Adrian Wooldridge (Management Editor, The Economist), Alexander von Gabain (Chair of the European Institute for Innovation and Technology - EIT  and Santiago Iniguez (President of IE Business School and President of IE University) gave opening statements at the EFMD April Roundtable: Management Skills for Growth. A full report on the roundtable is available here and video highlights are below. Readers are also invited to comment on the EFMD Call To Action “Management Capacity: The Missing Link to set up value creation and innovation in Europe” by mid June 2012.



Three key suggestions concluded from this roundtable are:

• Re-inventing the EU innovation model: The current European innovation strategy design tends to be based on a stable evolutionary model. This approach needs to be changed. The idea of supporting the creation of high-growth companies in Europe is highlighted as an important element. It is also suggested to re-prioritise policy objectives, to avoid trying to achieve everything at the sametime. Too many equivalent priorities lead to no priorities.
  
  
• Developing skills for future leaders: There is a call to develop humanistic managers who are not only expert in management techniques, but also have the capacity to understand and deal with cross-disciplinary and inter-cultural issues.
  
  
• Entrepreneurship: The possibility to exploit knowledge and capital from all entrepreneurs needs to be further addressed. Entrepreneurial mid-sets are required in all types of organisations, small and large, pubic and private.

The Call to Action addresses key issues such as the inclusions of management education in scientific and engineering studies, supporting entrepreneurial mind-sets and values from school-level onwards, and providing community research funding for important fields such as design thinking, open innovation and organisational sociology. This paper is to be used as the essential basis for EFMD EU Affairs’ interactions with the EU policy makers as well as relevant consultation and networking activities in the coming future. You are invited to comment on the EFMD Call to Action, please send your comments and feedback to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Martine Plompen, Associate Director, Research & Surveys Unit, EFMD
Jocelyne Wang, Manager, EU Affairs Unit, EFMD