IE Business School Professor Wins Research Competition: MBA News

A professor from IE Business School in Spain has won the 2013 Business Schools' Research Project Funding Competition.

 

Laura Illia, IE Business School's assistant professor and academic director of the Master in Corporate Communication at the school won the competition with a project titled 'Building a new reputation indicator UniCredit. Listening methods to close the gap between perception and reality.'

 

Illia competed with representatives from top business schools around the world: London Business School, INSEAD, Kellogg School of Management, The Wharton School, and Oxford University's Saïd Business School.

 

The Business Schools' Research Project Funding Competition was launched by the UniCredit & Universities Foundation, with the aim of funding one research project from one of the world's top business schools each year. This year's topic was corporate reputation, and was finalised in order to aid the UniCredit Stakeholder and Service Intelligence Department to handle survey databases on group reputation.

“It is relevant to work on a new reputation indicator for UniCredit right now for two main reasons," explains Illia in a blog post on IE Business School's website. "First, as any other bank UniCredit is part of an industry - i.e. the financial industry - that is living a reputation crisis. It is thus interesting to study this phenomenon right now.

 

"Second, with the boost of social media and the rise of globalization it is necessary to find new ways to assess a corporate reputation. Companies have lost the agency on their reputation and cannot merely align behaviours toward predefined reputation dimensions. Companies need to build their reputation around their relational network (online and offline) by engaging and dialoguing constantly with their stakeholders.”