It is a long way to a network school of business and economics

It is visit time I guess. After the visit of Anthony Long from Adelaide, we had a visit from Ed Weymes from Waikato (New Zealand) last Friday. Yesterday we had our bi-annual meetings with our International Advisory Board. Today we have two visitors from Lingnan College Ghuangzhou (China) and tomorrow we will host two visitors from the Auckland University of Technology, Auckland (New Zealand). These are visitors from esteemed partners and it is always a pleasure to see that they are willing to visit us in Maastricht. For, one of the main priorities in the strategic plan of the faculty of economics and business administration is to become an important node in an international network of similar institutions. Why? Because we want to offer our students a broad range of possibilities to gain international experience.

With visitors from partner universities we always have good meetings. Normally we start by confirming the smoothness of our cooperation and that we are ready for a second step to strengthen our ties. The funny thing is that we always agree quite quickly on the future steps in deepening our cooperation, but we also know that thereafter the hard work starts. Developing a double degree? Of course we should do so, but for how many credits? Can we plug an internship in the program? Will this be approved by the ministry of education? Will this be approved by the legal department of the university? The same holds for joint research projects. How can we organize funding? How can we get researchers involved in the development of the projects? What are the terms of the contract? Can we involve the corporate world in the research? So the way to real substantial cooperation is much longer that it seems at first sight even if you agree on the final target. But in my view, it is worth every minute because our stakeholders really benefit from it.