Archive for September/2010

Students from IE Business School’s International MBA (IMBA) program have been providing online and onsite assessment for the African women entrepreneurs who have participated in The Women-Led Businesses Program. The program is designed to provide mentoring and assessment for women entrepreneurs in Liberia, South Africa, Congo Democratic Republic, Mozambique, Senegal and Rwanda, and is organized by the Senegalese association FAS (Femmes Africa Solidarité) and IE Business School.

IE Business School’s Center for Diversity and FAS, in collaboration with AECID, have designed and implemented this project aimed at providing 23 African women with training and leadership skills. During the first phase, Professor Pablo Martin de Holan and Professor Celia de Anca created a group of consultants, each of which would be responsible for selecting candidates from a particular country. Between them they selected 23 high-potential African women from a total of 300 candidates. The selected candidates took part in a month-long training program led by Professor Ignacio de la Vega in Senegal. After this training period, they came to Madrid to continue their management education. During the 2009/2010 academic year, the program organizers selected the best business plans and presented them to a panel comprised of potential investors. Celia de Anca, Director of IE’s Center for Diversity, explained how IE feels that is essential to teach young, future directors and entrepreneurs about the enormous potential of the African continent for the corporate world. “The program is about another way of looking at this neighboring continent and another way of doing business in a continent with such potential”. Read more…

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

Television is dead. And not only television, but all the other classic media based on unidirectional communication, because the young are changing the rules. A recent study on teenagers´ habits carried out in the United States reveals of how the way information is consumed in our society has changed over the years: the classic one-way media, such as television, have died a death. The medium that was considered for many years as a bastion of North American culture and which still brings together multimillion audiences for events such as the Super Bowl final is being abandoned by young people in their droves. Time spent in front of the TV has fallen drastically and those who still watch it do so on a different screen: their computer.

The final nail in TV’s coffin has been hammered home, as expected, by the social network. The use of the social network confirms that the absurd fears of some adults for the alleged “isolation” of young people in front of the screen (“they don´t go out any more”, “I prefer my computer to seeing my friends”, “they are so pale because they get no sunshine and only get radiation from the screen”) were unfounded fears: the young people who are the most active on the net are also the most active off the net… they have more friends, go out more and go to more parties. Read more…

IE Focus | By Gayle Allard, Professor at IE Business School

After just 8 years of circulation the Euro has the dark side that Spain didn’t want to see when it took over from the weakened peseta. What we need now is real improvement in levels of competitiveness.We thought we knew what the Euro was about when we launched it in 2002. We started to spend those new coins and notes with an almost patriotic meaning for pro-Europeans. We went through the “rounding-up” stage, but anyway we were enthusiastic about the new currency and what it meant for Spain and Europe.

And the initial years of the euro brought the benefits we anticipated. Interest rates fell to the lowest ever levels. Trade increased, foreign investment reached new highs and Spain went through a golden era of growth and rapid increases in income. We should almost be forgiven for thinking that belonging to the Euro held only advantages. But we were wrong.

From the beginning, the euro was not ´pretty´ notes, but rather the final abandonment of two fundamental tools that had helped the member states balance out their economies: interest rates and exchange rates. Read more…

The mayor of Madrid, Ruiz-Gallardon, signs a collaboration with IE Business School which addresses four key areas: entrepreneurship, economy, innovation and worldwide promotion.

IE Business School is to produce management education tools based on the public administration model of the city of Madrid, including keys to the social and economic transformation achieved by the city in recent years.  The collaboration agreement signed today by Madrid Mayor, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, and President of IE Business School, Diego del Alcázar, also includes a plan for employees of Madrid City Hall’s Tourism City-branding Department to undertake IE programs. Moreover, IE Business School will be providing support in the design and management of the content of a Chair in New Technologies, set to be inaugurated in the near future, as well as providing consulting services for startups in the business incubator run by City Hall, where IE students will be able to place their business startups free of charge.

With this agreement the two institutions, one public, one private, will join forces to promote economic recovery in Spain’s capital. The Mayor commented that “this mutual support has come at a time when it is most needed, and will hinge on four key areas: economic analysis, innovation and technology, tourism, and entrepreneurship.  

Ruiz-Gallardón talked about how both IE Business School and the city of Madrid had evolved since the 1970s, saying that “Economic recovery is possible”. In 1973, the total value of all goods and services produced in the city of Madrid stood at less than 4,000 million Euros and a large part was centered around public administration. Madrid’s metro network covered just 50 kilometers at the time, the city was a full day´s journey from Spain’s coastal regions, and Madrid’s Barajas airport received some 3 million passengers. That year, a group of entrepreneurs, headed by Diego del Alcázar, founded an private business school to provide top-tier postgraduate programs in the field of management education in Spain, which until then had only existed in Barcelona.  

The Mayor continued by saying that today the average per capita income of a citizen of Madrid has multiplied by 16, production stands at more than 120,000 million Euros, and business activity no longer revolves around the public sector, “because we are now Spain’s main business hub.” Gallardon also remarked that the Madrid Metro is six times larger than in 1973 and one of the most extensive and effective underground transport networks in the world. High-speed trains can now reach Malaga or Barcelona in little more than a couple of hours, and Barajas receives 50 million travelers each year.

In much the same way, over the last 37 years IE Business School has gone from being a small business to become a worldwide leader in management education. IE’s first annual intake comprised fewer than a hundred students, whereas now there are almost 8,000 each year, with more than 40,000 alumni living and working in 102 countries around the world. Ruiz-Gallardón rounded off by saying that “the school’s original program is now one of the best one-year MBA programs in the world, according to the Wall Street Journal, as well as the best online MBA program in the world, according to The Economist, or the best Executive MBA in Europe, according to BusinessWeek”.

Mutual support

The Mayor went on to comment how IE enjoys its current position in large part thanks to its location in the unique city of Madrid, which has afforded the School enormous prestige. But he also noted that a substantial part of Madrid’s transformation was thanks to IE. He argued that business schools play a pivotal role in stimulating the economies of the cities in which they are located. They generate employment and wealth, foster social progress and professional development, and work in tandem with public policies from the private sector to attract and create talent, and strengthen the city’s image.

The Mayor declared that these were all very good reasons for establishing closer collaboration that will bring substantial benefits for the city, serving as an engine for growth and knowledge. Said benefits will be the end result of a series of actions based on four key areas:

Economic analysis. IE is interested in using the management model used for the social and economic transformation of the city of Madrid over the last ten years to design new teaching tools for its programs. The Mayor added that “We are proud that the best business school in Spain, which is also one of the best in the world, is using Madrid as a model for public administration”.

Innovation and technology. The agreement will serve as a platform for both parties to work together in this field, and for IE to design and manage the design and content of a Chair in New Technologies, which will be constructed in the Boetticher hanger and launched in the near future.

Tourism and city branding. Employees from the Tourism Department of City Hall will undertake programs run by IE. A prestigious business school like IE plays a key role in showcasing the city to the world, “Which is why Madrid City Hall is going to work together with IE on international campaigns aimed at promoting the school and thereby helping to sell the city”.

Entrepreneurship. Finally, Madrid City Hall will work with IE to promote entrepreneurship in three ways. Firstly by providing support in the drafting of a document about entrepreneurship in Madrid that will form part of the GEM (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor) report, a benchmark in comparing levels of entrepreneurial activity around the world. The GEM report normally focuses on countries, but this will be the first year that Spain will provide specific information on a city. Secondly, IE will provide counsel for new businesses in the City Hall start-up incubators, and thirdly, the incubator facilities will be available free of charge to entrepreneurs studying at IE.

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.