IESE Business School

The Nissan Chair for Corporate Strategy and International Competitiveness has conducted research in the following areas:

1. The process of globalization.  The local origins of international competitiveness.
2. Competitiveness and profitability in the Spanish financial sector.  The impact of information technology in general, and of the Internet in particular, on the financial services sector.
3. Integration in processes of mergers and acquisitions.

Other projects have focused on the analysis of competitiveness by sectors, States, and regions.

Eduard Ballarín, PhD in Business Administration from Harvard University, and Economics from the University of Barcelona, is the current Chair. Among his principal teaching responsibilities include General Management courses in the PADE, PDG and EMBA at IESE’s campus in Madrid. He is also responsible for the modules on Corporate Strategy in different international programs, such as the Global Program for Management Development (GPMD), which IESE offers in collaboration with the University of Michigan, and the Program for the World Bank, which is offered as part of an alliance with Harvard University, Stanford University, and INSEAD.

Ballarín is co-author of the books "Fusiones y Adquisiciones: Un Enfoque Integrador" (“Mergers and Acquisitions: An Integral Focus”) and "Contabilidad para Dirección" (“Accounting for Management”), and of numerous cases on banking issues, such as Banco Popular Español, Bankinter and Banco Santander Central Hispano.

Moreover, he participates in various consulting projects with numerous organizations on topics related to corporate strategy.

The Nissan Chair for Corporate Strategy and International Competitiveness directs the MBA course, The Microeconomics of Competitiveness:  Firms, Clusters, and Economic Development. This program, created by Harvard Business School (HBS) Prof. Michael E. Porter, is offered simultaneously in more than 30 business schools all over the world, by way of a technological platform that connects HBS with the other business schools.

The course explores the causes of competitiveness and economic development from a microeconomic perspective. Like macroeconomic policies, the stability of political and legal systems and investment in human and physical capital create huge potential for competitiveness, and wealth is truly generated at the microeconomic level. The cases discussed demonstrate how the ultimate causes of productivity for a given region or country are the sophistication and productivity of businesses, the strength of clusters and the quality of the business environment in which one competes.

In the 2001-2002 school year, the Chair became, along with the Anselmo Rubiralta Center for Globalization and Strategy, the Spanish member of the Annual Report of The World Economic Forum, Global Competitiveness Report . The study uses two complementary approaches to analyze competitiveness: the perspectives of growth and the macroeconomic conditions of more than 100 countries.