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Increasingly governmental policy around PhD education has resulted in greater university oversight of programs and student experience – often through creating central PhD Schools. While student experience is well researched, the experiences of Heads of these units, who are responsible for creating student experience, have been invisible. This exploratory Danish case study begins such a conversation: its purpose to examine the perceptions of five Heads of PhD Humanities Schools, each responsible for steering institutional decisions within Danish PhD policy landscapes.

A qualitative approach integrated three distinct analyses: a review of Danish PhD education policies and university procedures, each university’s job specifications for the Heads of the Schools and the Heads’ views on their responsibilities.

The Heads differentiated between their own and today’s PhD student experience. They had held prior leadership roles and fully supported institutional regulations. They cared deeply for the students under their charge and were working to achieve personal goals to enhance PhD experience. Their leadership perspective was relational: enhancing individual student learning through engaging with multiple PhD actors (e.g. program leaders) – when possible at a personal level – to improve PhD practices.

This study contributes an expanded perspective on how PhD School Heads constitute their roles by empirically linking: macro-national policies and institutional regulations and individuals’ biographies to their support of the PhD regimes – with implications for academic leadership generally. The authors argue research into PhD School leadership is essential, as it is such individuals who create the organisational settings that students experience.

This study was inspired by research of strategists on strategic innovation (SI), aiming to provide a unique model to enhance the digitization of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Bangladesh to fill the gap toward a digital economy.

A survey was used to collect data from 180 SMEs in the manufacturing industry for this research. The results indicate that strategic innovativeness (SI), human capital (HC), infrastructure and technology and resistance to change significantly influence the digitalization in Bangladesh SMEs.

The link between SI and SMEs' digitalization in Bangladesh is mediated by HC. The results show that HC plays a big role in the connection between SI and the digitalization of SMEs. This study may be valuable for SMEs managers, researchers and policymakers in Bangladesh and other developing nations, who want to learn more about SI in adopting digitalization.

The specialized knowledge and abilities of strategists allow them to establish parallels between the past and present, enabling them to make a sustained forecast about the digital economy. This study encourages small and medium-sized businesses to develop their SI and advance their HC, which could further deject resistance to change toward enhancing and adopting digitalization in SMEs sectors.