Archive for category: Press Release

• IESE´s MBA Class of 2023 is the largest in the school´s history with nearly 400 students and a new sixth section. They join new cohorts of IESE´s Master in Management (MiM) and Executive MBA programs beginning classes in Barcelona, Madrid, and Munich.

• IESE is one of the only top schools to have remained open for in-person classes since June 2020, thanks to putting in place rigorous health and safety protocols. This academic year, safety measures have been updated to include new protocols on vaccination and testing.

This week around 1000 students begin in-person courses of the MBA, Master in Management (MiM), and Executive MBA programs at IESE Business School´s campuses in Barcelona, Madrid and Munich. IESE´s rigorous set of health and safety measures, which enabled it to be among the first business schools to return to face-to-face classes back in June 2020, have been updated to include new protocols on vaccination and testing. The updated protocols ensure a safe and productive educational environment for all.

Despite the ongoing disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, continued strong demand from high quality applicants for IESE´s masters programs means that the school was also able to open a sixth section of its full-time MBA program for the first time this year. The incoming MBA class of 2023 is the largest in the school´s history with 387 students, up from 355 last year. More than eighty percent of the class are international, with students hailing from 59 different nationalities.

IESE´s full-time MBA students take classes at IESE´s campus in Barcelona, and study the program in English over 15 or 19 months. The average age of the class is 29.

The new students of IESE´s Master in Management (MiM) class of 2022 also recently began classes at IESE´s campus in Madrid. The class counts on 77 students from 27 different nationalities. Aimed at recent graduates with minimal or no work experience, the average age of the class is 23.

Launched three years ago and taught over 11 months, the MiM is a full-time program in English from the Spanish capital. It provides an immersive experience for participants, enabling them to acquire the best business tools to kick-start their management career.

Meanwhile, the new edition of the Executive MBA program in Munich has also started. IESE´s campus in Germany begins its third class of the executive MBA with 62 new participants from 22 different nationalities. The average age of the class is 35.

Ensuring a safe, innovative campus

From the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, IESE worked quickly to adapt its classrooms and put in place a comprehensive set of health and safety measures. These measures enabled IESE to successfully return to face-to-face classes over a year ago.

IESE´s extensive efforts to safeguard its campuses include restricted campus access and temperature controls, mandatory mask use in all common spaces combined with a high tech air-renewal and renovation system. As the pandemic has evolved, these safety measures have been further updated for the 2021-2022 academic year to include new protocols on vaccination and testing.

IESE is strongly recommending all participants and staff are fully vaccinated and provide proof of that with an official certificate. Those who are not will need to provide weekly proof of a negative PCR, serological or antigen test in order to access campus.

Participants who are unable to attend in-person classes will also continue to be able to connect to classes remotely. 

More on IESE´s health protocols.

• ECB’s Andrea Enría and Luis de Guindos speak at IESE-EY 16th Banking Industry Meeting

July 7, 2021. The banking system has shown resilience in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, weathering the crisis and helping to limit its wider economic impact. Yet the industry should be wary of complacency if it is to secure its future, experts warn. The acceleration of the pre-COVID trends of digitalization and sustainability present significant challenges, as well as opportunities, as banks try to manage the transition to a greener and more digital economy. Meanwhile, despite a recent wave of mergers, low profitability remains a pressing issue, with representatives from the European Central Bank (ECB) suggesting further consolidations may be necessary.

Those are the key conclusions from the 16th Banking Industry Meeting, organized by the IESE-CIF in collaboration with EY.

The annual event, which concluded yesterday, brings together the leading players in the European banking industry including regulators, academics, consultants and CEOs. As such, the event helps give a 360-degree vision of how the sector is currently performing, and where it is heading at a decisive moment for society as a whole.

Toward recovery
This year’s event took place over two days under the title “Helping to boost the economy” and looked at how the industry can help limit the financial hit of the pandemic for households and companies, as well as boost the economic recovery. In addition, speakers reflected on the role banks will play in a future marked by technological disruption and the challenge of climate change.

Speaking on Monday, Andrea Enria, the ECB chief supervisor, focused his remarks on the post pandemic outlook. According to Enria, positive signs of economic recovery combined with the fact that uncertainty – a defining feature of the COVID-19 crisis – is starting to abate, points to an overall picture of a stable and resilient banking sector.

Enria also spoke about the ECB´s plans to allow banking institutions to continue to use their capital buffers flexibly until at least 2022, given that they have been particularly strained in the face of the pandemic. “We do not want to start again to tighten the reins on the capital buffers while the crisis is still hitting the balance sheets of the banks.”

However, Enria urged banks to be wary of complacency, warning that banks should not be negligent with loans that could become shaky in the wake of the crisis. In addition, he questioned whether banks would take significantly bold measures to secure their future, pointing out that low profitability remains a concern. He suggested that further consolidations in the sector may be necessary, whether in the form of full-scale mergers or though consolidating business lines.

Merging the future
For his part, ECB Vice President Luis de Guindos highlighted the success of the extraordinary measures adopted during the pandemic to boost the economy, with company bankruptcies and unemployment being largely contained.

However, he reiterated Enria’s call for banks to improve their profitability to address the sector’s structural deficiencies. He also said he would encourage cross-border mergers within Europe, stating that it would be “very desirable” as it would send a signal that there is a European banking market.

Finally, many speakers also spoke about how the pandemic has accelerated several pre-COVID trends such as digital banking and the transition to a more sustainable, greener world. Here, de Guindos highlighted how the pandemic has shown the opportunity of new digital channels and ways of working, as well as the importance of properly addressing the issue climate risk.

José Manuel Campa, former IESE professor and current President of the European Banking Authority (EBA), added that financial institutions must urgently “improve the mechanisms for measuring and evaluating environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks.”

Meanwhile, BBVA CEO Onur Genç referred to climate change as “one of the greatest disruptions in the history of mankind” and highlighted the role the banking sector can play in financing and acting as catalysts to the transition to a greener economy.

Photo caption: speakers at IESE’s 16th Banking Industry Meeting spoke of a stable and resilient sector.

• New research, published in Science, points to gender imbalance in R&D having repercussions for women´s health. It marks an important step towards showing how labor-market inequality can lead to product-market inequality.

• U.S. biomedical patents with all-female inventor teams are 35% more likely to focus on women’s health than all-male teams, new research finds.

• Science magazine, published by the world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific society, is among the world’s bestselling and most prestigious general science journals.

June 18, 2021, Barcelona. Why are women’s diseases, women’s anatomy or women’s needs more generally overlooked by inventors? New research points to gender imbalance in R&D having repercussions for who is benefiting from inventions.

Analyzing more than 430,000 U.S. biomedical patents filed between 1976 and 2010, professors Sampsa Samila of IESE Business School, Rembrand Koning of Harvard Business School, and John-Paul Ferguson of McGill University find significant evidence that who is doing the inventing affects what is being invented, and they point to the missed opportunities that this pattern reveals. Their paper “Who do we invent for? Patents by women focus more on women’s health, but few women get to invent” is published in the journal Science.

Today only about 13% of U.S. patent inventors are women. Yet this study found marked progress over the years: in 1976, just 6.3% of biomedical patents came from women-led teams while the figure grew to 16.2% in 2010. There is evidence that this 10 percentage point increase has resulted in significantly more innovations affecting women’s health.

There’s also evidence that women, who currently make up about 35% of STEM scientists, aren’t more plentiful in the ranks of patented inventors for a few reasons — including gender bias in the labor market and in decisions regarding which R&D opportunities are deemed worth pursuing by managers.

“Effectively, the results are showing that labor market inequality could lead to product market inequality,” prof. Samila explains. “In other words, discrimination in the labor market is not just an issue for the individuals affected, but it affects the entire society due to the absence of the contributions of those who were discriminated against.”

The good news is that lowering barriers to disadvantaged groups should help boost innovation and economic growth. “There may still be many untapped market opportunities to invent for women, opportunities that could in turn improve women’s health,” the co-authors state.

Innovation inequality

Anecdotal evidence abounds of advances by female inventors. For example, the entrepreneur Surbhi Sarna has drawn from her own ovarian cancer scare to invent a better cancer-detection tool. Another, Dr. Patricia Bath, has invented a more precise treatment for cataracts, which affect women more often than men. This new research backs these up with systematic data analysis, finding that all-female teams of inventors are 35% more likely to focus on women’s health than all-male teams are. Interestingly, male inventors are less likely to focus their patented innovations on either men’s or women’s health issues when compared with their female counterparts.

While inventor teams with some women also follow a sex-focus pattern, the pattern is “strongest for all-female invention teams, holds over decades, and is present even within narrow areas of invention,” as the co-authors summarize. This latter point “suggests that the female inventor-invention link is both the result of women working in more female-focused research areas [e.g., gynecology] and female inventors identifying opportunities to invent for women regardless of the area in which they work [e.g., ocular surgery procedures].”

Prof. Samila gratefully acknowledges funding for this project from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 799330.

About IESE Business School

IESE Business School is the graduate business school of the University of Navarra. Founded in 1958, the school is one of the world’s most international business schools, with campuses in Barcelona, Madrid, Munich, New York and São Paulo. Consistently ranked within the top ten worldwide, IESE Business School has pioneered business education in Europe since its founding. For sixty years, IESE has sought to develop business leaders with solid business skills, a global mind-set and a desire to make a positive impact on society. The school distinguishes itself in its general-management approach, extensive use of the case method, international outreach, and emphasis on placing people at the heart of managerial decision-making. IESE is currently ranked number 1 in the world for Executive Education programs by the Financial Times, and has been every year since 2015. www.iese.edu   

• The 3rd Future of Banking report by IESE and CEPR explores how prepared the financial system is for future pandemics and climate change

The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed severe vulnerabilities in the global financial system, and serves as a cautionary tale for the potentially devastating effects that future natural disasters and climate change could cause to the world economy. The question of whether society is adequately prepared and what measures can be put in place to mitigate these risks has never been more pertinent.

A new CEPR/IESE report by Patrick Bolton, Marcin Kacperczyk, Harrison Hong, and Xavier Vives tests precisely how resilient the financial system is to natural disasters and discusses what can be done to make it more resilient. The report details how to reshape central bank policies to address climate-related risks, debates the role of asset managers in dealing with natural disasters and climate risk, and explains why mitigation is a form of self-insurance to limit the systemic risks of global warming.

This is the third report in the series on The Future of Banking, part of the Banking Initiative from the IESE Business School and supported by Citi. In the report, the authors stress the need for the financial sector – from asset managers, supervisory regulators to central banks – to play a major role in the prevention and taming of these disruptive, environment-related events. To do so, climate risk drivers and their transmission channels must be accurately addressed, precise measurement of the economic and financial impact of the different risks is essential, and mitigation and risk-reduction measures must be adequately developed. Policymakers thus have a responsibility to guarantee the stability of the financial system and use the fiscal and environmental instruments at their disposal. Climate risk should not be measured through short-term horizons and there must be an internationally coordinated response to a global issue. 

“The Covid-19 crisis and the subsequent downturn have reinforced the need to evaluate and address highly disruptive environment-related events as well as the strategic importance of sustainable finance in the upcoming years”

The risks involving natural disasters and climate change are large and complex. As a result, they require a broad range of players and tools to manage them. Fighting climate change will require a combination of public intervention and private sector mitigation strategies to price and hedge the long-term implications of climate-related events. Carbon abatement proposals should include net-zero commitments made by governments and companies worldwide to decarbonise the economy, and sustainable finance mandates should be introduced, backed by financial intermediaries to incentivise firm efforts towards decarbonisation.

Three key messages emerge from the report:

• Central banks must play a proactive role in promoting mitigation policies and coordinating climate risk policies consistent with government mandates, the private sector and civil society. Central banks should focus on the development of forward-looking scenarios and the implementation of climate stress tests. Central banks must include natural disaster risk in their prudential policy frameworks. The policy response to stabilize the financial system, however, should avoid an excessive reliance on central bank backstops – ‘lender of last resort’ interventions should not become the default.
• Asset managers can facilitate the management of climate risk and promote green financing through hedging and engagement in mitigation. Although an array of hedging instruments have been developed by the financial industry in response to crises, the systemic nature of natural disasters complicates the hedging activity for financial players because of the lack of effective risk-sharing. Financial markets and asset managers could discipline market participants to stimulate mitigation efforts by the real sector.
• Climate mitigation investments, such as incentives for firms to adopt decarbonisation technologies and reach net-zero targets, could have similar positive effects on stock valuations and for climate risk-management responses to those seen with the rapid development of vaccines to combat the pandemic, which played a significant role in stabilizing the financial system during the Covid-19 shock. Clear clarification of financial commitments and enforcement of stringent standards to combat climate change is essential in this regard.

The report shows that climate change and associated natural disasters will undoubtedly cause severe disruption to the global financial system without the implementation of adequate prevention and mitigation strategies. The Covid-19 pandemic should serve as a stark warning that the financial sector, from firms to central banks, must act now to ensure future stability. 

• IESE and Shizenkan’s MBA Future of Capitalism course closes with former Unilever CEO Paul Polman 

The first edition of IESE and Shizenkan University‘s MBA course on the future of capitalism came to a close last week, in a special session where students presented their vision of how business can have a more positive impact on the world. 

During the course, students received input from a group of prominent business leaders and CEOs who are supporting the initiative, including:  

• Paul Polman, Co-founder and Chair of Imagine, Honorary Chair of International Chamber of Commerce and former CEO of Unilever 
• Tak Niinami, CEO of Suntory Holdings 
• James Higa, Executive Director of Philanthropic Ventures Foundation and former Senior Director of Office of the CEO at Apple 
• B. Muthuraman, former Vice Chairman of Tata Steel and Chairman of Tata International 
• John Elkington, Founder and Chief Pollinator of Volans 
• Nitin Nohria, professor and former dean of Harvard Business School. 

There’s “a need to bend the curve of capitalism to make it more sustainable, more inclusive and more functional for the generations to come,” Paul Polman said during the final session’s keynote address.

He also stressed the importance of creating leaders who can drive this change in business, highlighting how the Future of Capitalism MBA course can help lead the way. “We certainly need more business school programs that create the business leaders the world needs, so I commend this program for doing that.” He particularly praised the global nature of the program, which involves collaborating with schools from Brazil, India, Japan and Spain. “We cannot tackle these big issues alone, so having these broader partnerships in the academic world is key.”

A global MBA project for social change 

The Future of Capitalism is an MBA course that is designed to help students critically observe the current state of capitalism and explore the roles of business leadership required to create a better future. 

The course was developed by IESE and Japan’s Shizenkan University, in cooperation with the School of Inspired Leadership (SOIL), India, and Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), Brazil. Launched in January 2021, the course is open to MBA students from all four schools. In total, 81 students of 22 different nationalities took part in the course.  

Over the last three months, the MBA students have engaged in virtual conversations with a variety of guest speakers from around the world, including Mark Thompson, former CEO of New York Times; Jennifer Morgan, Executive Director of Greenpeace International; former child soldiers in Uganda; and formerly homeless children in Bangladesh, among others. 

In the final session of the course, two finalist student groups presented their vision for how capitalism can become more inclusive. The first group to present explained the problem of adequately defining capitalism. They also highlighted how one of the issues with the current system is that “while we may have greater wealth creation, we also have greater inequality.” They attribute this to the widespread use of return on investment (ROI) instead of value creation as the main way to assess performance, which can ultimately end up destroying value. For them, the single biggest issue with the current system is “the shift from value creation to money creation.” 

The second group of students focused on how to encourage an even balance between promoting economic improvement and social well-being. Among their proposals, they looked at the need for business to think more long-term, explored changes in how to incentivize CEOs, and also emphasized the importance of collaboration.  

Muthuraman praised the “brilliant presentations” and how they highlighted the importance of looking at the system as a whole, measuring performance in a proper and holistic way, and understanding the importance of balancing competing needs. He concluded by reminding the participants to make sure they apply the learnings from the course to their own lives, because “we need more advocacy.”

Business leaders on the future of education 

The final session also included a high-level panel discussion among five business supporters of the course and IESE Dean Franz Heukamp. One of the topics explored how education needs to change to have a more positive impact on society.  

Polman highlighted the key role responsible business leadership must play in tackling climate change and inequality, and the crucial part business schools can play in that.  

“We need the willpower of our leadership. Sixty percent of climate change solutions are available to us now. We need to use them. We also need a new economic narrative.” To do that, “we need to create leaders who are good human beings with empathy and compassion. Never has the role of business schools been more important.”

John Elkington said that, “the future generations are being massively disadvantaged by our current actions and non-actions.” He added that, “we can’t just simply say to younger people that we will educate you so you can help with this. This is a pan-generational issue. We also need to re-educate the older generation” who have the experience, connections and perhaps time to do something about it.

James Higa talked about how the style of leadership has changed in his lifetime, and education needs to reflect this. “Being a CEO or leader is not done anymore within the confines of four walls and at the head of a conference room table. How do you help leaders bring this sense of collaboration and working with outside groups into being?”

He added that the new generation of leaders need to know how to lead in online settings, and have the ability to listen, empathise, persuade and build trust with disparate people. 

For his part, Nitin Nohria, former dean of Harvard Business School, pointed out how business schools are now over 100 years old, so what they need to focus on now also has to change. He said the values of this generation are in the right place, the issue is now for business schools to understand how to arm students with a body of knowledge that can equip them to better translate these values into businesses.  

To conclude the session, Tomo Noda, Professor and Chair of the Board of Trustees at Shizenkan University, reiterated that the aim of the Future of Capitalism is to be “not only a course but a project for social change.”

The next edition of the Future of Capitalism will take place in 2022, with the aim of opening up the course to more participating schools thus increasing its impact. The objective is to convert the course into a platform where around 300 students from 30 schools can join for the 2024 edition. 

Photo caption: Paul Polman, Nitin Nohria, Franz Heukamp and John Elkington (clockwise from top) spoke during the closing session of The Future of Capitalism MBA course.