Detailed Programme Research Cafés

Does your organisation want to differentiate from competitors? Are you increasingly becoming aware of the sales person’s role in helping you achieving this purpose?. Sales people can serve as a value creator to the customer.  They help the sales organisation deliver superior service to the customers. This way, they create potential barriers for competitors. Additionally, well managed sales people can also be a source of providing innovative ideas to create more customer focused solutions. However, in order to achieve this goal, sales organisations must effectively manage their sales force. In this session we will discuss cutting edge practices used by certain companies to enhance the productivity of their sales force.

During the session Mr Lieven Somers, Global Market Manager (Advanced Wire) at Bekaert, will also share his insights on sales management.

Supply chains have become increasingly complex in today’s global economy. Typically, multiple partners in the supply chain are involved in delivering the final product or service to the end customer.

In this presentation, we talk about how collaboration between partners in the supply chain (i.e. a supplier and a buyer) can improve the supply chain processes and finally the performance of the supply chain.

Furthermore, we show, based on some practical cases, how partners develop integrative collaborative practices and the difficulty of managing these collaborative partnerships.

During the session, Mr Frank Moons, Material Planning & Logistics Manager at Syncreon Automotive, will also share his insights on buyer-supplier partnerships.

In the first part, Mr Xavier Baeten (Manager Vlerick Reward Centre) will present a research tool that measures reward satisfaction and preferences. This measuring instrument was used for the Great Reward Study, in which more than 12.000 people participated. In the second part, he will present the results of this study. The survey questions satisfaction and preferences amongst employees working in the public and the private sector, regarding the total compensation they receive. The scope is thereby broadened to total rewards: including both the financial and non-financial rewards.

Volvo Cars Gent has a long tradition of conducting employee surveys. Mr Jeroen Degrieck (Hr-admin, Compensation & Benefits and Labour Affairs) will explain how Volvo Cars Gent makes use of the employee surveys to get to know and improve their organisation.

Final year students will be busy burning the midnight oil with that much-coveted degree in sight. But what happens after that? They throw themselves onto the job market in good spirits and full of expectation. What are their career plans? And has the crisis affected their expectations? What does this mean for you as an employer? How will you deal with the challenge that these talents confront you with?

This Research Café shares some insights on:

• What is an attractive employment deal for generation Y?
• What you can do to support generation Y in their career needs?
• What you can do to leverage the engagement of generation Y?

During the session Mr Marc Van Hoecke, HR Director at KPMG, will talk about managing Generation Y’s ‘talent engagement’ from day 1 onwards.

Recently, the mainstream media put the blame of the financial crisis on poor risk management practices in the banking and securities markets.

How did global management’s decision making react on both risk-taking and risk-avoiding decisions in the global risk environment?

Change is permanent and everywhere. Companies are investing more and more in emerging markets, extend their supply chains, and more transparency is needed in everything. The risk management function has been transformed in recent years from insurance, compliance and loss avoidance, and has become more of a board-level concern.

We know that it is important to embed ERM best practices from top to floor, and listen to people (bottom up). Next to front-line risk ownership, linkage and governance oversight is also very important.

What can we learn from the reactions to the economic crisis in risk management within global management?

During this research seminar, Mr Christopher Lajtha, owner of Adageo, will also share his insights on Enterprise Risk Management.

Furthermore, he will take a critical look at some of the risk management lessons that we should have learned from last year’s financial market meltdown and the resulting main street fallout.

Successful firms display the capabilities to be ambidextrous, i.e. they are able to both exploit - improving existing lines of business for short term performance - and explore - creating new lines of business for future growth. However, exploitation and exploration require different management approaches, which make it difficult to foster both simultaneously.

Professor Floortje Blindenbach-Driessen, together with researchers Kathrin Resak and Annelies Geerts, have recently completed several studies that investigated how firms can organise for ambidexterity. In this Research Café, we would like to share these findings with you. We will especially address the following topics:

• What is ambidexterity and why is it important for your organisation
• How to organise for ambidexterity 
• Getting the most out of an ambidextrous R&D organisation

The research on ambidexterity is taking place as part of the Innovation Research Platform, Vlerick's initiative to foster interdisciplinary research on Innovation. Platform director Philippe Silberzahn will present the platform during the session.

During this research seminar, Mr Tom Aelbrecht, Associate Director Venture & Incubation Center at Janssen-Cilag, will also share his insights on Innovation Management.