Faculty

Many of the 60 Faculty members, representing 23 different nationalities, are recognized world authorities in their fields. They divide their time between teaching, carrying out research and acting as consultants to major companies in many industries. This ensures that they remain firmly on top of the latest developments in managerial practice.

Faculty members draw on their varied experience to create a particularly effective learning environment that is highly conducive to tackling the critical issues facing businesses today.

New knowledge and superior learning material

Our goal is to conduct state-of-the-art research to enhance management knowledge and to create innovative material for the classroom. IMD Faculty members work closely with executives to align their research with real-world business issues. Research at IMD creates value in several ways:

• It is the source of our insights. It keeps our Faculty members in touch with current business issues and enables them to contribute to academic knowledge and management practice.
• Participating in IMD research projects and then receiving the results gives our Learning Network companies direct access to cutting-edge thinking in many important areas.
• Ongoing research ensures that our programs contain new ideas and insights. The majority of the teaching material used at IMD comes from our own research. Teaching material includes case studies, industry notes, exercises, videos and simulations. IMD cases cover companies and industries on all continents.

We have a practical approach to research. We make sure that our participants have the best possible experience at IMD. Learning must be fresh and relevant. Therefore, our research activities are based on four principles:

1. Focus on practical challenges facing companies
2. Creation and continuous updates of learning materials
3. Research efforts led by teaching faculty
4. Iterative approach to research activities and material development

With more than 80 research projects underway at any time, we are constantly updating our programs, keeping them relevant, and bringing innovative material to the classroom.

IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook (WCY)

The WCY is recognized as the worldwide reference on the competitiveness of nations, ranking and analyzing how an economy creates and sustains the competitiveness of enterprises. It has been published since 1989 and compares the competitiveness of 55 national and regional economies on the basis of 323 criteria and provides over 500 pages of key data, including in-depth profiles.

The Forum for Corporate Sustainability Management (CSM)

CSM is IMD’s corporate sustainability research initiative. Corporations participate in the Forum to build a sustainable business advantage through social and environmental strategic action. CSM research topics include multi-stakeholder dialogues and public-private partnerships; sustainability “mega-issues”; challenges and dilemmas for companies, including successes and failures; product responsibility in a global economy; and human rights.

IMD Family Business Research Center

For more than 18 years, IMD has been serving the unique educational needs of family businesses all over the world. The Leading the Family Business program remains the cornerstone of IMD’s programs in the field of family enterprise. Individual family companies may also arrange private programs that focus on specific organizational needs. In 2000, the IMD-Lombard Odier Darier Hentsch Family Business Research Center was established to support IMD’s educational programs and contribute to knowledge in the field by producing case studies, books and articles.

The Evian Group at IMD

Founded in 1995, The Evian Group is an international coalition of corporate, government and opinion leaders, committed to fostering an open, inclusive, equitable and sustainable global market economy in a rules-based multilateral framework. It advocates trade liberalization to achieve growth and sustain the momentum of globalization. The Evian Group believes that international trade and investment have the great potential to unite people through greater mutual understanding and common interest across countries, continents, cultures and generations, rather than dividing them.

Find out more: www.imd.org/research

Introduction

IMD is a pioneer in custom program design and delivery. We collaborate with over 100 leading organizations to co-create developmental experiences that help them improve their performance in real and measurable ways. Our core team of 55 design and delivery experts are world leaders in advising clients on their learning and development strategies, on linking these strategies with the most critical business priorities, on bringing together teams of committed experts to support our clients, and on designing and delivering highly customized interventions. 

Main focus

IMD’s research and program activity focuses on the many dimensions of strategy creation and execution in complex organizations. While each of our clients has a specific set of dimensions to address, most ask us to help them work on a combination of three challenges:

1. Building fundamental capabilities in a particular group of leaders so that they are better able to guide the organization to a successful future
2. Developing a new set of strategic capabilities to help the company execute a new global strategy with agility
3. Overcoming immediate business challenges through business-focused action learning.
4. IMD’s team is expert at diagnosing each of these challenges and in co-creating the right learning process with its clients.

Methodology

When we create programs with our clients, we undertake a process with them that is designed to address their hopes and fears, to align the learning process with their objectives and their existing development work, and to maximize the chances that the learning will have a lasting and sustainable impact on the organization’s leaders and on the organization’s performance. Our co-creation process has five stages:

1. Exploration and Discovery with all program stakeholders to understand the strategic context and program objectives
2. Focusing the program on the learning objectives that matter most to the organization and its leaders
3. Designing the learning experience so that it addresses the right objectives in the right way
4. Delivering the learning process with world-class experts and a strong support team,
5. Sustaining the impact of the learning experience through follow-up and evaluation

Benefits

The benefits that our clients can expect through their partnership with the IMD team include: a resilient learning and development strategy that is aligned with their organization’s business strategy; world-class developmental experiences that help build the leadership capabilities to support their ongoing success and overcome their most critical business challenges; and close interaction with some of the world’s best thought leaders and program designers, who are committed to their success. 

Find out more: www.imd.org/pp

• ARTICLE: Value Architecture: Building an Innovative Organization (published 14 May 2011)
  
• ARTICLE: Using iPads to Go Green (published 01 May 2011)
  
• ARTICLE: 10 Key Steps for Creating an In-house Learning Unit (published 04 April 2011)
  
• ARTICLE: Global Governance Urged During Davos Meeting (published 01 Feb 2011)
  
• ARTICLE: Top Teams and Poor Decisions (published 28 Oct 2010)
  
• ARTICLE: IMD Profs Run Entrepreneur Program for Exploited Women (published 03 Aug 2010)
  
• ARTICLE: 10 Tips on How to Sustain It - the Usain Bolt Way (published 07 Jul 2010)
  
• ARTICLE: IMD Appoints Interim President (published 01 Jul 2010)
  
• ARTICLE: IMD Brings SingTel into the Learning Network (published 20 Mar 2009)
• ARTICLE: Fund Manager Turns to IMD for Innovation Lessons (published 19 Mar 2009)
  
• ARTICLE: CMS Cameron McKenna Links with IMD (published 05 Dec 2008)