ESADE Names A Long Time Professor Its New Dean

Joan Rodon will become the new dean of ESADE Business School

After 22 years on the ESADE Business School faculty from the time he joined as a lecturer in 2000, Joan Rodon has been named the new dean of the school. He succeeded Josep Franch who left the job at the end of his second mandate on Nov. 18.

ESADE, with campuses in Barcelona and Madrid, Spain, was last ranked tenth among the best international schools for its full-time MBA program by Poets&Quants. The school’s full-time MBA placed 34th in the most recent global MBA ranking from the Financial Times tied with Imperial College in London. It’s latest FT rank represents a 14-place drop from 2021 when ESADE was ranked 20th best in the world. ESADE’s full-time MBA ranked first in Europe and third in the world for entrepreneurs, according to Poets&Quants’ ranking Best MBA Programs for Entrepreneurship.

Rodon will try to undo that recent slide. An associate professor in ESADE’s department of operations, innovation and data sciences, Rodon has served as vice dean of faculty and research for the past four years and from 2014 to 2018 had been the associate dean of the school’s undergraduate business program.

Under Dean Franch, the school has boosted its internationalization of students, with 117 nationalities on campus this year. In the announcement, ESADE said “the on-going innovation of the bachelor’s and master’s programs is also noteworthy, with subjects ranging from artificial intelligence and data analysis to digital business, sustainability and globalization, in response to changes in industry trends and the needs of today’s job market.”

Rodon earned his PhD in management sciences and an MBA from Esade. He also graduated as a computer engineer from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-BarcelonaTech. His areas of interest and research focus on the creation, evolution and governance of digital infrastructures and platforms, having published many articles on these subjects in leading academic journals.

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