In partnership with host ESADE Business School and key supporter IESE Business School, EABIS is pleased to announce the world’s largest collaborative Business- Academic conference on corporate responsibility, scheduled to take place on September 20 and 21, 2007, in Barcelona. The 6th EABIS Annual Colloquium will focus on “The Emerging Global Governance Paradigm: The Role of Business and Its Implications for Companies, Stakeholders and Society”. The September event will examine the contributions, commitments and impacts that business can make through governance to address the key issues and challenges of globalisation and sustainable development. To develop as comprehensive a picture as possible, participants will approach this theme within a conceptual framework that incorporates the “macro” level of economies and societies, the “meso” level of industry sectors and regions, and the “micro” level of the individual firm. An anticipated audience of 350 senior executives, academic thought leaders and visionary civil society representatives will therefore gather at ESADE to shape the future agenda for business practice, research and education in these vital areas.

We invite you to note the following dates related to the paper submission procedure:

1. Call for papers will be issued by February 6th
2. Deadline for paper submission: April 30th
3. The Official Colloquium website will be available by March 15th (www.esade.edu/eabis).

For all additional information please do not hesitate to contact the EABIS Team (info@eabis.org).

EABIS was recently invited to play a prominent role in a major conference for Business as an Agent of World Benefit (BAWB) that took place in Cleveland, USA, on October 23-25. The forum brought together 400 top business leaders and educators, such as Patrick Cescau, Global CEO of Unilever, C.K. Prahalad from the University of Michigan and Bertrand Collomb, Chairman of Lafarge, plus another 1000 participants in a virtual forum, to discuss how academic institutions can advance the 10 global principles of the UN Global Compact in the form of responsible business education.

Subsequent to the conference, a November 6 article in the Financial Times listed EABIS as one of the principle advisory organisations to the UNGC as a framework to manage this process is shaped for an international launch in 2007. In doing so, we stand alongside renowned major bodies such as EFMD, AACSB, the Academy of Management and Harvard University’s Social Enterprise Knowledge Network, which is an exceptional development for the network and testament to the rigor and value of the work we are collectively undertaking.

At the conference itself, EABIS was asked to contribute a leading European perspective on the latest developments and existing challenges surrounding the interface of business, academia and society on corporate responsibility issues. Gilbert Lenssen, EABIS’ President, was asked to join the Conference Advisory Panel, and André van Heemstra, Vice-Chair of the Supervisory Board, featured prominently in various high-level workshops – platforms from which he was able to highlight the remarkable progress that has been made by EABIS and in Europe overall in the past couple of years. The Forum also enabled André to explain EABIS purpose, mission and activities to many high-level listeners, not least our guiding principles of Mainstreaming and Relevance that shape all of our activities.

To date materials and presentations from the conference have not been made available to the public, but anyone seeking more background information on the Forum can click here.

European Knowledge & Learning Networks – Grant Scheme for Members

If you have an interesting idea or theme for an international research project, EABIS can support you. Download further details here

The purpose of the Grant Scheme for Internal Networking is to encourage exploration of external funding opportunities on selected themes and topics of interest to EABIS and its members.

Concretely this means providing funds for EABIS members (researchers, practitioners and/or representatives of other stakeholders) to travel from around Europe to meet in person and discuss potential research initiatives with a view to developing them into future proposals. Applications are received on a year-round basis (EABIS members only) and reviews and approval are carried out on an ongoing basis.

In the third quarter of 2006 one grant has been awarded (CR and Clusters of Innovation, led by Nigel Roome of Solvay Business School) in addition to the previous 3 already having been awarded in 2006. Successful applications get eligible costs reimbursed up to a maximum per person engaged in the Knowledge Network.

These networks are supported by EABIS Corporate Funded Research, Education and Training Programme (Category C).  EABIS would like to thank IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Shell and Unilever for their generous support with this initiative.

For more information, please call +32 2 541 16 26, or e-mail Bart Neerscholten, EABIS Research Manager on bart.neerscholten@eabis.org.

This EABIS co-funded project, analysing the management of stakeholder interactions of six major companies in the telecommunications and financial service sectors, has most recently finished its final single-case investigation, the Swiss Accident Insurance Fund (Suva). The executive summary of this case will be available later this year for EABIS members. Currently the project team is conducting an intra-industry analysis of the financial services sector similar to the telecommunications industry comparison, which started earlier this year. First insights of this intra-industry comparison in the telecommunications industry were presented at the Annual Conference of the Academy of Management (AoM) in Atlanta 2006 (S. Sachs, E. Rühli, M. Maurer: “Toward a Stakeholder Orientation in Strategic Management”) as well as at the Annual EABIS Colloquium in Milan, September 2006 (I. Kern, S. Sachs, E. Rühli: “How Stakeholder Relations Pay-off by Maintaining the License to Operate: A Comprehensive Case Study of the Swiss Telecommunications Industry”). The final results of our project “Good Practices Stakeholder View” will be presented at our concluding conference in June 2007 and the 6^th EABIS Colloquium, as well as in two books aimed at practitioners (published in 2007) and academics (published in 2008). More information on this upcoming conference, the books and related publications will be made available to you soon. Please visit our project on the EABIS Intranet“Good Practices Stakeholder View” Project. For further news and project-related publications and activities of the Center for Strategic Management: Stakeholder View of the University of Applied Sciences in Business Administration, Zurich (HWZ) or contact veronika.mittnacht@fhhwz.ch

London Business School has begun Year Two of the three year EABIS Corporate Funded Project on curriculum development in the areas of Ethics, Corporate Responsibility and Business and Society. The purpose of the project is to develop degree and executive programme designs and teaching materials that will assist the process of mainstreaming CR. The project in particular focuses on the development of mainstream materials that can be used not only in core ethics and CR courses but also in core courses across all management disciplines. The focus of Year One has been effective case-writing and case-teaching, including a review of existing cases and the development of up to ten new cases by the end of 2006. The project started with a Call to tender, which brought in 26 submissions from Schools across Europe. Following a rigorous selection process, six cases were selected for funding and a further two or three are also to be developed with founding partners Unilever, IBM, Microsoft, Shell and IMD. All will be profiled at the EABIS Colloquium in 2007. The cases confirmed so far are as follows:

• Hydro Polymers Ltd – Sustainable PVC?(London Business School)
• Waste Concern – Turning a Problem into a Resource (IESE)
• ENEL - CSR and Performance Measurement (SDA Bocconi)
• The Strategic Agreement between IBERDROLA and SEO/BIRD (IESE)
• Corporate Responsible best practices in SMEs: The Case of Illycaffe (SDA Bocconi)
• Innocent: Values and Value (BITC and London Business School)
• Unilever, Oxfam and the Role of International Business in Poverty Reduction (London Business School and Unilever)
• Aging Population In The Knowledge Society (Microsoft and INSEAD)

You can download the executive summary of the project here

EABIS members can visit the project space of this project on the EABIS Intranet where you can download project deliverables and read the full description of these cases. If you are not a member yet of this project space, click here (Curriculum Development) to join (following approval of your request to join, you can click on link above). Alternatively contact Gay Haskins at London Business School: ghaskins@london.edu

How to deliver value from best practice in managing relationships with stakeholders: Cranfield-Zurich doctoral seminar, 12-13 December 2006
A two-day workshop was hosted at Cranfield University, bringing together doctoral researchers working with Dr Lance Moir at Cranfield and with Professors Sybille Sachs and Edwin Ruhli at HWZ in Zurich. The theme, delivering value from best practice stakeholder management, reflected the main research interests of the two management schools. Work at Cranfield focuses on developing an internal business case for corporate responsiblity (CR) and how value and benefits arising from adopting a CR perspective can be measured. Within this arena, two presentations were given to the seminar. Dr Mike Kennerley, from Cranfield's Business Performance team, gave an overview of business performance measurement and introduced the 'Performance Prism' which takes a stakeholder-centric view of performance measurement. This involves devising measures that take account not only of stakeholder concerns, but can also demonstrate a stakeholder's contribution to the organisation's aims. Following on from this, Dr Moir outlined a framework for overcoming the apparent tension between delivering shareholder value and conducting business responsibly, which draws on the development of stakeholder based key performance indicators.

Meanwhile, the comprehensive research project at HWZ is concerned with understanding a firm's stakeholder orientation, the practices and policies implemented as a result of this orientation and the subsequent impact on company learning and performance. Dr Sachs brought the seminar up-to-date with the current state of the project which has focused on the telecommunications and financial services sector, and presented key propositions the research has found with respect to the strategic stakeholders of organisations in these sectors. The presentations of the current research at Cranfield and Zurich were interspersed with facilitated discussions of the students' research topics. The final discussion sessions on the second day drew out valuable insights, particularly in terms of methodology which were helpful to the development of each research project. It was interesting to note the commonality of issues facing the research teams, particularly with regard to data handling and measurement. There was a shared interest in understanding how a strategic stakeholder-responsive orientation can impact corporate performance, and how this can be demonstrated through effective measurement. To further this interest, the reseach teams are planning to host a workshop for a wider academic audience later in 2007 to discuss this topic at greater length. presentations will be uploaded on the event website shortly: http://www.eabis.org/research/MeasuringCR/value/