Faculty, key staff and courses

• Philip Anderson has been named Academic Director of the INSEAD Abu Dhabi Centre.

• Claudia Zeisberger and Bill Magill have started teaching the Private Equity course in Singapore and Fontainebleau respectively.

• Rolfe Swinton (’04J) has started teaching the New Business Ventures course.

• Peer Kølendorf  (’78J) and Raomal Perera will be teaching Business Plan Workshop in Fontainebleau.  The course, on both campuses, has now been split into two halves, the first half covering Business Planning, and the second half covering Effective Fundraising.

• Dominique Trempont (‘79J) from the Silicon Valley just started teaching “From Start-up to Fortune 500” in Singapore.

We have two major course changes in the entrepreneurship MBA electives offering:

• Managing Corporate Turnarounds Successfully:

Claudia Zeisberger will teach this brand new course with research support from Phil Anderson.  The course introduces students to the challenges of managing critical turnaround situations in corporations globally.  To consistently preserve shareholder value throughout the ups and downs of the business cycle, it is vital to understand the requirements of a concise turnaround plan and the steps involved to execute it successfully and in a timely manner.  The course builds on the earlier classes in the MBA programme, is a natural follow on to courses in Entrepreneurship and Private Equity.

• Entrepreneurial Leadership:

Randy Carlock has recently revamped this course to address the challenge faced by every executive – how to maintain entrepreneurial values while organising professionally, thinking strategically, maintaining controls and demanding accountability.  This course is now a series of experiential learning activities based on three assumptions: 1) entrepreneurial leadership is a competitive advantage in 21st Century organisations, 2) there are teachable entrepreneurial leadership behaviours, and 3) people can learn to be more entrepreneurial in their thinking and behaviours.  The course helps build an understanding and appreciation of how entrepreneurial leadership can influence individual performance and improves the organisation’s climate for innovation and value creation.  The new version of the course was first taught in the summer of 2008 and its success now led to its introduction to the EMBAs.

Other news:

• Chris Zott, Professor of Entrepreneurship, is currently on a leave of absence.

• Hennie Escoffier, who has been with INSEAD for over twenty years and with the entrepreneurship area from its inception, has now left INSEAD.   She will be missed by many of us.  We warmly welcome Roisin Kelly to the department as the new Faculty Area Administrative Manager.

Requests from faculty

• Examples:  Professor Henrich Greve is looking for performance feedback vignettes for teaching purposes and possibly also for a popular article.

A performance feedback vignette would be a set of events along the following lines:
Low performance (on a goal the firm cares about) - > some sort of radical change - > outcome; either improvement or disaster.

Any recent and new examples would be much appreciated.  If you have one, please contact Henrich at henrich.greve@insead.edu.

• Corporate entrepreneurship: Are you interested in having a team of INSEAD MBAs analyze a new business initiative for your company? In the Corporate Entrepreneurship course taught by Professor Michelle Rogan, MBAs analyze a new business initiative inside a company during the 8-week course.  Read more here.

• Private equity: Private equity professors Claudia Zeisberger and Bill Magill will be teaching the course again in the March/April period.  They both leveraged the extensive list of INSEAD alumni in this industry to support their respective classes in the previous Fall period and are looking to do the same this Spring.  Opportunities for alumni involvement range from sponsoring a special project that student teams develop to address current industry issues, to speaking engagements in the classroom.  If you are interested in participating please contact Claudia at claudia.zeisberger@insead.edu or Bill at bill.magill@insead.edu.

Papers and conferences

• Professor Randel S. Carlock, Ph.D., Berghmans Lhoist Chaired Professor in Entrepreneurial Leadership and a Director of the Wendel International Centre for Family Enterprise wanted to share with you a recent article he has published on “Cheers to French Entrepreneurs”.  You can find a copy here.

• Professor Bill Magill participated in two events at the Photonics Conference in Bordeaux.  This is a European investment conference sponsored by France’s CEA.  Bill took part in a VC panel on investment in the photonics industry (other participants included R Capital, Sofinnova, and EarlyBird) and made a keynote speech on the “Outlook for IPOs and M&A in the Photonics Industry”.

The conference hosted a mix of European entrepreneurs, agencies and venture investors active in photonics markets: lighting, solar, life sciences, displays, and the like. Investors were advising caution to entrepreneurs, specifically to fundraising expectations, capital needs, cash burn, market outlook, and time to exit. That being said, all were continuing to look for great ideas in this downturn and recognized that many great companies have been founded during the bottom of weak markets. Fortunately, plenty of remarkable Bordeaux wines were served during the gala dinner (at Château Pape Clément) to soften the gloom hanging over the investment forum.