Dear business-academic network,
We wish you good health and a fruitful new year 2023.
It seems that these uncertain times are not over, they have rather become even more turbulent and expose many challenges, dilemmas and conflicting solutions. This means that we need each other to better understand our reality and find future directions. We cannot overcome crises independently from one another and collaboration is needed, more than ever.
In this context, international collaboration between academia and corporates – the core business of ABIS – has a crucial role to play. ABIS will increase our efforts to be your catalyst of academic-corporate collaborative action and social innovations to address challenges like carbon neutrality, circular economy, equality and social justice.
The awareness of the need for change is increasing. What is still a problem is to focus on what to change; not to fight symptoms, but to solve the underlying causes. It does not really make sense to solve the symptoms of the carbon footprint of an industry if there is no change of the business model. There is a pressing need to move away from an efficiency and cost-driven business model to a sustainable value-driven model. During the last Colloquium “Business principles for the stakeholder capitalism era” in November 2022, professor Edward Freeman shared his insights on how companies can rethink their business models and be successful in creating both financial and social value.
Such insights spark many practical how questions. How to get where we need to get? How to meet stakeholder interests seemingly at odds? How to transition to more responsible production models? How to implement systemic changes? Getting to new and desired situations requires first to change the way that we think about an old situation or context: what is needed is a paradigm shift.
We count this year again on fruitful academic-corporate collaboration with various stakeholders to make progress in exploring the underlying causes and the “how” questions actively. You can trust our efforts in creating and disseminating knowledge via publications and research projects, in organizing inspiring events and opinion leadership activities, and fostering the professional and institutional development of our members through our foresight tools and workshops, our Mentoring Programme and the ABIS Sustainability Assessment. These are ways in which we contribute to society and how we are proud to serve our members and partners.
We wish you all the best.
Kindest Regards,
Dr. Ivo Matser EMP, Chief Executive Officer
Prof. Baback Yazdani, Chair of the Board of Directors
