James C. McKeon, PhD

Dr. James C. McKeon
School of Business
Marketing and CIS Department
jmckeon@wnec.edu
413-782-1499

Dr. James C. McKeon has a combined 40 years of engineering design, strategic planning and marketing, and business consulting experience in aerospace, insurance and financial services, automobile, pharmaceutical, pre-stressed concrete, leather, department store, and newspaper publishing industries. As a Senior Vice President of strategic planning and research for two of the largest life insurance companies McKeon led many intra-preneurship projects including the development of the industry’s first comprehensive strategic planning process, the launching of several national advertising campaigns, the use of solar energy to power irrigation pumps, the identification and analysis of domestic and international merger opportunities, and numerous market research projects.

Upon retiring from business sector in 1993 McKeon joined the faculty at Western New England College as Executive in Residence and developed two multi-disciplinary efforts in teaching entrepreneurship. The first involves forming undergraduate joint engineer-marketer teams to develop new products for selected companies. This effort was begun in 1997 working with the engineering faculty and continues today. The second entrepreneurship education effort involved a joint effort between a professor in the College’s School of Law and an associate in the School of Business to developed a joint course teaching law and graduate business students entrepreneurship using an academic-clinical teaching model. The clinical portion of the teaching model involves the law and business school students providing legal and business advice to entrepreneurs in the Springfield Community College’s student and adult incubators. This effort began in 2004 and has led to the establishment of the Law and Business Center for Advancing Entrepreneurship at WNEC. 

McKeon earned a BSME degree from Iowa State University and MBA degree and PhD degrees from University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School. Besides currently teaching at Western New England College he has taught at Bay Path College and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.