Dr. Francisco L. Roman
Full Professor
AIM - W. Sycip Graduate School of Business
Professor Francisco L. Roman, DBA, is the Don Andres Soriano Professor of Business Management. He is currently with the faculty of the Graduate School of business after serving as the Associate Dean of the Asian Center for Entrepreneurship (ACE), the Executive Director of the Hills Governance Center (HGC), and a Senior Fellow of the Ramon V. del Rosario Center for Corporate Social Responsibility.
From 2002-2004, Prof. Roman was involved in developing industry competitiveness in small and medium-sized firms in the Greater Mekong Sub-Region (GMS). In Thailand, he focused on several clusters—tourism, high-value agricultural exports, digital content, marine food, gems, silk and handicrafts. He also coordinated activities in Cambodia, in the fishery cluster, and in the dragon fruit sector in southern Viet Nam, as well as undertaking an exploration of the silk sector in Laos.
Prof. Roman designed a 20-session competitiveness and cluster development course that uses teaching materials written on industries in Thailand, Cambodia, and Viet Nam. In 2004, as part of the course, he wrote or supervised 12 cases on Thailand and Cambodia. Together with his country counterparts, Prof. Roman was also involved in assisting academic institutions in Thailand (Prince of Songkla University), Viet Nam (Hanoi School of Business) and Cambodia (National University of Management) to develop courses on competitiveness.
From 2002-2004, Prof. Roman was involved in a project with the Asia Foundation to develop cases in seven countries focusing on how NGOs can be “weaned away” from dependence on donor funding. He also worked on a CIDA project on Policy Training and Technical Assistance and on a UNDP project on the Management of the Philippine Justice System.
Since 1998 to date, Prof. Roman has been specializing on governance in large Asian family corporations. He continues to explore the strategies of Asian conglomerates, but with a focus on large family corporations that continue to dominate Asian business. He is a Director of a development bank and a food-franchise in the Philippines. He was a consultant for the Lopez Group’s project on the Asian Eye Institute. He also worked with a newly formed foundation for the development of Negros Island, whose objective is to seek other commercial options to sugar.
From 1995-1997, Prof. Roman was also the Executive Director of the AIM Washington SyCip Policy Forum, now renamed the AIM Policy Center. Activities focused on two inter-related programs, funded by Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAF), on “Regional Competitiveness” in the sub-region now known as the Brunei-Indonesia-Malaysia-Philippines East Asia Growth Area (BIMP-EAGA), and on a “Socio-Economic Development Plan” for Mindanao, specifically on the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).
From 1989 to the mid-1990s, Prof. Roman worked as a project consultant in the marketing of specialty coconut products from the South Pacific and on private sector development. He was involved in the Salim Group’s integrated agribusiness complex in Bulan Island in Indonesia. His other projects included consumer marketing in Shanghai and Guangzhou, the competitiveness of the banking and automobile industries in Indonesia and Malaysia, the competitiveness of special economic zones (in the former American military bases of Subic and Clark), and agri-business exports of processed foods.
To date, Prof. Roman has written or supervised 370 cases, notes and papers. He was a contributor or co-author in four books, on management in developing countries, on small enterprise development in the Third World, on the Philippine mutual fund industry, and on family corporations. He currently sits on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Asian Case Research Journal of the National University of Singapore.
Prof. Roman completed his Doctorate in Business Administration at the Harvard Business School (1989), in International Business, a field that studies multi-national enterprises, with a sub-specialization in Agribusiness in developing countries. He is an alumnus of the Ateneo University, where he graduated with a BA in Economics (1966) and an MBA (1968). He holds an MA in Economics from the University of Hawaii, East West Center (1972). He received certificates from the International Teachers’ Programme (ITP) at the Centre D’Enseignement Superieur Des Affaires, France (1977), and from the German Foundation for International Development (1994) as a Lecturer on Competition Policy. Prof. Roman has been associated with AIM since 1970.