On many levels Susan Hart is a surprising business school dean. She is one of the few women to have made it to the top of a business school, to be sure, but the dean of the University of Strathclyde Business School, in Glasgow, also unashamedly pursues the practical alongside the academic.

“We have a very clear policy that everything has to link with the world of practice,” says the ebullient marketing professor, now six years a dean. “If you are not connecting your students to the world of practice, you are doing something wrong.”

The approach is perhaps unsurprising for a university in Scotland’s industrial heartland that has built its reputation on strengths in technology as well as entrepreneurship, and which also espouses the notion of “useful learning”.