Archive for March/2011

This February, IE Business School brought together some of Spain and Israel’s most prominent entrepreneurs and investors for a conference about an essential element of the entrepreneurial endeavor: Failure.“The Advantages of Failure,” the first conference of its kind hosted by a business school, asked participants to speak about their greatest failures as entrepreneurs, how they learned from and eventually overcame them. Present in all entrepreneurial markets, the fear of failure is one of the biggest obstacles to fomenting a successful European entrepreneurial ecosystem. In Spain, for example, more than 50% of those interviewed by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), the largest single study of entrepreneurial activity in the world, note that the fear of failure is a key impediment to becoming an entrepreneur. 

The start of the conference delved into the lessons learned from experience: 

•Jose María Castillejo, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Zinkia Entertainment SA, whose principal product is the animated figure Pocoyo, recounted his experience with a Ukrainian train heist. The son of a local Ukranian politician “hid” a train full of sunflower seeds in order to squeeze Castillejo out of a profitable business exporting sunflower seed oil.

•Jesús Encinar, founder and CEO of Spain’s top real estate website Idealista.com explained how the failures of his parents’ first businesses – and the subsequent need to relocate from his childhood home – made him ever vigilant of bank debt and possible business failure. In 2008, Encinar was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Read more…

By David Bach, Professor at IE Business School, published on IE Focus

Germany has scored more economic goals than Spain because it applied the structural reforms needed before the crisis took hold, and because Merkel, has controlled spending from the start.Spain may have beaten Germany in both the European Football Championship and the World Cup, but where economy is concerned there is no doubt that Germany has the upper hand. Last Thursday´s news that the largest economy on the continent had grown by 3.6% in 2010 (the highest level since the unification in 1990) has surprised even the experts. The Spanish economy, however, closed 2010 with an average reduction of 0.2%. What does Angela Merkel know about economics that the Spanish president doesn’t? One analysis of the German success shows that the causes behind the differences go beyond the current Chancellor´s policies and also clearly point the path Spain should take.

Germany´s economic strength (and Spain´s weakness) is based fundamentally on four pillars: Read more…

By Enrique Dans, Professor at IE Business School, published on IE Focus

One of the key factors driving the boom in so-called social media is customer involvement, now the subject of extensive study.One of the main drivers of the boom of the so-called social media is so-called customer involvement. This represents a measure of how far the customer gets involved with the sender of the message, and is now the subject of extensive study.

Have you ever considered the general effect your messaging has on your target public? In a world full of media that is technologically limited to being unidirectional, the answer to this question was very inexact: we could only find out by using panels or surveys, which were always approximate, and we were unable to associate the answer with specific subjects or try to measure it in purely binary terms: one, buys the product or service, or zero, doesn´t buy it. This absence of information means that communication via the net can be measured or evaluated in a large number of ways that businesses are starting to discover. 

On the social web, users´ reactions are gauged by that fundamental variable: involvement. The minimum involvement of a user in terms of content is to simply “watch it go by”; the content appears and the user simply moves on to something else without interacting with it. Display advertising, for example, is a clear case of this: we can´t even be sure of whether or not the user has actually seen it or stopped to look at it. In fact, display advertising is a luxury in comparison with other media: we can at least know whether or not a specific user has received the impact and then act accordingly. In the press, we can only know the number of newspapers that have been sold and, on television, we have to trust a frugal scattering of audience meters that provide measurements that are poor and few and far between, but which everyone decides to believe since there is nothing better. Read more…

IE University is an international university in two complementary meanings of the word:
1 It is a university which has an international faculty and staff, with students coming from almost 60 different countries.
2 Students are prepared for international careers and draw on IE University’s international experience. 

Both the contents of its academic programs, and the academic and professional profiles which students are trained in, are international. This approach is a prerequisite for contemporary higher education in which graduates have to interact in other countries and languages from the start of their academic and professional lives. More importantly, when the barriers between what is global and what is local no longer exist, professional and academic projects have an immediate and far reaching impact on customers, readers, audiences, partners, etc, across the globe.  

Some features of IE University’s international outreach include:

• The two official working languages at IE University are English and Spanish. All its undergraduate and postgraduate programs are taught in English and many are also taught in Spanish.
• Internships in countries around the world and in international companies and institutions.
• The almost 60 undergraduate nationalities and over 90 postgraduate nationalities. Dozens of languages are spoken on campus, something that visitors to our Segovia and Madrid sites quickly notice.

 However, higher education at IE University is international not just to meet the needs of the contemporary academic and professional world. It aims to go further. Exchanging ideas and being familiar with different cultures and lifestyles are expected of people with  an excellent education in the 21st century and are an absolute necessity for professionals and academics who will guide the course of the complex world we live in. This is why we say IE University’s model of higher education is international.

But let’s see how Keiko McNally explains it to you:

Why is Humanities one of the core values of IE University?

The complex world we face today poses fascinating challenges for those beginning and those completing their educational journey. IE University’s higher education model is Humanistic in this respect. IE University expects its students, faculty and the entire university community to take a profound interest and obtain a good grounding in the Humanities, i.e. disciplines that help us understand the world we live in and gain an appreciation of other communities we share our history with.

IE University gives students the knowledge and understanding of other cultures, intellectual perspectives, historical and social situations, and artistic expressions. Through studying the Humanities, having academic exchange and research activities in the field of Humanities, and receiving active support by the entire faculty, undergraduate and postgraduate students gain an appreciation of the rich intellectual and cultural diversity of our world. This is mirrored in IE University’s programs and academic activities as follows:

1. The Humanities are an essential part of the core curriculum. Undergraduate students study specific Humanities subjects in the IE Module, which summarizes IE University’s spirit
2. In addition, the study of Ethics is part of all undergraduate programs, divided into General Ethics and Professional Deontology. Both form part of the IE Module at the undergraduate level.
3. Many of IE University’s academic programs include compulsory and elective courses that are humanistic in their content and perspective.
4. IE University has an interdisciplinary graduate school, the IE School of Arts and Humanities, which promotes IE University’s focus on the Humanities through teaching, research, and extracurricular activities.

The emphasis placed on Humanities has a practical component in line with the student profile that IE University develops. The Humanities provide an understanding of the richness of humankind’s personal, social, cultural, historic and artistic perspectives. They encourage a continuous search and inspiration for new ways of describing the world and undertaking projects. The humanities enable us to imagine new possibilities for being and doing, and allow professionals and academics to be innovative and entrepreneurial.

See how Julian Montano likes to describe the humanistic approach at IE University

IE Business School  is glad to invite you and the members of your network to join the 10th videoconference in our Sports Management Today series, to be held on Thursday, March 24th at 16:30 (Madrid local time – please click here for your local time). Register at msmconferences@ie.edu.

Speaker:

Earl Patton – Senior Manager for Sony FIFA Partnership Project Office

Content:

Coming off his international assignment for Sony FIFA Partnership Project Office in South Africa for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, Earl Patton will join us for this exclusive videoconference on strategies that pertain to global sports activation. Earl will discuss how Sony and other global partners of FIFA and the World Cup manage and integrate various business developments and marketing strategies from digital, television, print, social responsibility, sales and marketing. In addition, Earl will discuss the role of various internal and external groups within a global activation to illustrate how a united front is a key component to the deployment and success to reaching return on investment. Read more…

Finally launched: the IE Brown Executive MBA program which combines IE Business School‘s strength in interdisciplinary management education and Brown University‘s excellence in the humanities, social, biological, and physical sciences.

The institutions have been have been collaborating for two years and this Spring marks the beginning of their first joint program, which has been created specifically for the entrepreneurially-minded, globally aware, and inquisitive executive.

“We’re living at a time of intense global change and upheaval, which presents great opportunity and also requires innovation and entrepreneurship for the well being of our global society,” said Craig Cogut, Brown University alumnus (’75) and Founder and Managing Partner of Pegasus Capital Advisors, L.P.  “The advantage of studying liberal arts is the ability to speak and understand different languages, and I don’t just I just don’t mean English, Spanish, or Mandarin.  Music, art, and literature are also  languages that help you know the world. They teach you to listen, to hear, to see, to be flexible and creative, and most importantly, to learn from one another.”  The Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University, named in recognition of the generous support from Craig and Deborah Cogut, supports collaborative research in the humanities, focusing on interdisciplinary and comparative work across cultural and linguistic boundaries, and supports fellowship and grant programs, Brown’s distinguished visitors program, and regular campus events. Read more…

Why is entrepreneurship one of the core values of IE University?

The academic programs are entrepreneurial in their content and methodology as are the teaching style of the faculty, the spirit of IE staff and the mindset of IE University students. Everything at IE University is focused on motivating and providing specific skills for students to embark on their own projects using their own initiative.

IE University believes higher education should train undergraduates (future professionals and academics) and postgraduate students (more highly skilled professionals and academics) so they can transform the world round them. Entrepreneurship means the ability of our students and alumni to enrich their personal and professional lives, their society or community, with new and interesting projects. These projects include setting up new businesses in any industry, devising new processes and innovative methods or management and research, and creating new platforms and trends in communication and design, among others. This is augmented by IE University’s humanistic and integrated approach, as students learn from the start to integrate different skills and visions as they carry out projects in teams.

Listen to Lee Newman as he explains this.

IE University professor, Ibrahim Al-Marashi, discusses social networks and youth identity in the context of the current Middle East unrest .

The hybridization of the real and the virtual
 

Whereas only a small group of the 2010 IMBA had the honor of chatting with BBVA´s President and CEO Francisco Gonzalez, now all IE students and indeed anyone interested, has the possibility of enjoying a similar, one to one learning experience, virtually. The multimedia case study and the 30 minute interview by Dean Santiago Iñíguez, who paid a visit to the BBVA Innovation Center in Madrid to talk to President Francisco González, discuss the bank´s unique business approach to the uncertainty brought by the financial crisis. The written case also includes an innovative way to view the interview on mobile phones – Just scan the QR code on the right to be redirected to the interview.

As Alba Funosa, IMBA alumni 2010, explains: “ Talking with the CEO of one of the biggest banks in the world one to one, about the bank´s future strategy and its internationalization, was really exciting!”
Real or virtual: an amazing learning experience.