IMD business school for management and leadership courses

This paper investigates why firms facing identical carbon-pricing incentives exhibit heterogeneous decarbonization trajectories. We address this question through a theoretical framework that conceptualizes national institutional quality and innovation-system capabilities as boundary conditions that shape firms’ adjustment capacity under emission…

Recent US-Cambodia and US-Malaysia trade agreements include ‘poison pills’ echoing an earlier precedent, United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). For trading partners navigating intensifying US-China geopolitical rivalry, these provisions complicate hedging strategies. In practice, the bite of these provisions may be less than their formal…

This article examines the role of businesses and managers in driving sustainable development, with a focus on family firms. Drawing on the mixed gamble perspective, we compare the progress of family and non-family firms toward achieving SDG 7 (affordable and clean energy). We develop a framework that illustrates how ownership, management structu…

Sustainability challenges require collective action (CA) among diverse stakeholders, yet current management scholarship on CA remains theoretically fragmented. Through a comprehensive review and inductive analysis of 140 peer-reviewed management articles at the intersection of CA and sustainability, we highlight three complementary lenses that m…

How do individuals evaluate their capacity to contribute to positive social change when choosing careers? Drawing on construal level and prosocial motivation theories, we examine how contact with social issues and potential beneficiaries shapes individuals’ self-evaluations, and how these self-evaluations influence their social entrepreneurial a…

We investigate family CEO birth order as an antecedent of family firms’ CSR behavior. Despite psychology literature recognizing it as a key predictor of individual behavior, birth order has been largely neglected in management research. Drawing on behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology—specifically, the Family Niche Model—we identify e…

Learn when to tighten or loosen operating models for resilience and growth, and how successful companies navigate these critical transitions.

Explore why social capital is a tangible asset for business resilience. IMD’s Book Club reveals how trust drives growth, recruiting, and retention.

AI can make existing organizational norms harder to see by “flattening” them. Here’s how to stop it producing a more homogenous culture, instead of a more inclusive one.

Discover how the long arc of leadership challenges short-term thinking, as 123 executives reveal a growing gap between values and rewards.

SpaceX IPO signals future readiness shift to asset-heavy, vertically integrated strategies to control critical technologies, boost resilience, and accelerate innovation.

The Career Canvas helps professionals navigate a 60-year working life with nine strategic career moves beyond the traditional ladder.

When the world’s cities compete for talent, innovation, and investment, intelligence—not size—determines who wins. The Smart City Playbook is a fascinating journey into the front lines of urban transformation, written by Arturo Bris, one of the world’s foremost experts on competitiveness and Director of the IMD World Competitiveness Center in La…

The explosion of generative AI has sparked a wave of case studies showing how quickly and profoundly it is transforming businesses. Yet most of these use cases still apply the technology to enhancing existing systems. This book makes the case for why business leaders must revisit the fundamentals of generative AI and look beyond short-term, tact…

The State of Globalisation brings together leading economists to examine how technology, policy, and geopolitics are simultaneously reshaping the global economy in unprecedented ways. Far from marking a simple retreat, today’s divergent forces are transforming cross-border trade, investment, and supply chains, generating both new risks of fragme…

The IMD World Competitiveness Ranking (WCR) is a renowned tool for assessing the competitiveness of economies worldwide. This year, IMD’s World Competitiveness Center (WCC) has expanded its scope to include Kenya, Namibia, and Oman. This year’s ranking highlights that government efficiency is key to fighting social divides and keeping economies …

Have you ever wondered why AI and sustainability seem so promising, yet so often fail to take off inside traditional companies? Or why, despite their potential synergy, AI and sustainability are so rarely pursued together? Too often, companies treat AI and sustainability as separate tracks, believing it’s simpler to manage change that way. But t…

The Great Trade Hack by Richard Baldwin explains how Trump’s 2025 tariff blitz wasn’t economic strategy. It was grievance politics. Tariffs, Baldwin shows, are political placebos that won’t fix the U.S. economy but could fracture the global trade system. Blending sharp analysis with policy insight, he maps out three futures for world trade and u…