The Tuck School of Business has joined with four business schools from around the world to create a collaborative aimed at examining current business issues that affect society, such as healthcare, corporate management and sustainable development, according to Tuck dean Paul Danos.
Tuck will partner with Ecole Superieure des Sciences Economiques et Commerciales outside of Paris, the University of Mannheim in Germany, Shanghai's Fudan University and Keio Business School in Toyko to form the Council on Business and Society: A Global Alliance of Schools of Management. The Council will hold a series of conferences designed to share educational approaches and provide policy recommendations to government and corporate leaders, according to Danos.
"This is an experiment in bringing the power and influence of five schools in five different parts of the world and concentrating it on one topic for a year and seeing the impacts you can have," Danos said. "This is an experiment in maximizing the impact of the findings both on education and on policies."
The Council is a "new model" for academic conferences that can help improve understanding of business across international borders, Danos said.
"It's a model that truly draws on the strength of multiple schools in multiple locations," Danos said. "I think there's really a need for that because of the companies and our alumni who are working across all these countries and they need to learn how to take a height level view on how to coordinate their efforts vis-a-vis these very important topics."
The first conference will be held in Paris in 2012 and will focus on corporate governance, Danos said. The conference will examine various national corporate practices for selecting and compensating chief executive officers and boards of directors.
To prepare for the conference, members of faculty and students from the five schools will prepare case studies and policy papers about corporate governance, Danos said. At the conference, participants from each school will share their findings with one another for academic enrichment, as well as with policy makers and corporate leaders for policy recommendations.
"We're going to try to develop pathways to policy makers that will be used time after time so that people will know, no matter what position they take on a topic, they'll know how to make their voice heard in government and by regulators," he said.
Future conferences will be held on the other schools' campuses, Danos said. The school hosting the conference will take the lead on that year's issue, according to Danos, adding that the conference on health care might be held at Dartmouth.
"If we we're doing one on health care, I would expect we'd play a major role in it because we have such a depth of knowledge here at Dartmouth and we have programs that are currently running," he said. "If we decide on something like health care, I certainly believe that Dartmouth would be a great place to have it."
Danos said the Council plans to use its variety of national perspectives to enrich its understanding of the global economy and may add business from India and Brazil in order to further represent emerging markets.
"Part of what were trying to is bring these multiple perspectives to these issues and were going to lay out the different approaches that different countries have on these issues and sort out how policy can be influences in all these cultures," Danos said. "The multicultural, multinational part is a big aspect of this."
