Author: Cers Blogs

One conventional measure or indicator for the societal impact of research has been the number of media hits that a press release about a new piece of research receives in the media. While this indicator continues to have relevance in future, too, it recently stroke me that new versions of the indicator are also needed….

  Last week I was invited as one of the speakers to hold a session on sales and customer experience for a group of talented international participants of the Integration Programme Business Lead, run by Hanken & SSE Executive Education. When I arrived to the classroom, I found a folder with an agenda for the…

Emergent and marginal market trends have the potential to teach us something about more general socio-cultural developments which, in turn, may have far-reaching consequences for companies and consumers alike. However, such marginal phenomena are often dismissed as mere flukes not worthy of serious attention. Sometimes such dismissals are, in retrospect, arguably justifiable. In other cases,…

A recently published report by, among others, researchers at Aalto University and Sitra points to the need for drastic changes in our consumption patterns if we want to meet the 1.5-degree target of the Paris Agreement. The study highlights the magnitude of the required change, calculating a required reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 86-93%…

Imagine a time when there were no loyalty programs. Imagine also that you were the person who invented the first loyalty program. That is to say, you persuade customers to register by disclosing their names and contact information, and then you build something that captures their purchasing activities over time. As a reward for allowing…

Our current world faces problems that are so complicated that not one party, may that party be a company, a university, an NGO, a government and so on, will ever alone solve such problems. One such a problem is global warming, or more broadly environmental crises in form of pollution, extinction of species, a threat…

As a doctoral student, part of the work is to be comfortable in navigating the intellectual space of academic discourse and conceptual thinking. And for a new student, this isn’t necessarily an easy domain to master, as the terrain is rife with competing philosophical ideas and pre-suppositions. And even when some schools of thought are…

Innovation, design and strategy play an important role in the age of disruption as we embrace the discomfort of current market conditions. We need to develop new ideas and experiences to support a sustainable lifestyle including not only the technological possibilities but also the social and environmental changes in the global markets. Change in mundane…

  Burglars are getting smarter, unfortunately. It was about a year ago when we were moving to a new neighborhood. We fitted everything in a van and set off for the new home. The driver of the van, for some reason, started to talk about burglaries in Helsinki and Vantaa. Evidently, he did not believe…

  In recent years, the popularity of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have literally exploded and today over 900 universities in the world offer more than 11.000 MOOCs on every imaginable topic. Equally impressing, over a 100 million students from all around the world are enrolled in these courses. At Hanken, we have joined the…