We Help Transform the City and the Region

© HSE University

The Faculty of Management at HSE Nizhny Novgorod plays an important role in transforming the city and the region, as well as in the development of its entrepreneurial ecosystem - thanks to its faculty, who engage in relevant research; its students and educational programmes that include social projects, as well as international conferences, which bring together local and international professionals to share knowledge and best practices. At the same time, the provision of management education itself faces two main challenges – how to combine education and a research agenda, and how to align its academic curriculum with market demands.

Dr. Hein Roelfsema, Leading Research Fellow at the Department of Venture Management of the Faculty of Management, shared his thoughts on the challenges that the campus currently faces.

Dr. Hein Roelfsema

With the course on Venture Capital Investment, I personally focused on business a bit more and tried to balance this with straightforward entrepreneurial finance. A problem that often occurs is the commercial element, and we have to teach students how to generate a profit for investors. In this regard, business and economics insights, as well as technological insights, are important. Instead of being purely theoretical, I cite three start-up cases with different elements that students had to solve.

Also, we should not overemphasize soft skills in entrepreneurship courses. Afterall, networking works differently across cultures

Certain issues are not generalizable and one should be careful with the kind of values you actually teach. Moreover, more progress in research and collaborations needs to be made. Staff should build up their skills and collaborate on papers with other experts, thereby boosting their publication rates.

Denis Fomenkov, Deputy Director of the HSE Campus in Nizhny Novgorod and Dean of the Faculty of Management, spoke to us about how students and the faculty work together towards meeting new challenges and how various initiatives can help to transform the city and the region.

Denis Fomenkov

We try to operate as a think tank, which can deal with the challenges faced by both the region and the city. This is being done at different levels - starting with students, as management cannot be taught only in the classroom. It is imperative to go beyond the theory and venture into the real-life context, with an eye on all of the difficulties and problems that really exist there. Otherwise, students do not understand why they need what we teach them. For this reason, we have built a project management framework at the faculty.

We commonly meet with representatives from the city administration and different ministries to discuss what projects are of particular interest for them and can be developed by our undergraduate students. Among the initiatives discussed, we choose the most interesting and useful, which can also generate tangible and visible results. Students also have a right to devise their own project initiatives. Thus, their first year is devoted to project planning; second year - fundraising through crowdfunding platforms.

Eventually, we ended up with a large number of projects that were carried out by our students

Our students initiated the repair of pedestrian walkways, organized sport events for low-income and vulnerable social groups, came up with street art guides, and initiated the installation of power outlets in buses (just to mention a few). The major outcome of these activities is that students now have a clear understanding that a project concept should always be followed by a complex implementation process, including negotiations with respective ministries and bureaucratic agencies. This kind of real-life experience helps them understand the basic principles of project management while also preparing them for professional projects.

Not only students, but also the faculty gets involved in social projects - often free of charge

For example, our colleagues worked out a strategy for the development of entrepreneurial skills in Nizhny Novgorod. They have also organized roundtables with ministries, along with various representatives and entrepreneurs from different fields. As the city's business operations are mainly retail with a very stable history, we discussed how local companies can branch out into high-tech entrepreneurship and what is needed for that.

Our leading research fellow, Dr. Roelfsema, talked about international experience. For instance, in Europe, retail companies cannot survive without providing added value to their customers, because, otherwise, there are these large online competitors like AliExpress, Amazon, etc.

Another project involving our colleagues is the development of human resources and human capital strategies

A key problem in Nizhny Novgorod is that many talents leave the city and the region. We conducted a survey and a very large number (I will not reveal the percentage yet) of graduates and young professionals consider moving to Moscow, St. Petersburg or abroad over the next three years.

In fact, their success criterion is their ability to leave. This is very bad both for the city and for the region, since we are losing the competition for talent. We conducted large-scale research among young professionals, highly qualified specialists and entrepreneurs in order to identify the key factors influencing their intentions to leave and how employees/companies can retain them. We then compared the results with the region’s economic development strategy, while also organizing foresight sessions and focus groups with the HR directors of large firms, as well as target groups. The Laboratory for Labour Market Studies assists us in a lot of ways - their analytics and statistics are very useful for the region.

The campus and the faculty also must face contemporary challenges and market demands through education

For example, thanks to an IT campus project, the Faculty of Management restructured its programmes to embed an IT component. It is clear that management is impossible without IT skills - it is a core part of HR and analytics, business processes, marketing and product management.

Furthermore, since the companies working with IT products in our region are particularly focused on serving global markets, they need English-speaking specialists who understand developers and development processes, and who can also construct a dialogue between the market and developers, as well as bring products to market. We have also introduced a completely new track at the faculty - Product Management in English. Another international programme, which we restructured around a year ago, is Global Business. This one is more focused on the management of international projects, because, since we are an industrial region, it is important for us to boost exports to markets.

To promote the international research agenda and new approaches to innovation within the local entrepreneurial environment, the faculty also holds an international conference on business trends for practitioners and researchers from both local and international companies. This year, for instance, the participants discussed their research in marketing and entrepreneurship - Big Data analytics, changes in global supply chains, and the application of AI in business processes.