Start by choosing an open world today

For 200 years, we have trained and educated high-potential leaders and entrepreneurs through teaching and research on the one hand, and support to companies on the other. From this long-term experience, the world’s first Business School which celebrated its Bicentenary in 2019, has drawn three challenges that have to be considered as priorities for business schools.

A world with globalised companies

Far from the promise of a “flat world”, we now operate in a world where globalised companies face very different cultural realities: the political, legal, cultural, and social playing fields of these global companies have remained segmented.

In this context, the ability to know two or three cultures in depth and to have the mindset to discover other cultures throughout one’s life is a distinctive feature of tomorrow’s leaders and entrepreneurs. This is the very mission of ESCP Business School: offering students rotational curricula on 6 different European campuses in Berlin, London, Paris, Madrid, Turin and Warsaw.

The technological revolution

The technological revolution that started more than 20 years ago has disrupted all our activities: trade, information, training. Today, digital is no longer a world apart; the frontier between the real world and the digital world has been abolished.

Responsiveness commands professionals to be able to think and work in project mode rather than in established processes. In this context, interdisciplinarity prevails and everyone must master an expertise while being able to dialogue with other specialists.

At ESCP, the multidisciplinary approach was theorised by our founders – a group of economic scholars and businessmen, including the famous economist Jean-Baptiste Say: lawyers cannot elaborate rules without a solid digital culture; engineers and developers will see their innovative products doomed to failure if the designer and the marketer are not, and so on.

An incessant transformation

Finally, these incessant transformations are only meaningless pictograms if one remains with their nose pressed to a small part of the canvas. The leader must connect information, detect weak signals, embrace a long-term perspective... In short, stand back as if looking at an impressionist full picture.

The three dimensions

ESCP programmes provide tomorrow’s leaders with broad knowledge to help them go beyond the mere technical approach or exclusively economic purpose of a company, providing a solid grasp of the economy, politics, societal, and environmental issues.

These three dimensions — multicultural, multidisciplinary, and humanistic — constitute the historical foundation of the European education. If companies legitimately expect young graduates to be experts as soon as they enter the professional world, it is up to the higher education institutions to plant this seed that will help them evolve quickly and over time.

The world without borders will probably never exist, whether these borders are geographical, cultural, or disciplinary.

It is up to us to train the next leaders who will be able to successfully bridge borders. This is why today, more than ever, an integrated multi-campus Business School is the best answer to global challenges.