strategy as they are applied to information systems, specifically data driven decisions and analytics. Students will become more aware of the factors that really influence decision outcomes while learning techniques to analyze the symbiotic relationship between leadership and decision making, combining classical wisdom, recent research, and theory and practice to teach leadership and decision-making skills. Using cases, readings about the latest scientific research, and discussions, students get both practical and academic insights. Students will become better at making decisions and much better at understanding and influencing how others decide. Students are expected to understand the managerial challenges and solutions of corporate data management. The course will provide strategies for framing and executing data analytics projects that emphasizes the importance of generating the right questions in order to connect analytic results with critical business decisions; Use of data models to test theory; Methods to persuasively integrate data into a proposal without becoming bogged down in minutiae that will be lost on most audiences and an overview of the evolution of fields like AI, virtual work spaces and technologies that can be leveraged to address business problems.
“On-line education has evolved a lot since I first enrolled in a ‘distance learning’ course in the early 80’s,” Croasdell says. “Continually evolving technology has made remote access to knowledge resources – including learning environments – rather passe. The recent pandemic has pushed technologies into the forefront and shifted mindsets about what is possible. As a professor of information technologies, it is gratifying to see how underlying communications infrastructures and overarching software solutions enable global learning environments.”
In a nutshell, Dr. Croasdell is a strong believer in what Thomas Friedman has called a “Flat World.” Simply put, technology has shrunk the world. As such, our ability to understand and work with different cultures and economies is more critical now than ever before as citizens in this global community. Business managers looking to develop and grow business across international boundaries must have the skills and knowledge to think an act globally if they are to be successful.
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The online Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) from the University of Nevada, Reno can help you tap into the power of big data to drive smarter business and managerial decisions. In courses like BAN 709, you’ll develop the skills you need to speak the language of data science, while understanding the how and why of business strategy and value creation.