Doctor of Philosophy (Business)

AIB's PhD sits alongside its DBA as the university's other doctoral offering, but where the DBA is explicitly a professional practice doctorate for senior managers and consultants investigating a workplace problem, the PhD follows the traditional academic model: an independent, supervised research project intended to generate new theoretical knowledge in a business, commerce or management-related discipline, typically aimed at candidates who want to move into academia or high-level research roles rather than stay in corporate management.

Like the DBA, candidates work with a supervisory panel (a principal supervisor and associate supervisor(s)) over a multi-year candidature, and the thesis has to represent a genuine, original contribution to the field rather than an applied practice project.

It's the right choice for someone whose interest is in the theory itself, testing a management framework or building new empirical evidence in a business discipline, rather than someone trying to solve a specific problem inside their own organisation, which is the more common motivation behind AIB's DBA candidates.