Insights

From March 15 through 18 the global real estate industry gathered in Cannes for MIPIM 2022. This year’s theme was ‘Driving Urban Change’, and, just like last year’s edition ‘New World: New Era, Time to Reconnect’, social sustainability remained a pressing topic. This is a great opportunity to revisit the European Union’s (EU) ESG taxonomy regulation, the final report on social taxonomy, and what this exactly means for the real estate sector.

What should the real estate sector do about it?

Being creative and thinking in business terms: it is a combination that is still difficult in the cultural sector. And that is often not only a matter of not being able to, but also of not wanting to. After all, artistic freedom is difficult to squeeze into a business model, isn't it? Annick Schramme, professor at Antwerp Management School and UA, sees it differently: it is precisely through a well thought-out business model that you can continue to bring art and culture, even in times of crisis.

The future will be better than you think – and the reason is that there is a breakthrough movement to regenerate nature, society and the economy, and it’s gathering momentum. I call it THRIVING and I tell the positive story of this bubbling revolution in my book "THRIVING: The Breakthrough Movement to Regenerate Nature, Society, and the Economy. But I won’t lie – we are in a race for our lives. Our choices matter now more than ever. The decisions we make and the actions we take in the next 10 years will determine whether our life support systems break down or break through. In this short article, I summarize some of the most important lessons from the book.

How to ensure sustainable employment of your current employees?

Simply investing in recruitment is useless if there is no good foundation to build upon. With Welt, Voka and Antwerp Management School work together with companies to create 'Endless Careers for All Talent' (Welt).

Want to know more about the pillars of Voka Welt? Then dive into our white paper (in Dutch).

The increased digitization of the world we live and work in, has given rise to an increasing number of cyber threats and IT-risks. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a huge surge in the number, the intensity, and the sophistication of the attacks. But it’s not all doom and gloom. With proper technical solutions such as firewalls, antivirus programs , back-ups and a no-trust attitude, companies can better defend themselves.

ABIS - The Academy of Business in Society and Antwerp Management School organized the Value Creation Roundtable in January 2021. Numerous leading companies, such as the Port of Antwerp, Johnson & Johnson, ABN AMRO and Value Balancing Alliance, participated.

The exchange of their knowledge, competencies and ideas on sustainable transformation and the positive impact between key sustainability actors resulted in a report.

Many cyber security specialists or security software sales representatives want to convince people to act or buy certain products by frightening them with statements like: “If you don’t do (or buy) this, you will be hacked.” Sadly, this way of communicating is still an often-used approach in Information Security to get the message across or motivate people to “buy” their products or service. We call this the FUD approach. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt and was introduced in the late eighties. As of 1991, the expression became fashionable for any form of disinformation used against the competition. FUD is a simple but effective strategy that supplies the audience with negative, fake, or false information to influence their behavior and decisions. FUD is so effective because adverse events have a more significant impact on our brain and associated attitudes than positive ones. In psychology, this is called negative bias. Negative bias can have an effect on behavior as well as your decisions. This is also why the news often spreads negative news because negative news draws greater attention and therefore sells.

Although this might be effective in the short term to get things done, this won’t be a very successful approach in the long term. In this blog I'd like to explain you why.

The use of data is becoming more and more pervasive in our private lives, yet the incorporation of data in HR takes off on a very slow pace. Only one in five companies in Europe has people analytics projects. Why does it seem to take so much longer for analytics to conquer the work context compared to our private lives?

In 2020, Yves Vanderbeken graduated from the Executive Master in IT Governance and Assurance (aka MITGA). His research is still a burning topic in our society: how to find and select the right citizen services from the government to help us? And how could online service platforms improve these citizen services? In this blog, he shares some of his most recent findings.