Skip to main content

Colbey Emmerson Reid Joins Poole College as Director of Consumer Innovation Consortium

The Poole College of Management at North Carolina State University announced recently that Dr. Colbey Emmerson Reid has joined the college as director of its newly formed Consumer Innovation Consortium (CIC) and professor of practice. Reid was selected for the position following a national search conducted by the Poole College in fall 2012.

“We were seeking a scholar who specialized in culture and innovation and who would be able to foster interdisciplinary alliances with the business community, especially in design and the liberal arts,” said Dr. Ira R. Weiss, dean of the college.

At the CIC, Reid will manage the day-to-day execution of the joint research being conducted with corporate partners and will work with the college’s Jenkins MBA students to utilize cutting-edge cultural analyses of innovation and to improve their skills in communication and critical thinking.

The CIC, the newest and fast-expanding academic-corporate initiative in Poole College, was founded by Executive Director Dr. Stacy Wood, J. Lloyd Langdon Distinguished Professor of Marketing.

“The purpose of the CIC is to form academic-corporate partnerships that deliver state-of-the-art consumer research to corporate leaders in marketing and design innovation, and provide recruiters access to a generation of uniquely trained business graduates,” Wood said. “The consortium will also supply NC State faculty and graduate researchers with opportunities to explore the marketplace implications of diverse research approaches and to foster a collaborative intellectual space for understanding consumption practices that facilitate change and innovation,” she said.

In addition to managing the resources, operations, events, publications, and public relations of the CIC, Reid will oversee student projects and teach courses in critical thinking and communication in the MBA program. Supporting interdisciplinary faculty development and fostering liaisons between the Poole College and NC State’s colleges of Humanities and Social Sciences, Design, and Textiles are also priorities. “Current research suggests that more interdisciplinary approaches to management can both stimulate future innovation and manage risk during times of volatile cultural changes,” Reid said.

Reid brings over 16 years of teaching and research experience in literature and composition to the consortium, as well as experience creating and overseeing study abroad programs and an interdisciplinary research and lecture forum. Reid has also chaired an institutional grant-awarding committee to promote faculty development at York College and hopes to use that successful experience to build research opportunities at NC State.

“I hope to bring grant funding to the CIC that will help support faculty who are interested in the marketplace implications of their design experiments, or of their scholarship in history, psychology, philosophy, and literature,” Reid said. “These fields have long traditions of studying consumption, and they and consumer behavior researchers can mutually profit from each other’s insights.”

Previously, Reid was associate professor of English and humanities at York College of Pennsylvania in York, PA. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in English from the University of Washington and bachelors’ degrees in English and French from the University of Florida.

Her scholarly activities have focused on the topics of communication, innovation, creativity and design. She received the Leon Edel award in 2009 for her essay on the language of accounting in Henry James and the Fredson Bowers awards in 2011 for her essay on the relationship between early 20th century design innovation, consumption habits, and avant-garde poetry. . She is currently writing a book on the adoption of avant-garde home and fashion design innovations by middle class consumers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and is co-editing “Radical Interface,” an interdisciplinary essay collection on technology and design.