We are happy to announce that our very own Assistant Professor, and MaastrichtMBA teacher, Jermain Kaminski has earned a spot in the prestigious collection of Poets&Quants 40-Under-40 Best MBA Professors for 2024. It is the 12th edition of this annual recognition, but Poets&Quants’ goal remains the same: to identify and celebrate the most talented young professors currently teaching in MBA programmes around the world.
Jermain Kaminski, 38, is Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Maastricht University School of Business and Economics. In his research, he combines methods from machine learning and natural language processing, with a specific focus on large text, audio and video data in entrepreneurship. Another venue of research concentrates on strategic decision-making with causal machine learning.
Teaching how to innovate
So what does Jermain enjoy most about teaching business students? “Watching them turn from timid freshmen into boardroom sharks,” he says. “Jokes aside, I think business practices are good at the hermeneutic competencies, the capability to connect the dots. Many MBA students I teach in fact have a background in engineering, physics, biotechnology, or medical sciences, or even have been commercial airline pilots. Seeing these students growing a new career or starting a startup is one of the pleasures of my job. Now five years into it, it started to pay back by seeing the first funding rounds, patents for those I witnessed early in the classroom. In my first year of my PhD, I once met a professor at RWTH who had a surgical intervention with a new device that was invented by former students. Isn’t that nice?”
One of the most challenging aspects of teaching students is keeping up with the rapid technological change and ensuring that a curriculum remains relevant and cutting-edge, Jermain thinks. “I usually update a good 20 per cent in my syllabus every six months. You also need to make sure to not teach oversimplified concepts, especially to practitioners. These days, you can throw a random stone at any conference, and you will always hit a self-acclaimed AI expert, but very unlikely someone developing these systems. Understanding what you can do with AI is the easy part, developing it further and experimenting with vulnerabilities is obviously the challenging one. So that’s why I tell my students to think like hackers who are trained to explore loopholes in existing systems, as this will enable them to develop improvements.”
One of 40’s global best
Professors on this year’s 40-Under-40 list come from 34 different business schools. The list includes professors from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, China, India, Italy, Mexico, and, of course, the Netherlands. They were chosen from roughly 1,000 nominations submitted by students, colleagues, business schools, and professors themselves. Each nominee was evaluated on teaching (given a 70% weight) and research (given the remaining 30%).
