Athens (Greece) 29 September 2016: Prof. Danica Purg, President, IEDC, meets Muhtar Kent, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, The Coca-Cola Company, and Erhard Busek, Chairman of Institute for the Danube Region and Central Europe, Austria, to discuss the importance sustainable development in business education.
As the mission of business education institutions must go hand in hand with the needs of business itself, IEDC-Bled School of Management has served as pioneer in developing education of impact for 30 years. Therefore, it was part of the core belief that IEDC has fully integrated the subject of sustainable development across its entire curriculum - since 2008.
However, the biggest step forward was done in 2010, when The Coca-Cola Company invested in The Coca-Cola Chair of Sustainable Development at IEDC. Since its establishment, the chair was active in developing a culture of sustainability in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond via research, teaching and outreach efforts, and had a great impact on theory and practice of sustainable development locally, regionally, and internationally. The Coca-Cola Company’s investment supports applied research, development of unique teaching materials, and creation of breakthrough global projects aimed at developing management professionals ready to address complex social and environmental pressures facing the world today.
Through the Chair, also CEEMAN International Management Teachers Academy (IMTA) is supported. IMTA provides a unique opportunity for young faculty to develop their curricula, course design, teaching materials and particularly teaching skills and methods. IMTA Alumni Association consists of close to 570 graduates (30 of them graduated in the field of sustainable development), representing 160 institutions and 49 countries. One of the recent initiatives of Coca-Cola Chair is also publishing an integrated vocabulary for promoting responsible and sustainable business.
Prof. Mollie Painter-Morland, IEDC Faculty Member and Full Professor at Nottingham Business School and Academic Director of ABIS (The Academy of Business in Society) is holder of Coca-Cola Chair. She has experience in ethics and sustainability function across the world (having worked in Africa, USA, UK and Europe), and has been actively engaged in professionalization efforts of the ethics and compliance profession, as well as in the promotion of sustainability reporting. She has consulted in various countries and published extensively on business ethics, CSR, and sustainability.
“Our contribution and partnership with IEDC encourages students to consider social responsibility and community development activities as strategic imperatives,” says Muhtar Kent, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, The Coca-Cola Company.
On the photo: Mr. Kent, Coca-Cola, Prof. Purg, IEDC, and Dr. Erhard Busek, Chairman of Institute for the Danube Region and Central Europe, Austria, met in Greece, Athens, on September 29. Professor Danica Purg, President of IEDC-Bled School of Management, expressed deep gratitude to The Coca-Cola Company, and praised the enterprise’s commitment to envisioning a new, sustainable future for Central and Eastern Europe and the world at large.