Professor Mark Durkin is the Executive Dean of Ulster University Business School.Prior to joining Ulster University in 1996, Mark spent over a decade in various service, sales and strategic marketing roles within Bank of Ireland Group. Having joined the Bank at 18 he completed all his studies on a part-time basis including a Masters in Marketing from Ulster University (1993) and his PhD from Loughborough Business School (2005). Mark’s teaching and research focus is at the marketing/technology interface and he is interested in the adoption of alternative finance by SMEs and emerging digital competency sets for managers in larger businesses.Through his career he has been actively involved in many KTP and Innovation Voucher schemes. He was awarded the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s ‘Marketing Person of the Year’ in recognition of his contribution to marketing education in Ireland in 2006 and is an invited member of the CMO (Europe). Mark was a Head of School within Ulster University Business School from 2002-2007 and established and directed the University’s student marketing division from 2007-2010.Mark is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, a Fellow of the Institute of Banking and is a Senior Fellow of the UK’s Higher Education Academy. He has published over 50 peer reviewed academic papers and is an invited scholar to Babson College in Boston and a visiting professor to Philadelphia University. He is also part of the ‘World Famous Scientist and Scholars Visit Hubei Programme’ in China.