Dr Antoni Olivé, Professor and Researcher with the IQS School of Management

1. What do you like most about your job?

Although they often drive me crazy, working with students. It’s becoming more and more complicated because students are the same age every year – twenty years old – yet I’m always a year older. Now I’m three times their age! Sometimes I find it hard to understand them. But working with young people keeps me up to date. For example, they’re my gateway to new business models.

2. What would you like to spend more time doing?

Reading and writing. I don’t want to finish my career without having written a book on the connections between entrepreneurship and art.

3. What are you proudest of?

In the academic field, an article on the emergence of Cubism, which analysed the “entrepreneurial” side of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. My research for this article began following my time in Charlottesville, and was suggested to me and supervised by Professor Saras Sarasvathy, who was at IQS last June to give two lectures.

4. What value do you appreciate most in people?
Humility.

5. Where’s a place you’d like to visit?

I did a three-month research stay in the USA, in Charlottesville, Virginia. It’s a city of about 50,000 inhabitants, more than 20,000 of whom are students at the University of Virginia. The city has a lot of history as three of the first five American presidents lived there. I wouldn’t mind spending another semester there at all!

6. What’s a dream you’d like to pursue?

Becoming the mayor of Igualada, my city. It won’t happen, because I’d have to run for a municipal election and actually win. And both the one thing and the other are very unlikely, though not impossible.

7. What do you have left to learn?

In terms of teaching, more activities that I could bring to the classroom to make the sessions more dynamic. On a personal level, learning more languages, playing various musical instruments, and mastering certain art creation techniques (painting, photography, video, etc.).