IE & Asia-Pacific

IE University has created a Facebook application called “Trivia Challenge” , to enable internet users to gauge their knowledge about biology, architecture, communication, law, art history, psychology and tourism. The aim is to provide a fun way for young people, for whom new technologies and internet are a way of life, to get to know more about the different subjects taught at the IE University campus.

The application presents users with a challenge: it poses trivia-style questions that are divided into four levels, each of which represents a year of university studies. Each level comprises eight questions related to the different degrees at IE University. The aim of the game is to answer as many questions as possible correctly to get a score that will get you onto the “most knowledgeable” list.

IE University is firmly committed to the new environment based on social networks and the application of technologies to education. It sees social networks as a powerful tool for connecting with students, which is why you can find IE University on all key networking sites, including Youtube, Tuenti, Facebook, Myspace and Flickr.

IE University also recently launched a mobile site that permits thousands of mobile users to access the internet and interact through its portal at http://ie.yoc.com, where people can find information on the University, its bachelor programs, social networks and a strategy game.

See the Trivia Challenge application on FACEBOOK!

The IE Brown Executive MBA is to be launched in March 2011. One core element of this program is Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship which pulls together all management areas with the aim to create value for the firm as well as for society introducing Brown’s expertise into the value creation process.

The objective of the teach the innovation processes and develop the entrepreneurial skills associated with the continuous creation of value in a business environment and social context. The ability of a company to create new value for customers and end users is essential to sustained growth. This module is therefore about participants understanding corporate innovation processes and learning the leadership skills associated with entrepreneurial management and new business development. The pedagogical approach is that of ‘experiential learning’ in which the faculty provide a framework for understanding, but the participants develop and sharpen their skills by undertaking projects based upon relevant  xperiences drawn from their own environment. The projects blend team and individual activities, culminating in a business case. The project also incorporates the nuanced learnings from the liberal arts and critical studies curriculum in framing the business case in a relevant cultural, historical and geopolitical context.

In the following video, this approach will be visualized by Angus Kingon from Brown and Joseph Pistrui and Pablo Martin from IE.

The IE Brown Executive MBA breakes with the traditional Executive MBA model purely focussed on management. Starting in March 2011, this program integrates leading management thinking with wider perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, engineering, and life sciences.

Follow this video in which Angus Kingon from Brown and David Bach from IE provide insights into the program structure and its innovative learning approach.

One of the most innovative Executive MBA will start in March 2011 and is a joint initiative from Brown University, the leading Ivy League school, and IE Business School, one of the leading business schools in the world.

The IE Brown Executive MBA will introduce participants not only into the most updated management knowledge but instill the critical liberal arts thinking which helps managers to think out of the box!

In the following video Brown’s Provost and IE’s Dean explain why the connection between liberal arts and business becomes critical in the future, and therefore why this alliance makes sense.

Explore the Master in Corporate Communication and follow the suggestions from Adrian Monck, Managing Director and Head of Communications at the World Economic Forum (Davos-Switzerland):

IE Focus | By Ricardo Perez, Professor at IE Business School

Nokia is still a leader in terms of sales, but the crown of innovation has now passed to Apple. In order to get it back, Nokia needs to reinvent itself as a mobile services company that offers multiple benefits to its partners. At the last world mobiles congress in Barcelona, Nokia and Intel revealed their plans for the joint development of software for all kinds of devices to compete with Apple and Google. Nokia takes another step forward in its strategy of creating a technological platform that returns it to a position that will enable it to take the initiative in the most interesting market at the present time, i.e. smart phones like the iPhone, and in new markets, such as the one created recently by the iPad. Don´t worry, I won’t go on about the iPad; what I want to speak about is Nokia and its position in today´s market. It is a story of what can happen to a leading company if it comes up with the wrong definition of the business game it is playing. The loss of leadership this causes has happened to others: it has happened to Sony with its music players and its video consoles over the last two years. Nokia had worked hard to create the different technological platforms it believed would enable it to win in the mobile market. Symbian, its key product, has also seen defeat. Allow me to explain.

Nokia established the rules for the top-of-the-range telephone market before iPhone. It created an alliance to produce the base software (operating system) with which telephones worked (Symbian, theoretically neutral and owned by many companies on the market). It also made sure that what users saw on the telephone when they used the menus (user interface) was the development and property of each of Symbian´s partners, which meant it could not enter the market as a competitor. The rules were clear and benefited Nokia in a market that competed in terms of the electronics and “additional utilities” of the telephone (best camera, GPS, etc.). Read more…

The continued demand of online education, makes IE launching a second intake in March 2011 of its renowned Global MBA.

Since already 4 years, the IE Global MBA provides candidates with an extraordinary flexbility when studying their MBA program. They can continue progressing within their corporations meanwhile they connect on a daily basis to the online campus, exchanging experiences and discussing cases in teams like in the full-time MBA class.

Every Saturday they enjoy the class setting through videoconferences where teams have to present their conclusions on a given case discussing it with the entire class moderated by the professor. If you’re working in an international oriented company, videoconferences are most likely to be happening at some stage of your career development and during the program you learn the tools to efficiently conduct those conferences.

Due to the increasing demand of the Global MBA and a more diversified outreach, IE introduced last year a second time slot for the Saturday Videoconferences. Now, those sessions can be followed from 11am to 3pm and from 4pm to 8pm (Madrid time). The second time slot boosted the diversity in class and the program counts now with 43 different nationalities within a class size of about 70.

… and there is another good news: in addition to the September intake , IE launches a second intake, starting in March 2011. The official program start is set for March 19, 2011 and the first residential week starts on March 28, 2011. This first residential weeks helps to know the other team and classmates as well as the professors. The second residential week at the end of the program is rounding up the whole online experience with the graduation together with the full-time MBA. Being awarded the same degree, it makes sense that both classes graduate together!

The next virtual presentation will be on September 8 at 1pm Madrid time (7pm Singapore time). You can sign up for on our event page and explore in the meanwhile the IE Global MBA web.

IE Focus | By David Gracia, Professor at IE Business School

The social networking phenomenon is unstoppable, but there is still no business model capable of successfully exploiting the services these companies provide.Social networks are attracting more and more consumers´ attention. As a result, they are becoming an unbeatable opportunity for advertisers to showcase their products and services to potential consumers. However, advertisers´ and users´ interests are not always the same and social networks need to find a balance so that they can attract new users and, at the same time, capitalize on their services in an Internet culture ruled by freebies. It is a three-edged challenge: advertisers, users and the social networks themselves.

Social networks are a particularly attractive platform for advertisers. Facebook, which has just completed its sixth year, was visited by 460 million people in February, 13.3 million of them from Spain (according to figures released by Nielsen). If Facebook were a country, it would have the third-highest national population on the planet, with more than 400 million inhabitants.

The comparison between Google and Facebook is particularly interesting. On the one hand, the percentage of Internet users that use the search engine in Spain is 91%, whereas only 53% use the social network. On the other, the key factor lies in the time spent by users on the site: whereas with Google people enter, search and leave, whereas Facebook users are getting more and more involved in a growing number of activities. On average, users spend 1.45 hours a month on Google, which is very little in comparison with the 6.5 hours they spend on Facebook. Read more…

Madrid stands for quality of life. The capital is up two positions in the annual ranking of the 25 most liveable cities published by the British magazine Monocle, taking the tenth position. The Urban Quality of Life Index, featured each year in Monocle’s July edition, has become a world standard used to measure the urban parameters that define each of the cities that make it into this prestigious list.

Madrid has jumped up the scale for the third year in a row after taking the 13th and 12th positions in 2008 and 2009 respectively. Of the 25 cities included in the Index, only seven have improved their position in 2010 compared to the previous year, and only three of them stand among the top ten.

By making it into the top ten of the world’s most liveable cities, Madrid now shares a privileged status that only includes three other capitals with over three million inhabitants: Tokyo, Paris and Melbourne. Despite the general Spanish context, the capital is still an appealing place to live in and invest in.

For more information on Madrid, please visit esmadrid.com

… found @ Inside España Newsletter

IE Focus | By Enrique Dans, Professor at IE Business School 

You may not know this, but your computer could have a secret life of its own. It may form part of a network that takes advantage of chinks in your computer’s security system to commit fraud. Such a network is called a botnet.The news of the recent arrest of three Spanish citizens responsible for the “Butterfly Network”, described as one of the largest botnets in the world, was received with great interest by Spain’s technology sector. But exactly what is a botnet and what is it used for? What is a zombie computer? What are we talking about?

A botnet, or “robot network”, is a group of computers which, after being infected by a specific person or group, remain under his or its control and can be used for fraudulent purposes. The owners of the computers are usually unaware of the infection and do not know that their machine is being used, together with many more, for some type of generally criminal purpose. The person who manages to control a botnet has many options on the table: collecting sensitive user data, launching distributed denial-of-service attacks and even ordering the computers to click on websites with advertising contracted by a third party. The possibilities are manifold: the botmaster has an army of computers ready to execute a certain command at his/her will, with the profit resulting from any fraudulent behaviour being very difficult to identify as a result of the distribution. Read more…