IESE Faculty: Prof. Juan Roure

15 partners (mainly national business support agencies) from 12 European countries joined their efforts in GO-SME project. Throughout the EU, the fragmentation of innovation ecosystems and the lack of interconnection between public national and regional agencies appear to be one of the main obstacles to securing support for the most promising SMEs. The GO-SME project responds to the need to provide financial support to SMEs and start-ups for the development of their innovative ideas. The aim of GO-SME is to share the best practices of participating research funding organisations (RFOs) and their mutual learning in designing programmes which would support SMEs and start-ups in an initial assessment of their innovative ideas so that they can progress to more advanced stages of innovation development. To achieve this aim, a combination of the following activities will be used: 1/learning from best practices already applied in support schemes for innovative SMEs and startups, 2/motivation of agencies from widening countries to design innovation support schemes for SMEs and start-ups, 3/cooperation in the setting up of comparable support schemes and sets of selection criteria, 4/sharing of best practices in the work with (international) experts and sharing of their pools 5/learning from best practices in providing coaching and mentoring services to innovative SMEs and start-ups 6/mutual opening up pools of coaches and mentors 7/offering of special services to running projects which will be selected as the most promising by an independent international panel. The added value of the project rests in its ambition to design national and regional programmes supporting innovative SMEs which could act as a pipeline for the EIC Accelerator and be part of the “plug-in” mechanism. At the same time, it can serve as a pilot project for a possible partnership co-funded from innovation ecosystems in the Horizon Europe programme.

IESE Faculty: Prof. Diego Aparicio

Will there exist price convergence in the online marketplaces? Is the economy shifting to a form of uniform pricing (each user observes the same price) or to a form of personalized pricing (discounts or prices are specific to groups of consumers)? From a managerial standpoint: What are companies’ optimal pricing strategies? What are the optimal frequencies of price changes? What is the optimal personalization? From the consumer standpoint: What are the behavioral reactions? What are the fairness concerns to those strategies? The research supported by this grant will allow to address these questions. The research lies in the intersection of pricing and big data using data from two main sources: data collected from online marketplaces; and data obtained from field experiments in partnerships with leading European retailers. The study of pricing and big data are core priorities for government agencies in Europe and the United States. For instance, big data is one of the five priorities under the “Digitizing European Industry” initiative and of Horizon 2020. The research will extract concrete implications. For academics, the development of advanced pricing optimization. For managers, the implementation of pricing algorithms in collaboration with academics that incorporates consumers’ concerns. And for policymakers, the understanding and thereby design of policies that regulate and increase price transparency, in a world where the barriers to using personalized data are increasingly complex.

“This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 892142”.

IESE Faculty: Prof. Xavier Vives

The project intends to study the effect of the ownership structure of firms on competition in product markets, innovation, and aggregate outcomes, and derive welfare and policy implications. The rise of institutional investment, with the profound changes in the asset management industry in recent decades, has implied important variations in the ownership structure of firms. Among them, there has been a formidable increase in common ownership of firms in the same industry, which has raised antitrust concerns, mostly in the US but also in the EU. At the same time, a lack of dynamism in terms of entry and exit, investment and innovation, linked to potential secular stagnation of advanced economies, has been perceived, and blamed on the rise of market power. The proposed research will develop mostly theoretical models to study the effects of changes in the investment industry and firms’ ownership patterns on product markets and the general equilibrium macroeconomic consequences. The proposal consists of five strands. The first three purport to study the effect of changes of the market structure of the investment industry and ownership structure of firms on: i) market power in product markets; ii) investment and innovation incentives in the presence of technological spillovers among firms; and iii) aggregate output, investment, labour supply and income distribution. The fourth strand aims to develop empirical assessments of the developed theory. The final strand of the proposal will derive the antitrust and regulatory implications of the results. Particular attention will be devoted to the impact of changes in the network of control rights and cash flow rights of firms’ owners. The novelty of the approach lies in the integration of the perspectives and tools of industrial organization, corporate finance, and network theory to provide a global view of the relationship between ownership structure, competition and innovation.

“This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No 789013)”.

IESE Faculty: Prof. Julia Prats

The STARTED project will put in place a project-based learning approach for developing entrepreneurial skills (and spirit) in researchers, to foster interactions between stakeholders in R&D innovation, and to guide the transfer of innovative projects through to startups.

This project will enable the setting up of a European Research-to-Startup Centre (ERSC) supported by a shared web-platform centralising ad hoc learning and training contents/tools/guidelines to create/help future entrepreneurs, with dedicated modules to promote interactions with R&D organisations, technical centres or business angels (ResearchInno database and forum). The scope of dissemination in this project is wide-reaching considering the imperative of national R&D bodies and the support of European startup organisations.

The main benefits for European society are: the creation of durable bridges between research organisations and startup ecosystem stakeholders, development of entrepreneurial skills through guided self-learning, increasing student employability by IDEs (innovation-driven enterprises), and improvement of innovation transfer to businesses in a variety of sectors in search of competitiveness enhancement (agriculture, tourism, fitness, etc.).

IESE Faculty: Prof. Julia Prats

InvestHorizon is a programme financed by the European Commission, in association with Eureka, to facilitate series A funding for selected deep tech companies boosting their investment readiness and investor relations.

The commission aim to offer support to innovative high-growth potential SMEs from EU Member States, Associated countries to Horizon 2020 and Eureka member countries, partner countries or Associated countries to Eureka, to improve their access to finance. The Contractor will provide investment readiness services, which aim to help and prepare innovative high-growth potential SMEs to become investment ready. The services will be customized for each SME according to the specific needs identified within the frame of the services described in the tender specifications.

IESE Faculty: Prof. Sampsa Samila

While gender and ethnic diversity have increased in the workforce, the evidence is much less clear on whether there has been an increase in gender and ethnic integration, i.e., people actually working together across gender and ethnic lines. This project will analyse large databases (1) to assess trends in gender and ethnic integration in science, innovation, and entrepreneurship, (2) to understand the causes and consequences of gender and ethnic integration as well as potential barriers, and (3) to improve the methodology in the study of gender and ethnic integration and to develop indices that could be used to track changes. The project is specifically focused on European data and will consider issues related to differences in the level of integration within as well as between countries. Furthermore, the project will be able to analyze integration at multiple levels including team, organization, city, and field. The project will use large databases including PATSTAT, Microsoft Academic Graph, and government registry data, combined with name-matching algorithms to estimate the gender and ethnicity of the scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs. The results of the project are highly relevant for scholars studying innovation, entrepreneurship, social inclusion, social structure, and inequality. The results will also be translated into insights for managers to help them understand and possibly integration in their organizations, yielding greater creativity and innovativeness. Furthermore, the results are of interest to policy makers as increasing gender and ethnic integration within Europe would help European competitiveness as well as the cohesion of European societies.

“This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 799330”.

IESE Faculty: Prof. Julia Prats

The overall objective of the “TechCapMarkets” project is to enable an increase in the supply of alternative finance for innovative SMEs, and in particular equity finance, by improving the exit opportunities for shareholders in private innovative SMEs. The project will also cover the use of the capital markets to diversify and increase the supply of alternative finance to innovative SMEs via venture capital funds. The project deliberately focuses on this specific component of the alternative finance ecosystem.

The project will form Expert Working Groups (EWGs), composed of market practitioners, and guided by a high-level advisory group (HLAG), that will conduct consultations around specific topics related to the use of public and private markets as an exit option for alternative financiers and their use as a source of alternative finance. Given the early and emerging nature of some of these areas, e.g. secondary trading markets for shares in private SMEs, it is highly important to bring to the wider alternative finance ecosystem all the latest and cutting edge experience of market experts.

IESE Faculty: Prof. Juan Roure, Juan Luis Segurado and Amparo de San José

Promising ICT project results obtained in the course of H2020/FP7/CIP programmes are expected to lead to innovative solutions in fields like Energy, Life Sciences, Health, Ambient Intelligence, Transport, Industry 4.0, SmartCities, etc. However, most of results are early stage disruptive innovations from technology and/or applications point of view. If their potential economic impact is attractive, they face challenges before reaching any commercial exploitation and require specialised support. IRSUS will bridge the gaps faced by innovators (research teams, SMEs, spinoffs & startups) to reach the market with a feasible, viable and attractive business case and strategy for users, clients, partners and investors. IRSUS will create value to support innovators through the road to market.170 promising ICT innovations coming from research projects and detected by the Innovation Radar methodology by the EC will directly benefit from IRSUS activities, to successfully drive their way to markets and to reach commercial exploitation. IRSUS consortium will: 1 Introduce business-related elements into the core of the innovators 2 Provide them with training, partnering and individual/group business support services (mentoring, private&public funding, support to licensing, etc). Services will be strengthen with external specialised actors, e.g. business coaches or corporate funds. Ready for investment innovators will be introduced to our Advisory Board of Investors. 3 Connect innovators with already existing public & private initiatives to maximize the quality and quantity of delivered services. 4 Raise awareness on innovations to make an impact on the whole European R&I ecosystem. The complementary consortium partners include expertise in value creation of R&I results, business & entrepreneurship, EU projects & funding sources and cover the whole EU geography (ZABALA and IESE Business School in Spain; innomine in Hungary, DOCOMO Digital in Italy; etVenture Startup Hub in Germany).

IESE Faculty: Prof. Juan Roure, Juan Luis Segurado, Amparo de San José

Abstract: The overall concept of the project consist of supporting innovation in SMEs and fostering the smart reindustrialization of Europe by enabling the emergence of new cross-border and cross-sectoral value chains resulting from the translation of advanced technologies among selected sectors with strong synergies. These new value chains will be created from the interaction of the following sectors: aerospace,agro-food sector, Health & medical devices and ICT.

The project will take of 36Months. The development of the new value chains will be facilitated setting up geographical poles of activitiy in different regions across ES, PT,NL, IL and PL, comprising: Cluster/ SME intermediaries, which help create an appropriate innovation ecosystems;RTD centres. which are able to assess the potential and viability of the proposed new value chains for SMEs innovative services or products. Besides, a third kind of entity, theinnovation facilitatorswill operate at a cross-cluster level, organizing funding rounds to complement with private funds EU public support and establishing networks for collaboration. More than 50 letters of support signed by different type of stakeholders.

ACTTiVAte will undertake 2 kind of activities to optimize the benefits to SMEs: a) Direct funding of SMEs innovative projects. Competitive calls will be launched in the proposed technology areas.Thewining projects (30) will receive an amount of up to 50.000€ each from a total of a 1,5M€ from the project budget. The selection criteria will consider both the technical feasibility and viability and the socioeconomic impact. Investment rounds will be organized to raise private funding to multiply the effect of public investment. b) Activities aimed at creating a favourable environment for the innovation in SMEs, such as brockerage events, mentoring, coaching, mobility and exchange programs among other initiatives. The demonstration of the project at large scale will also be carried out during the project.

IESE Faculty: Prof. Joan Enric Ricart and Prof. Pascual Berrone.

Partner institutions: Stockholms stad, Stadt Köln, Institut Municipal d’Informàtica de Barcelona, ICLEI European Secretariat GmbH, Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (KTH), Stadt Graz, Municipiul Suceava, Authority for Transport in Malta, Câmara Municipal do Porto, Cork City Council, Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe (REC), Envac AB, Dalkia Sverige AB, Fortum Power and Heat AB, Carrier Transport AB, Skanska Sverige AB, Info24 AB, Insero E-Mobility AS (IEM), RheinEnergie (RE), ampido GmbH, STATTAUTO Köln Gesellschaft für Car Sharing mbH, AGT Group (R&D) GmbH, Deutsche Wohnungsgesellschaft mbH (DEWOG), Endesa SA, RETEVISION I, S.A., Anteverti Consulting SL, Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC), Centre d’Innovació del Transport (CENIT), Gas Natural SDG, S.L., Fundació Privada I2CAT, Institut de Recerca en Energia de Catalunya (IREC), Philips GmbH, Schneider Electric Industries SAS, UrbisUp Consulting SL, Promoting Operational Links with Integrated Services (POLIS), IBM Svenska AB.

GrowSmarter aims to improve the quality of life for European citizens by better mobility, housing and the quality of urban infrastructure while improving the citizens economy by lower energy costs and creating as much as 1500 new jobs (on the demonstration level); to reduce the environmental impact by lower energy needs by 60 % and increased use of renewable energy thus reducing GHG emissions even more; and to create sustainable economic development by demonstrating and preparing a wider rollout of smart solutions.

GrowSmarter will demonstrate at 3 lighthouse cities 12 smart, integrated solutions as a way of preparing for a wider market rollout. These solutions are integrated in specially chosen sites making demonstration easy to reach and take part of for the 5 follower cities and other European and international study groups. All the smart solutions are fit into the Lighthouse-cities strategic development plans and the follower cities replication plans.

The solutions solve common urban challenges such as renewal of existing buildings (GrowSmarter demonstrates the cost efficient renewal of 100.000 square meters of Nearly Zero or low energy districts reducing energy demand by 70-90%), integrated infrastructures for ICT, street lighting, smart grids district heating and smarter waste handling or sustainable urban mobility for both passenger and gods integrated in smart grids, biofuels from household waste thus reducing local air quality emissions by 60%.

The integration of Cities, strong group of industrial partners together and quality research organisations guarantee that the solutions will be both validated by independent research organisations and transformed into Smart Business Solutions by industry for the wider rollout to Europe.

Growsmarter builds on integrated, close to the market solutions, to form business models for their wider deployment by the industrial partners. The project will help Europe GrowSmarter!

IESE Faculty: Prof. Jaume Ribera and Magda Rosenmöller, Center for Research in Healthcare Innovation Management (CHRIM)

Partner institutions: Instituto de Medicina Molecular da Universidade de Lisboa, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Technopage SA, CEAMED SA, ProteoDesign SL, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, University of Queensland, Stanford University, Instituto Ciência Hoje (ICH).

INPACT aims at the pre-clinical development of innovative drugs and drug formulations against selected cancers (e.g. prostate cancer) and pathogenic bacteria (e.g. S. aureus). The INPACT consortium allies the expertise of both academic and industrial R&D partners that contribute with their own unique technologies to achieve new drugs that are only possible to develop in an integrative effort. Academic partners have unique knowledge and technologies on supercharged viral proteins-derived cell-penetrating peptides (eg from Dengue virus) and ultra-resistant cyclic peptides that may be transferred to the industrial partners, which in turn have specialized proprietary technologies on anticancer and/or peptide drugs’ technologies. The judicious exchange of knowledge among partners will lead to new resistant peptides for trans-barrier delivery of drugs (eg cyclic peptide-drug chimeras) and bacterial killing (both planktonic and biofilms). INPACT includes four leading academic partners (from Portugal, Spain, Australia, and Brazil) and three consolidated biotech SMEs (one from Portugal and two Spain).

In addition to the R&D project itself, INPACT involves at the highest possible level a top business school in Europe (IESE, Barcelona, Spain), a consolidated media partner specialised in science communication (Ciencia Hoje, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and experts in international science funding from one of the top US universities (University of Stanford). The consortium will be the perfect environment for young researchers to acquire knowledge and skills in science, technology, entrepreneurship, business, and communication so they can pro-actively tailor their career path in a life-long learning perspective. This is a contribution towards the advancement of Europe through the use of research and education for societal development and economic growth.

IESE Faculty: Prof. Jaume Ribera and Magda Rosenmöller, Center for Research in Healthcare Innovation Management (CHRIM)

EIT Health is one of the most recent Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs) of the EIT (European Institute for Innovation & Technology). Its goal is to improve the sustainability of healthcare systems, promote healthy living and active ageing and enhance the overall wellbeing of people across Europe.

EIT Health brings together more than 130 leading organizations (higher education institutions, research labs and companies from key areas of healthcare as well as healthcare providers, public authorities and municipalities) to form dynamic cross-border partnerships that develop innovative products and services, start new companies, and train a new generation of entrepreneurs. EIT Health partners are organized in six co-location centers in UK/Ireland, Scandinavia, Spain, France, Germany/Switzerland and Belgium/Netherlands and also supported by the EIT Health InnoStars regional clusters (from Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Italy, and Wales).

More information >

IESE Faculty: Prof. Nuria Mas, Prof. Alfredo Pastor, Magda Rosenmöller and Prof. Jaume Ribera, Center for Research in Healthcare Innovation Management (CHRIM)

Partner institutions: Ascora GmbH (ASC), Atos Spain SA, Tempos 21 Innovación en Aplicaciones Móviles S.A., Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Asociación de Investigación de la Industria Textil (AITEX), Technische Universität Darmstadt, Stichting Nationaal Ouderenfond, Talkamatic AB, E-SENIORS : initiation des seniors aux TIC, Tie Nederland B.V.

In an optimal society, elderly people will be able to live at their own homes with the possibility to act independently and to actively participate in society. The ALFRED proposal will contribute to this goal by providing a personal and interactive assistant for elderly people. ALFRED will foster independent living and active ageing, integrating interactive services for elderly people and for care-takers. It will prevail age-related physical and cognitive impairments through the effective use of ICT and the better coordination of care processes.

In order to achieve those objectives, the project will create a virtual, interactive assistant for elderly people. This assistant will be realized as a mobile device running on day-to-day Android smartphones allowing a wide impact of the project results. ALFRED will be fully voice-controlled and combine latest scientific research results from mobile development, data management, context aware services, speech recognition and personal data management, combined with activities from behavioural and social science.

In one sentence: ALFRED will realize a mobile, personalized Butler for elderly people helping them to stay independent, to coordinate with caregivers and to foster the active participation in society. ALFRED will be fully voice controlled and could – from a user perspective – also be described as “Siri for supporting elderly people” but with an open and extendable app background and with a clear and precise focus on improving the life of elderly people. Developers will be able to contribute new “Health Apps” to ALFRED extending the platform and generating new added value.

IESE Faculty: Prof. Miguel Antón

Partner institutions: Individual

The information in banks’ balance sheet has long been neglected in important areas of Macroeconomics and Finance. The latest financial crisis has shown however that banks’ balance sheet positions provide essential information to understand bank dynamics, systemic risk, the monetary policy transmission mechanism as well as their market valuation. While these are all important topics, they are typically treated separately in the banking-macro-finance literature. The aim of this project is to draw on the wealth of information present in commercial bank and bank holding companies balance sheets in order to shed light on their empirical implications for these key macro-finance developments. We will also examine the role that banking capital regulation plays on their market valuations at the micro level as well as on the transmission of monetary policy to the real economy.

IESE Faculty: Prof. Gaizka Ormazabal

Partner institutions: Individual

The purpose of this project is to follow up with a line of research on the role of corporate governance I started at Stanford University during my PhD at the Graduate School of Business. With the support of the Rock Center for Corporate Governance, I have explored different aspects of corporate governance and their regulatory implications. In papers coauthored with leading researchers from Stanford, Wharton and Harvard, I am exploring several aspects of the potential role of corporate governance on the financial crisis such as the role of corporate boards on risk oversight, the role of credit rating agencies and executive risk-taking incentives in the securitization process, insider trading activity around the financial crisis, the market reaction to corporate governance regulation, and the role of proxy advisory firms in stock option exchanges. Some of this work has been published or is under review at top-tier economics journals. There is still much to learn about whether the financial crisis could have been avoided or mitigated by appropriate incentives and monitoring mechanisms, and about which corporate governance practices affect outcomes important to investors. In conjunction with my American colleagues, I will keep exploring the multidimensional nature of corporate governance and financial regulation and hopefully will also keep publishing papers at leading scientific journals in the areas of Finance and Accounting. This research project is also an opportunity to strengthen the cooperation between European and American business schools in a joint effort to better understand the causes and consequences of the recent financial upheaval.

IESE Faculty: Prof. Morten Olsen

Partner institutions: Individual

Over the last 10 years the use of Special Trade Preferences – the granting of lower import tariffs to specific countries – has increasingly been used as a tool to encourage development in developing countries, primarily in Africa. Yet, despite the popularity of these tools – practically all sub-Saharan countries receive some form of special trade preferences – we have little understanding of how well they work, both in terms of transferring wealth and encouraging growth. On what basis should they be evaluated? How should they be designed to be the most effective? Can they be superior to alternatives of traditional foreign aid? We seek to answer these questions in three ways. First, we develop a theoretical model that specifically allows for varying types of export goods, in particular in the use of labor and (potentially imported) inputs as requirements on the use of imported intermediated inputs is an important feature of special trade preferences. Second we use two changes in trade policy – the removal of tariffs on fabric for a number of African Countries with the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) of 2000 as well as the expiration of fabric quotas primarily for Asian competitors in 2004 – to test the predictions of the model. To test the data we will use a highly disaggregated data set containing information on volume, type of imports and price, of imports into the US from a large set of exporters. Third we design a theoretical model that allows for growth enhancing effects of policy and study optimal policy in this context. Preliminary theoretical results indicate that the current design of AGOA – with no requirements on third party inputs – encourages the production of products with a large imported share of fabric and the removal on quotas for Asian competitors in 2004 pushed African exports into cheaper exports. Both of these results find preliminary support in the data.

IESE Faculty: Prof. Massimo Maoret

Partner institutions: Individual

Organisational socialisation, or how we “acquire the social knowledge and skills necessary to assume an organisational role”, is now more relevant than ever due to current socio-economic trends that have repercussions on individuals, organisations and the overall society. The 2008 Great Recession put the cost-structures of EU organisations under great stress, and failure in newcomer socialisation hinders organisations and firms due to the inability of incoming talent to perform at high levels, and to the costs associated with turnover and additional recruitment. My first objective is thus to evaluate the effectiveness of socialisation tactics in different industries and job tasks. Second, in the flat, interdependent organisations that characterise the current workplace, networks are critical in determining success. Thus, I will evaluate the development of newcomer social networks and their relationship to their performance. Results will allow workers to self-access their career and socialisation trajectory through a tool based on my scientific findings, in order to achieve higher individual performance, job satisfaction and well-being. Third, employees now transition into organisations that are highly diverse due to the increasing cross-country mobility and immigration in the EU. It then becomes relevant to evaluate the impact of demographic differences between newcomers, supervisors and colleagues on socialisation effectiveness. Socialising diverse newcomers more efficiently will foster organisational performance and prevent social discrimination by ensuring a smooth integration of individuals of different cultural origins into the workplace. To attain my research objectives I will test a new theoretical framework using statistical estimation methods on two separate large longitudinal datasets, based on survey data from the Apprentissage of French Master Grande Ecole students and archival data on the performance of professional basketball players (1985-2012).

IESE Faculty: Prof. Juan Roure, Prof. Julia Prats, Juan Luis Segurado and Amparo de San José

WA4E is an ambitious programme contributing to increase the number of Women Business Angels (WBAs) Europe, and to facilitate the funding of Women Entrepreneurs (WEs) by Business Angels in 6 target Countries (France, UK, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Portugal). WA4E builds on the deep experience of the partners that represent 4 Business Angels networks (Angel Academe, Be Angels, Femme Business Angels, IESE business angels network) of which one is completely composed by WBAs, 2 BA federations (UKBAA, IBAN) and 1 non- for- profit association of women entrepreneurs. The Consortium is led by BAE which is the European association grouping the most developed BA federations in Europe and representing 90% of the total European angel financing market. WA4E expects to mobilise more than €2,5mln as investments made by WBAs through the organisation of 42 pitching events and to increase the number of WBAs by 10% in the target Countries through the implementation of a dedicated training and mentoring programme. Such programme will be tailored for women on the basis of a deep research action (surveys and interviews) aimed at better understanding needs and constraints hampering participation of women to angel investing activities. WA4E will deliver also specific training sessions to WEs to better prepare them to meet investors expectations and to improve presentation capacities to access angel financing. Finally WA4E will implement communication, dissemination and networking activities for WBAa and WEs to facilitate their collaboration and exchange of best practices and investment opportunities. This will be done through the interaction with the WEGate platform and the use of a social media strategy.

IESE Faculty: Prof. Fabrizio Ferraro and Prof. Heinrich Liechtenstein

In recent years a growing number of investors has been seeking opportunities for financial investments that produce social or environmental benefits.As the phenomenon of investing in private enterprises that aim to contribute to solving social and environmental problems has been growing, impact investing has emerged as “an investment approach that intentionally seeks to create both financial return and positive social or environmental impact that is actively measured” (World Economic Forum, 2013: 7).

While the rapid growth of the field of impact investing has soon been accompanied by the question about how to measure and assess impact, a more fundamental question about how impact investing firms define impact and attempt to incorporate considerations of impact into the overall investment decision-making has not been exhaustively addressed yet.

The Study: In order to advance our understanding on how impact is defined by impact investors and on how firms actually attend to the tension between social and business goals, the study aims to explore the process of impact integration by analyzing its nature, dynamics and mechanisms. In particular, by studying experienced impact investing firms, and by observing this process at different levels (venture firm, fund, portfolio firm), we aim to:

• analyze how impact-focused investors formulate impact objectives in their investment process, monitor the achievement of these objectives, and manage the investments made in terms of impact;
• analyze how impact investors cope with the often conflicting demands they face from their multiple stakeholders and explore the governance, organization and tools they deploy to cope with the complexity;
• understand how impact and financial aspects are connected and identify the elements that relax or stress the tension between diverse objectives.

IESE Faculty: Prof. Antonio Dávila, Mathieu Carenzo and Kandarp Harsiddh Mehta, Entrepreneurship Innovation Center (EIC)

Partner institutions: META Group, Semmelweis, GEA, IESE

Creativity and innovation are the main pillars of the nowadays knowledge based economy, being one of the key elements for personal, social and economic development. As stated by the Commission “Creativity and innovation contribute to economic prosperity as well as to social and individual wellbeing.”

Promote such skills and attitude is of crucial importance for Europe, and education and training should be the elective vehicle for instilling in young and adult learners such attitudes as well as the skills to manage the innovation process or to look at traditional businesses with innovative and creative approaches.

The scope of the proposal is therefore to improve the quality of the existing vocational training offer in Hungary Slovenia and Italy by transferring and adapting to regional contexts, an existing and tested training programme for Creativity and Innovation developed by the IESE Business School.

Partner institutions: IESE (Coordinator); Clusterland Oberösterreich GmbH; VDI/VDE Innovation + Technik GmbH; MFG Innovation Agency for ICT and Media (Baden-Wurttemberg), Association Club des Districts Industriels Français; Baltic Innovation Agency; CROATIAN EMPLOYERS’ ASSOCIATION; ecoplus. The Business Agency of Lower Austria Ltd.; CONFEDERATION OF HUNGARIAN EMPLOYERS AND INDUSTRIALISTS; Innovasjon Norge, ACC10, Suddansk Universitet, Europa InterClusters, Generalitat de Catalunya

Cluster-Excellence.eu puts together the most experienced persons and organisations in Europe to identify and set up a meaningful set of quality indicators and peer-assessment procedures for cluster management. The intention is to develop training materials and set up an approach for quality labelling of cluster management, in order to help cluster managers achieve high levels of excellence in their duties and to succeed in the peer-assessments. Cluster-Excellence.eu will then create and act as a club of professionals and institutions, to promote cluster management excellence, and diffuse the adoption of the Quality Label among its members.

IESE Faculty: Prof. Antonio Dávila and Mathieu Carenzo, Entrepreneurship Innovation Center (EIC)

Partner institutions: Advancis, Leaders2B, Danmar Computers, RSM

REDIVE is a Life Long Learning Program Leonardo project that aims ultimately at improving the multi-cultural recruitment processes in EU companies to increase the effectiveness of workforce diversity, by addressing the problems/challenges: Lack of awareness on the incorporation of workforce diversity in corporate strategy, Limited skills and knowledge on culture and diversity by HR and recruitment professionals, Gap in the market with regard to training on culture and workforce diversity.