China, India and Japan: Global Economic Drivers

Explore IE Live IE

IE Business School and Casa Asia are organizing this conference to discuss the concerns that Asian companies have in Europe and vice versa, in order to show the full potential, from the business point of view, of relationships with three of the major Asian countries: China, India and Japan.

Every time we have more and more evidence that Asia will be the center of global economic growth over the coming decades, due to the enormous strength of the Asian economies. In Europe, Asia is perceived as a great opportunity for its high growth rates, demographic factors, infrastructure needs and rising middle classes. In Asia, Europe is perceived as a market with high rates of consumption that is valued technological capacity of their firms, the relevance of their brands and the degree of excellence shown in the design of certain products. 

Details

Rock ‘n’ Roll Architecture

IE University

It happened in the IE Bachelor in Architecture, subject: Design Studio II… Professor Manuel Ocaña, http://www.manuelocana.com/ invited architect and researcher Carlos Ramos to one of his lectures. Carlos’ conference was entitled out Towards Rocking Architecture. – A retrospective insight into space and sound throughout four short stories.- and talked about the influences rock music could have on architecture. As well…

Details

Businesses, customers and small fry

Academics

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

It’s time to put an end to deliberations. If there is anything that really is changing as a direct result of the popularisation of the net and the so-called social web, it is undoubtedly relations between businesses and their customers.

Open your account on Twitter (Sorry? You’re an executive and you still don´t have Twitter or you don´t know what it is?) And write something about well-known large business organizations with millions of customers, such as Telefonica or Iberia, often criticised for their customer service. In a matter of minutes, if what you have said about the company merits a reply, you will quite possibly find it on Twitter. Have a look at the Twitter accounts of Movistar or Iberia… What can you see? Businesses talking directly with their customers and offering to solve their problems. Businesses that listen to the small fry.

It might be a question about items on a bill, explanations about an incident or about an offer: the question is that, after many years of inflexible single-direction trading and contacting customers only to harass them by throwing new products and services in their faces, many businesses are finally starting to use bidirectional communication channels to maintain real relations with their customers. Such relations are much more genuine and make it worthwhile to manage exceptions or speak with a human voice if a problem can be solved and a customer can be satisfied. Trivial? At the moment, more or less testimonial. But undoubtedly a sign of the times. Times in which technology, far from isolating individuals, makes it possible to humanize relations and bring together those who are on both sides of the screen. How can invest millions in expensive CRM systems if our customers then speak about us in public and we pay them no attention?

Details

IE University: Hidden Gem in Global Architecture Education

IE University

The Bachelor in Architecture from IE University leads the “Hidden Gems in Global architecture Education” category in the recent ranking from Design Intelligence magazine. This US ranking is the most prestigious regarding Architecture and Design Schools.  In the 11th edition of America’s Best Architecture & Design Schools published at the beginning of November, Design Intelligence decided for the first…

Details

IE students mentor African women entrepreneurs

IE News

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”.

Details

Change of Screen

Academics

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.

Details

Welcome, Spain, to the Euro

Academics

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.

Details

Madrid signs collaboration with IE

Live IE

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…

Details