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?

By 2050, we need to keep the increase in the global average temperature below 2°C – and ideally below 1.5°C. In order to achieve this goal, the Holy Grail is to switch to electricity en masse. ‘And what about natural gas?’ asked the natural gas transporter Fluxys. “Gas is also renewable. Over the next five years, we want to explore how we can link the – underexplored – possibilities of gas to those of electricity.” And rightly so, because hardly anyone still believes that the future will be entirely electric in 2050.

Volvo Cars no longer defines itself as a car manufacturer but as a mobility provider. This is the core of its Vision 2020 plan, which lays out ambitious but concrete targets. “This target-driven mentality is something that we also see at Vlerick”, remarks Wim Maes, Managing Director of Volvo Car Belux.

Young Belgian companies with ambitions to grow set the bar for growth higher and higher. These scale-ups do not shy away from taking the step to sell aboard, where they generate nearly 30 percent of their total turnover. They are growing smart and are doing so primarily through less risk and hybrid ways for growth, such as licences and strategic alliances. Finally, the average salary that the founders pay themselves has remained constant in the last three years. These are the most significant conclusions of the third edition of the Rising Star Monitor. This annual survey by the Vlerick Business School and Deloitte Belgium provides insight into the trends and challenges for young Belgian companies with growth potential.