In early May, Professor Mathieu Luypaert presented the results of the M&A Monitor. The large audience, of course, included our three Prime Foundation Partners, who are active in the Centre for Mergers, Acquisitions & Buy-outs. A perfect opportunity to touch base about their partnership.

It appears the merger and acquisition market in Belgium has reached its turning point. For the first time in six years, the sustained rise in acquisition prices has not continued. However the number of transactions did continue to grow, even though there were considerably fewer foreign acquisitions in 2018. Another striking point is that the acquisition of technology and attraction of talent are gaining importance as motivations for an acquisition. Finally, when it comes to the size of transactions, smaller acquisition deals are on the increase. These are the most important conclusions of the sixth edition of the M&A Monitor, an annual survey of more than 150 Belgian merger and acquisition specialists.

On 20 February we invited the crème de la crème of the Belgian scale-up community for the first alumni round table of the Entrepreneurship 2.0 programme, which is now on its fourth edition. The programme’s two founders, Professor Veroniek Collewaert and Deloitte’s Sam Sluismans, look back at it with satisfaction.

A considerable number of case studies on financial planning have been developed, but it is more difficult to find ones that deal with financial planning in a regulated environment. For the Future Grid Managers Programme, Professor Filip Roodhooft, along with colleagues from the Energy Centre, straight away developed two that play out in the regulated energy sector. In the leading roles are the Belgian distribution system operator (DSO) Eandis, now Fluvius, and the French transmission system operator (TSO) Réseau de Transport d’Électricité (RTE).

After months of hard labour, the five finalists of KBC Superpitch, a marketing assignment for Vlerick Masters students, presented their cases to KBC’s senior management in the packed auditorium at KBC’s head office in Brussels. Under the guidance of Frank Goedertier, Professor of Marketing at Vlerick, and Sven Evens, Strategy & Innovation Manager at KBC Insurance, students from the Ghent, Brussels and Leuven campuses have been carefully shaping their ideas into a compact business case.

On your marks, get set, go! In mid-February, for the third year running, we organised a “digital sprint” course. Vlerick lecturer Willem Standaert, our students, our Chair partner Accenture and its clients AXA and Ores worked together in a digital ecosystem over the space of one week. And this is just one way of putting our Digital Chair with Accenture into action.

How do you get your people to adopt the smart technology that is invading the supply chain? How can man and machine work together? What about trust? These are the questions our new Centre on People in the Smart, Digitised Supply Chain will dive into. At the steering wheel are professors Ann Vereecke and Karlien Vanderheyden.

The energy transition is changing the energy ecosystem. In recent years, power generation and distribution have become more decentralised. DSOs now find themselves at the centre of change, operating the grid which all these new players – producers and prosumers – want to connect to and use. In 2018 the DSO Chair organised two workshops to discuss topical issues facing the future of DSOs: (1) energy communities and (2) regulatory sandboxes. This white paper provides a round-up of the findings and insights from each workshop as well as suggesting areas for further exploration.

On 7 February, the names Eandis and Infrax will disappear to make way for the new company Fluvius. “Although the merger is in line with the economic logic and political momentum, that doesn’t make the challenges any smaller.” That is why the Director of Regulation & Strategy Donald Vanbeveren and our energy professor Leonardo Meeus have decided to supplement the chair's traditional one-on-one research with interactive workshops. The first workshop was about regulatory sandboxes – and Donald pronounced it “super!”

When Deloitte and Vlerick began collaborating on entrepreneurship in 2014, there were plenty of initiatives for start-ups. But once they were ready to progress and had reached the scale-up phase, their managers were generally left to their own devices. The past three years have shown that there was a need for a community of like-minded people. Now our aim is to further strengthen that community and to meet the needs of the new generation of ‘born globals’ with the help of useful benchmarks. Because their burning question remains: how do other scale-ups do it?