ESTIEM Magazine | Spring 2008 | The Future Way of Doing Business

Issue 34 2008/I | ISSN 0874-5242 | Price 0 Euro | www.estiem.org

ESTIEMMAGAZINE The Future Way of Doing Business Industrial Ecology

European Students of Industrial Engineering and Management

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INTRODUCTION Editorial President’s Speech Introduction to ESTIEM Introducing: Board 2008

NEWS A New Place for Summer Academy Venture Network – From Dusk till Dawn Vision of Responsibility – The Latest News TIMES Project & Committee Memories of ESTIEM – Knowledge Management All about a Country – Europe3D

4 5 6 8

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11 12 13 14 16 18

20 22

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28 30 33 EVENTS In the Heart of North West Germany – Council Meeting Bremen Enjoy the Island – Vision Cambridge The Business Taste of Russia – Business Seminar St. Petersburg Marketing in the New Economy – Vision K2K Bosch-ESTIEM Workshop 2007 TIMES Semi-final Novi Sad

3 TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOCUS Life Cycle Assessment Technology: Designing and Managing that Old Black Magic LiderA Factorial Module – Sustainable Construction How Does Global Warming Effect Economy?

Ecoefficiency: Philosophy, Theory and Tools Fuel Consumption-optimised to any Destination

34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 INSIDE ESTIEM Cultural Prejudice: Gourmet as a Serb?

Successful ESTIEMers in China Show What You Know – Case Study Show Skopje – Wher is that?

Back to Action! What’s Happening in Lisbon?

Alumni Report

43 44 46 47 48 49

AGENDA

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PROFESSIONAL Thin Films as Solar Collectors Working in Consultancy

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4 iNTRODUCTION imprint

Industrial Ecology – Beginning of New Industry Era

Project Leader Katarina Gavric

The Earth is what we all have in common.

Editorial Staff Isidora Strboja Katarina Gavric David Christian Berg Sezen Sayoglu

Design David Christian Berg Article Acquisition David Christian Berg Katarina Gavric Advertisement Acquisition Ignacio Perez Prat Philipp Bächle Contact magazine@estiem.org ESTIEM Permanent Office Paviljoen B-6 P.O.Box 513 5600 MB Eindhoven The Netherlands Fax: 0031-(0)40 2473871 e-mail: info@estiem.org www.estiem.org Disclaimer The contents may not always reflect the opinion of the publisher. Any reproduction or copy is permitted only with the permission of the editors.

Our Partners

Katarına gavrıc

Layout Sezen Sayoglu David Christian Berg

Natural ecosystems do not have wastes since the wastes produced by one organism form are the food source for another. Natural systems do not create an overflow of stably toxic components that cannot be used by other organisms in the system.

This approach is picked up by ‘Industrial Ecology’. It is one of the more radical approaches to achieving levels of material and energy resource use efficiency. Industrial ecology means the exchange of materials between different industrial sectors where the ‘waste’ output of one industry becomes the prime-material of another. For example, the cooling steam from an power plant can be used as a heat source for chemical manufacturer. The fly ash from a cobble fired generating station can be used as an input for the cement industry.

‘Industrial ecosystems’ are describing a situation in which a number of different industries, usually proximately close to each other, exchange ‘waste’ outputs. Industrial ecology represents new and leading line paradigm for business. It emphasises the establishment of technologies, managerial and policies systems, which contrive and promote production in a more cooperative way. Technologies and processes that find the balance between economic and environmental efficiency are referred to as eco-efficient.

At the end, perhaps the most important message to get across is that industrial ecology, through creation of a network of cooperating industries, is not only an efficient economic exploitation of resources, but also makes industries excellent urban neighbours.

Industrial ecology is an emerging framework. Thus much research and development of the field and its concepts needs to be done. It is our responsibility to do so.

sources www.wikipedia.com www.is4ie.org www.sustainabilitydictionary.com

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from all over Europe. International cooperation is not only a prerequisite for achieving something on the European level; it is also a great platform for developing new ideas. If you have an idea for an international project, ESTIEM is there to support you. Are you willing to take the initiative?

Mikko Sjöberg

President’s Speech

introduction

Looking through my window, it is not hard to understand why industrial ecology is a topic of our time. I remember being able to ski in Helsinki for several months during the winter – but not anymore. The winter 2007–2008 broke all records and was the warmest ever recorded in Finland1.

Recently, I have been highly impressed by many Global warming is blamed for this, but the question business ideas that can be categorized as social is, how much can we do about it entrepreneurship2. In short, it means making an ecological or social impact through organising a Issues such as ecoefficiency, life cycle assessbusiness or a venture. While a business should ment, or sustainable design are rarely covered on always be profitable, you measure the success of a lectures of industrial engineering and management, social venture in other terms than monetary profit. though all companies will certainly face them at Quite often, bringing multicultural teams together some point in the future. For this Magazine, sevis the best way to facilitate such ideas. eral articles have been gathered to inspire you and I hope this issue of the ESTIEM Magazine will to give you new perspectives on doing business. give you a few new ideas. Enjoy reading! If you can Ecological and environmental issues also rethink of some winter sports that can be done withquire strong international cooperation. Approaches out snow, let me know before next autumn. such as emissions trading would never work without a network between several countries.

Multinational cooperation has also always been the basis for everything we do in ESTIEM. We are currently linking future professionals from 24 countries, with a steady growth of diversity, and our alumni network is getting tighter as well. When you embark on a journey with ESTIEM, you always end up in a team of people

References 1 http://www.fmi.fi/news/index.html?Id=1204549200.html 2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_entrepreneurship

introduction

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Back in 1990,

students from five different countries founded an organisation which they named ESTIEM: European Students of Industrial Engineering and Management. Its aim was and still is to establish and foster interrelations among European students of Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM).

In 16 years, it has grown into an organisation bringing together 40 000 students from 65 universities in 23 European countries, and is still growing. All these universities offer courses in IEM. Based on this structure, ESTIEM forms links between students, academics and companies in order to create a Europe-wide, multi-level IEM network.

Through involvement in ESTIEM, students get an opportunity to experience different

cultures, take part in international projects and become friends with other ESTIEMers from all over Europe. Our belief is that the activities and projects of ESTIEM give our members knowledge and experiences that are important for their personal development and the realisation of future goals. The students involved in ESTIEM incorporate both the skills required for modern business and an open-minded approach towards other people and cultural issues.

The decision-making body of ESTIEM is the General Assembly, which meets twice a year, in autumn and in spring at the Council Meeting.

Each university, represented by its so-called ‘Local Group’, sends two student representatives. The five members of the Board of ESTIEM are elected during the autumn Council Meeting. The Board is responsible for the management, coordination and administration of the association. It represents the association in all legal matters.

ESTIEM has continuously increased the number of its activities, thus being able to offer a great variety of events to IEM students. Based on its activities, ESTIEM has attracted many active students, and the organisation has seen rapid growth since its founding. Major activities on a European level besides Council Meetings include the only European wide IEM case competition TIMES, the seminar series Vision, ESTIEM Magazine, Venture Network, Europe3D, Summer Academy and Student Guide (a database with information for students who want to study abroad); all led by Project Leaders who are elected at the Council Meetings.

Besides taking leadership positions in the Board and as Project Leaders, ESTIEM members can also take up more responsibility by working in one of the committees. The committees work together closely with the Board, supporting it in

Introduction

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CM

CoM, ReCoM

its tasks. ESTIEM has six of them at the moment: the Information and Communication Technology Committee, the Public Relations Committee, the Members Committee, the Knowledge Management Committee,and the Corporate Relations Committee.

With lots of teams and tasks to choose from, there is a place for everyone. Naturally, the backbone of ESTIEM is the European IEM student.

Open-minded and keen on developing him or herself, he or she is eager to make friends and create contacts with different IEM representants from all over the continent.

When ESTIEM was founded, the aim was to make it an abbreviation-free association. However, this goal was not completely achieved… After all, “CM” fits much better in your mouth than “a Council Meeting”. The table at the right offers a brief introduction to the most common ESTIEM abbreviations.

Council Meeting. Organised twice a year, this general meeting of member groups holds the ultimate decision-making power in ESTIEM. Coordination Meeting, Regional Coordination Meeting. An event where a small group of people get together for a Project Meeting or a meeting of Local Groups in a particular region.

CRC

Corporate Relations Committee. Responsible for adding value to relationships between ESTIEM and its current and potential corporate partners.

FLC

Financial and Legal Committee. Members of this committee have an advisory function for those who are responsible for financial or legal affairs in ESTIEM.

KMC

Knowledge Management Committee. This committee ensures that all knowledge is preserved and that experiences don’t get lost during handover periods or when people resign from their active ESTIEM career.

LG Local Group. ESTIEM is basically a network of these IEM student associations located at different universities around Europe.

LR Local Responsible. The person in charge of a LG. MC

Members Committee. This team supports the member groups of ESTIEM and provides information to those who are interested in joining the ESTIEM organisation.

PL,CL Project Leader, Committee Leader. PL is the person in charge of an ESTIEM project. Analogously, Committee Leader is designated with CL. PRC

Public Relations Committee. Concerned with ESTIEM’s outer appearance and increasing the awareness of ESTIEM among companies, professors, as well as IEM students throughout Europe.

SAC

The Summer Academy Project. This project organises a two-week event, of which two editions are held somewhere in Europe each summer.

The event is highly academic and guided by a well-known professor.

TIMES

For more detailed information about our organisation and its activities, please visit our website at www.estiem.org. Here you can also find everything you need to know if you want to get involved. So don’t hesitate and start moving… you won’t regret it! 

INTRODUCTION

WG

Tournament in Management and Engineering Skills.

Working Group. In Council Meetings, several Working Groups are formed to discuss different crucial ESTIEM matters.

WGL Working Group Leader. A person who is in charge of the WG. He or she plans, guides the members and prepares the documentation.

n to ESTIEM

introduction

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Mikko Sjöberg President Local Group: Helsinki (Finland) Age: 23 When did you have the moment when you said to yourself: ESTIEM is a great organisation and I want to work for it?

It was in autumn 2003, when I was travelling around Germany with my Local Group. At some point we ended up in Berlin and I woke up at an ESTIEMer’s place. It was really fun to get to know all the people around, tour around the city, and so on. I thought it was really cool to have this network where you get to know people from all over Europe.

In 2005 I became more seriously involved with ESTIEM. If you were a car, what type of car would it be?

Introducing: Board 2008 A new year, a new ESTIEM Board.

At the 35th Council Meeting in Bremen, the ESTIEM Board members for the year 2008 were elected. Who are they?

Read the interviews below to get a first impression...

Something fast and small, like Zastava 101B Turbo – new ESTIEM car.

Where do you see ESTIEM in three years?

In three years? More active, more open, and most likely a bit bigger as well.

Since there are three boardies located in Finland (Jan is in Helsinki for half the year), are all important decisions made in the sauna?

Tobias Hemmerlein

rene heunen

Well, it’s often said that the decisions are made while people are golfing, but in Finland this happens in the sauna. That is traditionally the place where you go for a couple of beers, swim in a whole in the ice, and after that you make the most important decisions. However, Jan is travelling a lot, and Kimmo is in Tampere, so I won’t get a chance to see them very often in Helsinki. We’ll see...

Gabrielle Busson Vice President of Finance Local Group: Lyon (France), Karlsruhe (Germany) Age: 22

Jan Knutzen Vice President of Activities Local Group: Ilmenau (Germany), Helsinki (Finland) Age: 24

When did you have the moment when you said to yourself: ESTIEM is a great organisation and I want to work for it?

What chances do you see for the development of Europe3D?

I started with ESTIEM two years ago. At the very first day of my studies people from Local Group Lyon gave a presentation. I must say that I didn’t really understand what it was about, but I thought it was cool. So I went to the first meeting and without really realising it I signed up for this organisation. It took me quite a while to discover what I was doing.

At first I organised a Local Qualification and then we had a Vision in January. Afterwards I realised that I am completely addicted to ESTIEM. If you were an animal at the zoo, what would it be?

Uhmm… probably a giraffe, because it has a long neck and a lot of people told me that I have a long neck as well. Secondly, because I think that this animal is really funny.

What is going to be your personal contribution to ESTIEM in your board year?

Firstly, being in the board is somehow a big contribution in itself, I guess. It is really time and energy consuming. Furthermore I would like to push the French spirit in ESTIEM. It would be great to have more active French speaking people. This would be my small personal contribution.

How do you think your cultural characteristics will demonstrate during your cooperation with your fellow boardies?

I think French people care a lot about what people think. For me for example this is really important when I do something within the Board. I try to guess, how ESTIEMers react on what I do, as good as possible. The other characteristic is that I can be convinced of something that I didn’t believe in the beginning. If you can demonstrate with arguments that one solution is better than the others, I can easily change my mind. And the third point my fellow boardies can profit from is when I bring some good wine.

Share a secret about yourself nobody else knows.

I can share this one and I guess nobody knows about it in ESTIEM. When I was younger I used to do a lot of rowing and I even made it to the Junior World Championships in 2003.

There are several chances. Firstly, it is a completely new Project compared to Vision, because you cannot only discover the professional part of ESTIEM, but also learn something about culture and politics. Secondly, it is a really good opportunity to get in touch with people who study something completely different. They most likely have some different views on different topics which enables us to get new perspectives on various issues.

If you were a drink, what would it be and why?

I think I would be a Hauki, because Hauki means pike in English and a pike is really hard to catch. The other reason is that it tastes really fresh and I think I am bringing some kind of freshness into others lives.

Do you have any ideas to make ESTIEMers even more active in 2008?

In my eyes the first step to activate people is always through communication. If you keep contact with people they feel they are part of the whole network. If people are already in a Project or Committee, give them responsibilities. By fulfilling them, people become motivated to take a step further and get more involved. And for people not already working in a project or committee: make them travel and introduce ESTIEM in a way that makes them realise they will get something out of it.

What song should definitely be added to the songbook as soon as possible?

The “Koko elämä”-song should definitely be in the songbook as soon as possible. I am still trying to develop even more versions of the song, although not everybody likes it.

Kimmo Torvinen Vice President of Administration Local Group: Tampere (Finland), Brussels (Belgium) Age: 23

David Christian Berg Vice President of Public Relations Local Group: Clausthal (Germany) Age: 25

When did you have the moment when you said to yourself: ESTIEM is a great organisation and I want to work for it?

What is going to be your personal contribution to ESTIEM in your board year?

Actually, I knew about ESTIEM before my studies. I had a friend working for ESTIEM at that time and the first time I met her was when she was coming from a Council Meeting and told about it. I got excited at once. Furthermore my first room mate in Tampere was the current Local Responsible. He pushed me into ESTIEM. Bit by bit I got more active and involved. So it grew over time and I ended up in the Board.

Every consecutive ESTIEM Board has paid special attention to improve the oh-so important web pages.

Any improvement plans for this year?

We have already talked about it here (at Board Meeting Skopje). We want to improve the structure and make everything a bit more easy to access. So we have to think about where information should be. Maybe some Facebook benchmarking.

But as this is just an early stage I can’t tell you more about it right now.

I don’t think I will just contribute on one level or in one subject. First of all I will contribute in involving people by talking to all my committees and projects I am responsible for. Furthermore one big contribution I am hoping to make is setting up a new company partnership. Another contribution is to increase the press visibility of ESTIEM. Furthermore, together with the IT Committee and Kimmo we will contribute to the internal communication between ESTIEMers by providing new tools. But this doesn’t depend on myself as much as it does on our great people within the IT Committee.

What is your favourite ESTIEM abbreviation?

That’s actually pretty easy. It is RPRR, because everybody is making fun of it. We just haven’t found anything better and it is really long, meaning Regional Public Relations Responsible. And just see, what it looks like with all the R-s!

Describe Kimmo in three keywords

What will be the ESTIEM Board drink in 2008?

It is Hauki. A drink made from Vodka and Fisherman’s friend.

In which European city would you like to see a new Local Group soon and why?

If I take it totally from a personal point of view: a city where I would like to go to and where we don’t have an ESTIEM Local Group is definitely Paris.

Organised...well-dressed...small What makes ESTIEM a unique organisation for partner companies to cooperate with?

That is pretty simple. We have a specific target group of IEM Students, an organisation that represents 45 000 IEM students all around Europe, people that are involved in projects and committees and take responsibilities in our organisation. We have not only involved people, but people who are very good at their studies. Furthermore we have the European idea behind ESTIEM and companies are looking for internationally oriented students and we can offer this to them. I got feedback from several companies and I was surprised how well they think about ESTIEMers and their creative capacity. We should not underestimate the professionalism we put in Projects and Committees and our ability to communicate with students. It is quite clear that the students, input and visibility we can offer to companies are very valuable for them.

News NEWS

News 11

After three years of ESTIEM adventure, I am feeling really excited to write these lines as the leader of the most valuable ESTIEM Project, from my perspective. Here, you will find out what is going on with Summer Academy and me as its Project Leader.

My Summer Academy adventure is all about coincidence… It all started with a friend of mine asking me what I am going to do for the summer holiday. Well, I answered by saying “nothing special this year” and he asked me; “let’s participate in Summer Academy together then”.

Until that time, I knew very little about Summer Academy but without thinking about it a minute, I said “Ok…why not, let’s do it”. After completing the application procedure, I found myself at Istanbul Ataturk Airport, waiting for our flight to Budapest with Nese, previous Project Leader of Summer Academy.

When I met with other the participants and our academic leader Dietrich Brandt, I realised that something was different; an event that I haven’t experienced so far was coming my way.

In the days that followed, I found myself learning totally new things, contributing in a very interactive way, and also having fun with enthusiastic participants and an inspiring academic leader. Although I don’t like comparing different ESTIEM events, I have to admit that Summer Academy 2007 Hungary was the most unique, most contributing and self-developing event in my ESTIEM adventure. That’s the reason why I applied for Project Leader of Summer Academy and finally, why I am writing these lines to you.

I wanted to be part of this unique project and try to contribute to it.

So, what is happening in the Project? As Summer Academy team we had a very fruitful Coordination Meeting in Cambridge with Jim Platts, at the end of February. Besides discussing operational things like promotion and sponsoring, we mainly focused on the background and philosophy of Summer Academy and on strategic planning. In our talks with Jim we agreed on finding an Academic Leader besides him and Dietrich Brandt to further strengthen the Project and to insure its continuity even if Dietrich or Jim should not be able to participate one summer. For this search we rely on you to help us find a professor, who is willing to teach ethical leadership to future leaders in Europe.

On the operational level – as each year – we are organising two very distinct Summer Academy events. The first one is being organised

by Local Group Budapest with Local Project Leader Dora Molnar in Hungary and will be lead

by Dietrich Brandt from Aachen University. The second event will be organised by Local Group Novi Sad with Local Project Leader Dusan Stanar in Serbia and will be lead by Jim Platts from Cambridge University.

Find out more about these two exciting events at www.sac.estiem.org and send in your applications until the 30th of April.

Do not miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!

omer faruk yurdusever

A New Place for Summer Academy:

NEWS News

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Venture Network

aras yıldız

From Dusk Till Dawn “Entrepreneurs are about loving their journey, not their destination”

Since I became involved in Venture Network this quote was always on my mind, clearly affecting my life. I gained myself the view of not just focusing on result. It quite helped me to notice that, most of the time, success and joy of life are hidden in the details of our voyages to the ends.

There are a lot of ESTIEMers who are thinking about becoming entrepreneurs, developing ideas and trying to gather experience and knowledge about entrepreneurship. Furthermore, entrepreneurship isn’t only about creating companies, it is also about being creative and overcoming barriers. We want to achieve that every ESTIEMer is aware of the fact that Venture Network can be his or her starting and break-even point for entrepreneurship future, through real jobs and practical implementations.

So, what has happened at Venture Network side so far? Let’s take a brief insight into our history. First of all, the idea became visible at Council Meeting Porto by having the first Working Group with efforts of Riku Seppala from Local Group Helsinki, who was the initiator of Entrepreneurship Task Force in ESTIEM. The next step was the entrepreneurship description which was prepared between Council Meetings Porto and Ankara. The Council Meeting in Ankara was really critical for the project to produce something tangible and show people that something is happening. The name was changed from “Entrepreneurship” to “Venture Network” to make the pronunciation easier for ESTIEMers.

But, even more significant was that the Venture Network had a clear roadmap till Council Meeting Eindhoven.

During this period, four newsletter articles were written, first Coordination Meeting was held in Budapest and first Venture Network event took place in Skopje in March 2007. Event structure was created well enough in order to provide opportunities for ESTIEMers by bringing the closer to the Alumni, successful entrepreneurs and other ESTIEMers who are interested in entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship experts from Austria-Herbert Pock (Austin, Pock & Partners), Almir Kovacevic (WUS Austria) and two Alumni entrepreneurs – Daniel Giebel and Bart Jutte – joined us in Skopje and shared their worthy experiences and skills.

Moreover, Venture Network had its third Working Group at Council Meeting Eindhoven.

We had some hot topics like establishing “Student Consultancy” in ESTIEM, constituting a roadmap to become an official Project of ESTIEM at Council Meeting Bremen and deciding on where we might organise second event and also how we could improve the event structure. Everything seemed great until the time came to implement the ideas. We had big difficulties to form a team and gather skills to exhibit something, so the project came down to a standstill.

As we all know, projects or even the simplest work in our lives depend on good co-ordination, teamwork and motivation. Sometimes they might be missing, but it doesn’t mean that your purpose is completely gone. Venture Network has a big potential to guide dear ESTIEMers, give them occasions and structure strong ESTIEM-Alumni relations. The only, simple thing you should do is to take care and be a part of it so we can develop this promising project... 

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News NEWS

The Latest News of Responsibility

As you might know the head topic of Vision is changing every year. During this season we will be dealing with the “Vision of Responsibility” We will discuss the corporate social responsibility of the companies, especially about “the responsibility of engineers and managers on the environment” in the ‘Vision of Responsibility’ seminar series. In the 21st century, companies have started to work more on avoiding waste, producing environmentally friendly products, reducing pollution and unnecessary products, recycling etc. as a new strategy for the future.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is described as a concept whereby organisations consider the interests of society by taking responsibility for the impact of their activities on customers, employees, shareholders, communities and the environment in all aspects of their operations.

The scale and nature of the benefits of CSR for an organisation can vary depending on the nature of the enterprise, and are difficult to quantify, though there is a large body of literature exhorting business to adopt measures beyond financial ones. It is a correlation between social/environmental performance and financial performance.

However, businesses may not be looking at short-run financial returns when developing their CSR strategy. Business’ care for CSR within a company will likely rest on one or more of these arguments: human resources, risk management, brand differentiation, license to operate. To sum up, we will be talking about how to have the

highest performance by implementing those CSR strategies, which can be exclusive for the customers in the market place by dealing with new environmental issues.

About these we are going to have twelve seminars all over Europe in the time period of September 2008 until May 2009. All of them are related to a distinct subtopic.

For further information about the topic please take a look at the portal.

With this topic we want to achieve that students of numerous cities and countries learn the basic approaches from industry and companies and to deal with new ecological and economical technology. But our main goal is that students together with professionals figure out some visionary and future-oriented ideas. After all seminars are finished, we will summarise the results and ideas that students came up with from every single Vision, in a booklet. The idea behind it is improving the sustainability of Vision.

Related to sustainability we had discussions about implementing a logo for Vision, which isn’t changing every single year. But why did we do that? Firstly, the Vision becomes easier to deal with and it is now possible to work faster in the beginning of the Vision work. From now on, you will not have the step of inventing a new logo. This means you can approach your sponsors faster. Secondly, it is much easier for companies and ESTIEMers to recognise Vision, with one logo that shows Vision is one big project. Also, it protects us from having some bad ones among plenty of logos.

Finally, I can say that we are all looking forward to the Vision of Responsibility and we hope that we will have great events in our great association. We hope a lot of you are interested now in Vision and I hope a lot of you will attend many Visions all over Europe. 

sebastıan katzung

I’m really glad to be the next responsible for the Vision series, because on one hand, the concept is ingeniously, 50% learning and case studying on brand new cases from science and 50% sightseeing in foreign cities, getting to know open-minded students from all over Europe and having great parties. On the other hand my team and I will have a lot of interesting work solving the current problems of Vision and keeping high standard Vision seminars in all Local Groups who organise a great event.

The famous ESTIEM Vision Project has a new Project Leader 2008 since Council Meeting Bremen in autumn – Sebastian Katzung from Local Group Hamburg.

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NORA ROSENDAHL

CHRISTIAN SEYFARTH

NEWS

TIMES Project & Committe

“Experience is the best teacher” states the old aphorism. Especially valuable is the experience in professions where work, to a great extent, relies on tacit knowledge accumulated during years in the field, tackling with problems and dealing with complex situations.

Corporate managers are a group traditionally regarded as professionals who need to “grow” into their position, learning on the job. This creates a dilemma as to how to educate the managers of the future,

which has resulted in many universities concentrating on teaching students substance and facts, assuming they will learn the tacit knowledge anyway, when they go out into the crude working life. In latter years this attitude has changed, however, and pedagogically talented teachers have increasingly begun to apply case method based learning practices.

Case-based learning is not new, however. Learning by cases has been used in law and business education for over two decades, with leading spokesmen among

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the world’s most respected educational institutions, such as Harvard University. What makes cases so effective as a teaching method is the fact that they place students in the same situations managers face daily in their work – including incomplete information, time constraints, and conflicting goals – giving students a first-hand experience in analyzing complex business situations. Case studies stimulate students’ thinking, challenge their capabilities, and prepare them for future managerial decision making.

TIMES is currently celebrating its 15th anniversary, and in latter years TIMES has been increasingly engaged in promoting the case study method which constitutes such an integral part of our case solving competition. Year after year students have praised participating in TIMES as one of the most valuable learning experiences in their lives so far, leading us to wonder why this method is not applied more widely even though its benefits are clear and undisputed.

A benchmarking of university teaching methods executed among ESTIEM universities a couple of years ago showed that very few universities use cases regularly in their courses and only one university offered a course concentrating exclusively on cases. As this means that many TIMES teams solve their very first case when participating in the competition, we decided to take a more proactive role in spreading the case study method both in order to raise awareness of using cases in teaching and to improve the quality of the competition. This led to establishing guidelines as how to organise a university case course, which since then has been successfully implemented in several ESTIEM universities.

NEWS

Moreover, the TIMES Committee has regularly organised Working Groups about case solving at ESTIEM Council Meetings, which have been very popular and praised by students. Just recently, during the Council Meeting in Bremen, the Committee conducted two sessions on introducing the method of case solving. After a brief introduction, the participants got hands-on-practice and received the opportunity to contribute to the success of the Working Group in a very proactive manner, by solving a small case themselves. This gave them the chance to apply their knowledge straight away, having the chance to ask questions to the Working Group Leaders all the way working. Beyond that, TIMES is striving for cooperation with a case event called a “Case Study Show” in Belgrade, Serbia, this year, as we reckon it might hold strong potential for synergies for both events.

What, in the end, makes cases such a powerful tool is their close imitation of real-life situations and problems. Even though nothing can substitute the value of genuine experience, the case method comes as close as it can be by involving the whole person; the emotions and the creativity as well as the intellect.

Qualities such as patience, persistence and persuasiveness matter, along with mental power and agility, just as they do in the real lives of professionals. Case learning educates the entire personality of the future manager, not just the mind, which is also what TIMES is all about. 

“Experience is the best teacher”

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Memories of ESTIEM Katharina Mattes , tobıas hemmerleın

Knowledge Management

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. – George Santayana, The life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905.

It is the task of the Knowledge Management Committee (KMC) to keep the knowledge within the organisation and to prevent it from getting lost. As you can already guess, reading the quote above, doing research about the history of ESTIEM fulfils those tasks. Knowledge about the organisation’s history enables us to learn from what went wrong in order to not make the same mistakes again.

bers of the late nineties met together with three girls from Sweden, Johanna Porsö (Local Group Gothenburg), Sara Götesson and Charlotte Erlandsson (both Local Group Linköping). The main goal of the meeting was to start filling the content in the history pages. While the alumni took care of the years when they were active, the girls started with the recent history. It was a very inspiring meeting, accompanied by great amounts of good vine from Lutz Heissler’s vineyard.

The Team…

Two years ago the idea was born to collect all the data about what has happened in ESTIEM. The plan was to present it online in the ESTIEM Portal to show how our wonderful organisation, called ESTIEM, developed. The kick-off was at the autumn Council Meeting K2K in 2005 during one of the Knowledge Management Committee (KMC) Working Group Sessions.

…became even larger at the spring Council Meeting 2006 in Porto. Johanna, the Task Group Leader at that time, and Sara, the KMC Committee Leader, introduced this Task Group to the participants of the KMC Working Group.

At the end of the Council Meeting there was quite a big team of ESTIEMers contributing with tasks like contacting former active Project and Committee Leaders and updating the received information on the History Pages.

The First Steps…

Ups and Downs…

…of this new Task Group within KMC was to define what information we wanted to collect and how to present it. After creating a structure and dividing the initial tasks, the work had started.

As always when working on such a big task we had many nice experiences but also some problems to deal with. It was really great to see the working spirit and enthusiasm of the team members as well as the increasing amount of material produced. Unfortunately, as more or less all the work had been done, the pages were by mistake deleted, but with lots of efforts by the IT-team, the material could be restored.

The First Highlight…

…was definitively the meeting in Bad Dürkheim at the vineyard of an alumni ESTIEMer that took place in February 2006.

Three ESTIEM alumni and former Board mem-

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The Results…

…can be found in the ESTIEM Portal. Just click on the main section ‘Info’, and after that, on the sub page ‘History’. For each year, information about the developments in ESTIEM and in the different committees and projects are presented A “must” to discover are the years 1990-1994, as the very beginning of the ESTIEM history is written like a book in a gripping way. Enjoy it!

To Sum It up…

…it was a great experience creating the history pages. We learned a lot about the different Committees, Projects and the whole organisation.

Moreover, the contact to former active ESTIEMers made us even more ESTIEM-addicted. One nice memory I personally have was when I wrote the history about the Summer Academy Project. Umut Ergunsu and Björn Johansson, who were the first supporters and initiators of the new event at that time together with Jim Platts (who has been the academic leader since the beginning), spent a lot of time explaining the birth of the Project to me,

sent me emails with very personal feedback and even called me to tell about their experiences.

It was great for me to discover their feelings and impressions.

Special Thanks…

… to everyone who contributed to the History Pages. Especially to all the hard-working history writers during the last two years and, last but not least, to all the ESTIEMers who shared their knowledge and experiences with us.

The main tasks of the Knowledge Management Committee in ESTIEM is to support the Board, the Projects and the Local Groups within ESTIEM. This is done by offering Best Practice Documents (Guidelines how to organise events or for leading positions) and giving trainings. Those trainings support leading persons in ESTIEM, prepare them for their tasks and provoke the personal experience exchange between them. Last but not least we also keep track of our intranet, the ESTIEM Portal. 

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All About a Country

aydın dıkıCı

“Europe is one of the seven traditional continents of the Earth”, says Wikipedia and Europe harbours 48 countries , in 24 of which ESTIEM exists. Many different countries, but we are called European Students of Industrial Engineering and Management!

We call ourselves European students, the adjective being ‘European’! Being European is one of the three common features of this association according to its name. The diversity takes us to a common place, Europe! It’s like a group of people living in the same house – even though a huge house.

What do we know about the place we come from or live in? Just imagine the countries around you for a second. If there are prejudices, there is no hope for any further step. Young people can achieve a higher level of communication for the future of Europe only if they know each other.

Learning from national differences and similarities is the easiest way for it. For this purpose, ESTIEM presents its new Project, Europe3D: Europe in three Dimensions: Politics, Culture and Economy.

What Should Happen in five Years with Europe3D?

Events in about ten different countries with 400 participants and limitless bilateral or multilateral discussions about the countries will have taken place! The participants will have renewed their view on the country as a result of active learning in the country. Moreover, hundreds will be familiar with the idea of better understanding each others country and with other benefits coming from associations’ meeting and events’ nature and local influences on global market.

And what about the internal ESTIEM side?

As Europe3D invites all European students, any ESTIEMer can help this Project and ESTIEM, simply, by talking about this open-minded ESTIEM Project and its goals, at their universities and cities.

For more: www.europe3d.estiem.org The next Europe3D will take place in Belgrade from October 1st to 5th

tımon kabelac Local Group Braunschweig “Europe3D was one of the best events I had with ESTIEM. I learned a lot about Turkish culture and from the students from other faculties because the perspectives of our discussions had a broader horizon then with IEM students only... Just great!”

Maja Adamovıc Local Group Novi Sad “Europe3D is fantastic opportunity to learn a lot about specific country from different prospectives.

And for non-ESTIEMers, it is a way to find out more about ESTIEM and also a unique chance to experience unforgettable ESTIEM spirit! All in all, Europe3D Turkey was one of the best experiences in my life! Local Group Ankara-Bilkent, Local Group Istanbul-ITU and ESTIEM, thanks for this great event! So, ESTIEMers and friends, on the count of three...”

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Industrial Ecology

20 Focus Life Cycle Assessment One of the new areas, which have gained popularity in the field of Industrial Ecology, is Life Cycle Ehsan ehsanı Assessment. The basic rationale behind life cycle assessment is the fact that it’s necessary to optimise the impact of a product on the environment. So in short, life cycle assessment is investigating and quantifying the environmental impacts of a given product or service caused or necessitated by its existence (when it is designed, produced, transported and when it is recycled) . The reason behind increasing attention on life cycle assessment is the tremendous impact, which it can have on the performance of the products in companies in respect to environmental issues.

Normally, life cycle assessment is done through a four-step process : Goal and scope, where the boundaries of the assessment are defined and the product which is going to be analysed is selected; Life cycle inventory, where the investigators shape a model for analysis and gather the data required by model; Impact assessment, the third and the most important phase, where we have to determine what is the actual impact on the environment in terms of energy, pollution, etc.; And at last, we have to summarise the lessons learnt and formulate an agenda for change.

Underlying Challenges

At first look, life cycle assessment might seem really simple, which only needs commitment from organisations. But in reality, the situation is a little bit more complicated and there exist a number of challenges:

Life Cycle Inventory

What is the product we want to study?

What are the boundaries of the work (logistics …)?

What can e learnt from the life cycle assessment?

Goal and Scope

Interpretation

What is model we need for the analysis?

Is the data correct?

Life Cycle Impapct Assement

What modifications in design production and logistics need to be made?

Figure 1 – Four basic steps in a life cycle assessment for a product

What is the contribution on the impact categories (e.g. energy)?

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Imagine a large company, which is competing in a global context; usually such companies design their products in multiple locations, produce them all around the world and sell them in many countries. A typical journey for a product is to be designed in Western Europe, to source the material from Asia, to produce in Eastern Europe and to sell all around Europe and the US If we multiply this by 500 which is the number of variations the product might have (e.g. in consumer goods), we will end up with a big number representing high-level of complexity just in one product category.

The above-mentioned complexity shows itself when we want to gather and analyse data and also when we want to communicate the data: How can we collect the scattered data from all around the world? How do we re-analyse the data when some change happens in the system, like a change in fuel price? How do we communicate the results to the designers?

Basically, what PLM does is to gather and centralise all product-related data from all round the world and from different systems and provide decision-making and calculation capabilities necessary for conducting life cycle assessment.

This is fundamentally important for a life cycle assessment analysis because if proper and up-todate information about logistics, purchasing cost, and production data are not available, the results won’t have credibility.

However, the existing PLM solutions only partially cover the requirements of industrial ecologists regarding life cycle assessment. So, closer collaboration between practitioners in life cycle assessment area and software developers is necessary in the recent years to provide more suitable software. 

Technology Can Help

Fortunately in recent years, enterprise software has advanced significantly; a new area with the name of Product Life Cycle Management (PLM) has opened up and has covered sustainability issues on its way.

REFERENCES (1) http://www.lcacenter.org/LCA/LCA-definitions.html (2) A framework from Center for Life Cycle Analysis (Columbia University)

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Technology: Designing and Managing that Old Black Magic

Prof. braden allenby

In the song by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, “that old black magic” is, of course, love - powerful and unpredictable, common yet mysterious, and completely transformative. Thus, it is frequently overlooked until it happens to pounce on one. That technology is not dissimilar is an important insight for the technologist, modern manager or industrial ecologist.

Thus, this song crosses my mind as scientists in Arizona – a State defined by the Sonoran Desert and lying in a very arid portion of the United States - discuss how the Colorado River watershed, and thus water resources in the American West, will likely be affected by global climate change. One of their major points is that under most scientific scenarios Phoenix, Las Vegas, and other desert cities will inevitably “run out of water.” By their analysis, this will occur as precipitation patterns shift, the River flow shrinks and water appropriation law takes over. In this case, principles of American water law, and contentious negotiations among the states, means that Arizona’s and Nevada’s water rights to the Colorado are junior to California’s – or, in other words, that California gets first dibs all the water that’s left. So from their – scientific - perspective, Phoenix will wither in the desert. But from an engineering perspective, this is simply wrong, for

water availability almost anywhere is a pricepoint issue, not an absolute availability issue. A rise in price, reflecting increased scarcity or demand shifts, puts more technologies into play. In the short term, one gets technological substitution as existing but more expensive technologies become economic with price increases. Over the longer term, however, one tends to get unpredictable and fundamental improvements in technological systems. Thus, for example, if the flow in the Colorado River shrinks, there will be a point – more expensive, but not technologically infeasible – when Arizona can build desalinization plants, either in California or Mexico, and treat all the water it needs. Expensive? Of course. Political quagmire? Water in the West always is. But will we “run out of water” as some scientists fear? Not unless we choose to. Note, of course, that this doesn’t “solve” water availability in many developing countries, because consumers and governments lack the resources to support expensive water treatment and delivery technologies – but that the proper framing of water availability is still as a political choice and pricepoint issue, not as an absolute availability issue.

More broadly, global climate change plays the same tune. A major theme of that debate is the need to reduce fossil fuel use to reduce carbon

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dioxide emissions, bolstered by the 200 year projections that are routinely used in climate change debates. But such projections are far more speculative than they appear and than their adherents frequently claim because they systemically underestimate the unpredictability and power of technological evolution. For one thing, the focus on emissions presupposes a technological stasis that is historically questionable. For example, recent work at Carnegie Mellon University and elsewhere, including development of pilot scale technology, suggests that extracting carbon dioxide from the ambient atmosphere, liquefying it, and injecting it into geologic formations, is both economically and energetically feasible. This research is in prepublication stage, but if it, or any similar technology, is developed, it obsoletes our current understanding of, and approaches to, the “climate change problem.” The question shifts from fossil fuel use and emissions, to the much more profound one of what atmospheric chemistry, and dynamics, we as a species choose to have – and who gets to make that choice. In short, as in the water case climate change becomes a pricepoint issue.

This case also illustrates another fundamental weakness in current approaches, the tendency to project current trends into the future without assuming adjustment by other components of these complex human/built/natural integrated systems.

Thus, it is quite simply wrong to view computer projections of states well into the future as somehow “real,” for one thing we know for sure is that current rate of social and technological change makes them worthwhile warnings at best.

Valuable thought experiments, perhaps; probable in any sense, no.

Why do we cling to such projections, wrong though we know them to be? Perhaps in large part because we fundamentally don’t understand

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technology and technological systems; perhaps because we have a very human tendency to privilege the present, resulting in strong aversion to even the idea of technological evolution. Additionally, the agenda of proponents of particular policies may only in part be one of environmental quality; in many cases, it includes the more implicit social engineering goal of reducing consumption and restructuring capitalism, especially in America.

Thus, one concern expressed by environmentalists about ambient atmospheric carbon dioxide capture technologies is that because they enable continued use of fossil fuels they don’t adequately change the behavior of American consumers.

These arguments are important, but should not be allowed to confuse a more basic point: any student these days who hopes to contribute in a useful way to the world needs to be aware of the profoundly transformative effects of the technologies already in motion. Desalinization or ambient air carbon capture are economically, institutionally, and politically challenging, but they are trivial compared to the technological tsunami that curls above us: the integrated and accelerating co-evolution of nanotechnology, biotechnology, robotics, information and communication technology, and cognitive science (call them the Five Horsemen, or, less romantically, NBRIC). History indicates that even single technologies can redefine the world: railroads, for example, changed virtually all contemporary institutions radically: 1. Railroads required a uniform, precise system of time, and thus created global, “industrial time” and its associated culture; 2. Railroads created the need for, and co-evolved with, national scale communications systems (telegraph); 3. Railroad firms created modern managerial capitalism (modern accounting, planning, and administration systems);

The Author Braden Allenby spent over twenty years working for AT&T as counsel, research Vice president for technology and environment, and environment, health and safety Vice president.

During that period he also served for two years as Director of Energy and Environmental Systems at Lawrence Livermore National Labs. He also taught as an adjunct professor at Yale University School of Forestry, Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, Princeton Theological Seminary, and the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

He has authored various articles, book chapters, and books on industrial ecology, including Industrial Ecology, the leading engineering text in this field.

Portions of this article previously appeared in a column by the author in GreenBiz in September, 2006

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4. Railroad firms created modern capital and financial markets; 5. Railroads became potent symbol of national power and technological prowess (as in the U. S. in the last half of the 19th century, and for the Bolsheviks during the Revolution); 6. Railroads transformed landscapes at all scales: Chicago existed, and structured the Midwest economically and environmentally, because of railroads; 7. Railroads fundamentally changed economic and power structures (in the United States, for example, the technology validated American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, and restructured the economy from local/regional business concentrations to national scale trusts); and, finally, 8. Railroads changed world history by dramatically changed the underlying teleology of American culture from Jeffersonian agrarianism, an Edenic teleology, to a technologydriven New Jerusalem, a cultural schism that replays itself today in the different attitudes of Europeans and Americans towards many sustainability and environmental issues.

If a single defining technology has such broad effects, what are we to make of the coming NBRIC challenge, which integrates at least five foundational technologies? Industrial ecology suggests a few responses.

First and most important, always understand the system within which one is working. Few technological issues these days are not systems problems, and our inability to generate appropriate institutional and social responses arises as much from our misreading and misunderstanding of the systems involved as anything else.

Second, the implications of technological evolution are all too complex to understand a priori;

they can only be understood in real time as their relevant properties emerge. This requires us to develop far more flexible engineering, industrial, managerial, policy, ethical and governance options than we are used to. This is an increasingly critical gap in institutional and social competence, given that many experts argue that our institutions and social governance mechanisms (such as regulation and laws) are already decoupled from technological cycles because of the accelerating evolution of the latter (for example, ask yourself what tax laws apply to virtual currencies in virtual realities – most of which are freely convertible to world currencies at this point. What’s earned in Second Life or World of Warcraft no longer stays there.).

Third, an important source of resilience during periods of unpredictable and rapid change is the development of larger option spaces. That is, the odds that a system responds appropriately to unpredictable challenges increase as the options available to that system are increased. Thus, an important challenge to industrial ecologists, and technologists generally, is to use their understanding of the relevant systems and technologies to develop alternatives, even if each has risks, rather than tie the system only to particular responses which, if obsoleted by system evolution in real time, likely result in system crash. Design options, seek options, invest in options – and therefore augment resiliency in an uncertain environment.

Fourth, mistrust ideologies and rigid belief systems. In times of slow change, they may simplify cognition and thus be valuable; in times of rapid change, they only assure ineffectual and even dysfunctional response. The railroad did not just link together communities; it shattered old verities, including traditional ideas of time and space. We should anticipate no less in future. The problem, of course, is that times of turmoil are precisely those when we should eschew ideology, but for most of

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International Society for Industrial Ecology Introduction to the Student Chapter

us precisely the time when we seek the comfort and certainty of ideology. Fundamentalism is the dysfunctional handmaiden of change.

Understanding the power of technological evolution does not mean that technology will answer all our problems, nor justify unthinking technological optimism. But our abject failure to appreciate the power of technology does indicate that the current intellectual frameworks and tools we bring to understanding our anthropogenic earth are badly flawed, and that we do not yet know how to take ourselves, and our world, seriously. As Heidegger said in his essay “The Age of the World Picture,” [t]he flight into tradition, out of a combination of humility and presumption, can bring about nothing in itself other than self deception and blindness in relation to the historical moment.” So far, we indeed seem to have chosen self deception and blindness. Whether we continue to do so is the real question concerning technology. 

by Vered Doctori and Abhishek Agarwal The International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE) opened its doors for members in February 2001 after a diverse group of leaders joined forces in early 2000 to form the first and leading society dedicated to supporting research, applications, and communication related to the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of Industrial Ecology. Only a year later the Student Chapter of ISIE was established to provide students with opportunities for networking, research collaboration, and career development, while ensuring that students play an active role in the advancement of the ISIE via participation and contributions at the ISIE events.

The chapter is run by a group of committed student officers, who are in charge of the chapter development activities including recruitment, networking, conference planning, and communication with the ISIE council and external peer organisations. Every year, a special conference committee plans and runs the student activities at the ISIE and Gordon Research Conferences. Since industrial ecology students are spread all around the world, their main face-to-face activities take place at the annual conferences where students find great opportunities to meet with peers, industrial ecology professors, and industry professionals in an intimate setting. This year, the meeting will take place at the 2008 Gordon Research Conference on Industrial Ecology, Colby-Sawyer College, New London, New Hampshire, USA, 17–22 August, 2008.

During the year discussions are carried out online. Job opportunities, postdoctoral positions and other useful information in the field of industrial ecology are also often posted. The Student chapter has their website at http://www.isiestudents.com, where you can find planned activities as well as reports and photos from past conferences. There is also a section for student funding, IE programmes, and other professional development resources. The active involvement of the Chapter ensures a future generation of professionals who support the ISIE. The Student Chapter membership is free and it welcomes new students from all disciplines and from all countries. To join the ISIE Student Chapter discussion group, please send a blank email to: isie_studentssubscribe@yahoogroups.com.

To become a member, simply send an email to the Student Chapter President, Ming Xu (Ming.Xu.3@asu.edu) including your name, school & department, degree, and research interests. You are also encouraged to become an official member of the ISIE (done via www.is4ie.org) even though you don’t have to become an official member of the ISIE in order to participate in discussions.

For more information about the ISIE Student Chapter please contact the PR Officers – Abhishek Agarwal (abhi_mgmt@hotmail.co.uk) or Ramzy Kahhat (ramzy.kahhat@asu.edu).

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LiderA Factorial Module

A tool to design for the environment in search of sustainable construction

Pinheiro Manuel Duarte

Sustainable Design at Construction

Construction is one of the largest end users of environmental resources and one of the largest polluters of manmade products, and also an important area (Ding, 2008) in which the industrial ecology and design for environment can support a process to achieve sustainable products like buildings and built environment, that are projected to 25, 50 years or more. There are multiple sustainability assessment principles, strategies, actions, and tools (Waage, 2007) and the building environmental assessment tools are one of them (Cole, 1998).

In order to support design for environment and assessment, it is proposed a system approach and tool denominated LiderA, the Portuguese acronym for environmental leadership. LiderA is a Portuguese voluntary system, developed at TULisbon (Pinheiro e Correia, 2005). LiderA system is in place since 2005 (www.lidera.info) and has a global life cycle approach and 50 assessment criteria to sustainable construction, organized in: Site and integration, resources consumption efficiency, load impacts, indoor environment and functional aspects (durability, accessibility, environmental management and innovation).

LiderA Factorial Analysis and Applications

Factor 10!

2%!

"Factor 4!

20%!

Worst!

0%!

Actual practice!

14%!

Factor 1.14!

4%!

Factor 1.33!

16%!

Each criterion (numbered from C1 to C50) has environmental performance levels from the point of view of sustainability, which can be compared with different performance levels that should be better than existing practices. The application of this analysis to the actual situation of the first five certified projects shows their performance level (Figure 1).

One of them is the Jardim Atlântico Hotel that is located in the southwest coast of Madeira island, in the Atlantic Ocean. The construction Factor 1.6!

14%! of the hotel began in 1991 and was ready for opening in 1993. It had apartments with 0, 1 and 2 bedrooms and 8 bungalows. It has a good environmental performance (50% better than similar Figure 1 – Actual factorial level of the Jardim Atlantico hotels), including European Eco Label to tourist Hotel (Madeira) service and ISO14001 certification.

"Factor 2!

30%!

The Author Pinherio Manuel Duarte, DECivil/SHRHA, LiderA System, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon Technical University, Portugal

One module which is also available is a factorial approach which involves: (1) environmental aspects identification, (2) factorial improvement analysis to the project and/or to the users in short, medium and long term –1 to 3, 5-25 and 50 years, (3) the LiderA criteria environmental improvement performance improvement is compared with major life cycle cost in order to (4) support design decision and management, user mode or management.

Even with an average of environmental performance 50% better than other similar hotels, the LiderA factorial module application at Hotel Jardim Atlântico finds several opportunities of improvement, both in refurbishing of the buildings and in use and management in several areas, like energy or water.

C12 Electricity C16 Water C18 consumption C11 C15 C19 C26 C27 consumption Consumption from Electricity and losses Rainwater Wastewater Wastewater renewable Equipment in interior consumption! sources! efficiency! collection! treatment! recycling! spaces! control!

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C27 use!

C27 building!

Existing!

Potential!

8!

9!

C26 use!

C26 building!

C19 use!

C19 building!

C18 use!

C18 building!

C16 use!

C16 building!

C15 use!

C15 building!

C12 use!

C12 building!

C11 use!

C11 building!

0!

For example, beyond all the measures presented that contribute significantly to water use reduction, roof drainage is installed, so that rainwater may be collected (C19), leading it to a storage tank for garden watering, but there is no use. If it gets implemented, small changes, that can lead to the use of the collected water in the pool and other uses, will lead to the achievement of the reduction of consumption from public supply in 25%; if the wastewater is used for irrigating green areas, the possible achieved global reduction is 75%; this is factor 4.

The energetic field was targeted with many measures and special attention was given to the main goal, which was to reduce the electricity consumption (C11). Even so, in medium term, the increasing of equipment efficiency and wind energy and photovoltaic integrated façade will allow to achieve at least a factor 4 in electricity consumption and electricity from renewable sources.

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1!

2!

3!

4!

5!

6!

7!

Figure 2 – Profile example of some possible environmental measures to be applied to Jardim Atlântico Hotel

performance in energy, water, materials, loads, interior environment, and other functional areas.

The LiderA factorial approach allows you, even in preliminary design, to know where you are in environmental performance and which steps must be taken to improve the environmental performance. The results of the analysis applied to the Hotel Jardim Atlântico case show important variables of control, influence and management and also, new possibilities that could be implemented in the project in short, medium and long term, demonstrating the importance and potential of this factorial approach.  REFERENCES (1) Cole, Raymond J. (1998). Emerging trends in building environmental assessment methods. Building Research & Information, Volume 26, Number 1 / January 1, 1998, 3–6 p.

(2) Ding, Grace K.C. (2008). Sustainable construction - The role of environmental assessment tools.

Journal of Environmental Management, Volume 86, Issue 3, February 2008, Pages 451–464

Conclusion

The search for a sustainable level challenges construction and building design, users and managers to structurally improve the environmental

(3) Pinheiro, M. Duarte; Correia, F. Nunes (2005). LiderA - Portuguese voluntary sustainable assessment building system - main lines. The 2005 Sustainable Building Conference in Tokyo 27–29 September (SB05 Tokyo). Tokyo.

(4) Waage, Sissel A. (2007). Re-considering product design: a practical “road-map” for integration of sustainability issues. Journal of Cleaner Production, Volume 15, Issue 7, 2007, Pages 638–649

10!

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How Does Global Warming

andreea sabo

In the last years the subject of global warming has been increasing in popularity among politicians and gain the attention of the wide public. What effect does climate change have upon world’s economy and international policy?

And how much does it actually cost?

What is Global warming?

Solar short wave radiation that passes through the atmosphere is absorbed by the Earth’s surface and warms it. The heat causes emission of long wave (infrared) radiation back to the atmosphere.

A part of this radiation is lost in space, while some is absorbed and re-emitted by molecules of some of the gases present in the atmosphere. This leads to more warming of the Earth’s surface and troposphere, therefore to more heat, that emits infrared radiation again, and so on. The phenomenon is known as “Greenhouse effect” and it is responsible for the appearance of life on Earth, since without it, the mean world temperature would have been approximately 34 ºC lower, meaning -18 ºC. In consequence, an increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere can have major consequences on the climate and the environment.

There is however a number of scientists who argue that the main reason for the recent warming of the climate is Earth’s tendency of changing it’s axis and orbit around the sun – theory also known as Milankowitsch Cycles.

Yet, it is certain that human activity, mostly industrial, causes emissions of such greenhouse gases such as CO2, CH4, NO2, SF6, hidrofluorocarbons (HFC) or water vapor. The current level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is of 440 ppm CO2-equivilant , compared with 280 ppm before the industrial revolution, and with a growing rate of 2 ppm annualy.

A study published in 2005 under the lead of Sir Nicolas Stern attempts a calculation of the costs of climate change. According to the Stern Review, a business-as-usual scenario would lead to an increase up to 550 ppm CO2-equivilant by the middle of the century, this meaning a 2–3 ºC increase in temperature. Not exceeding this limit would prevent disastrous and unimaginable consequences on the climate, as the earth is today only 5 ºC warmer than in the last known ice age. The cost of the business-as-usual scenario could reach, according to the Stern Review, 5%–20% of world annual gross domestic product (GDP) by end of the century, while immediate action – reduction of up to 60% of emissions annually worldwide – would cost 1% of world annual GDP. Environmental Regulation

In order to lower the impact of climate change at the least possible cost, action needs to be taken immediately. Environment pollution is, from the economical point of view, a public good (or also known as “public bad”), characterised by externality (production/consumption of one market participant affects the benefit/utility of another market participant who is not financially compensated). So in order to achieve an efficient allocation for it, legal intervention is needed. As in the case of all environmental goods, policy interference has to internalise external effects (a polluter causes a market failure, by not taking into account the impact he is causing over other market participants, that means the external costs of his pollution).

In the matter of greenhouse gases emissions, one can differentiate between command and control, and market-based instruments.

Command and control instruments are prohibitions or non-transferable licenses (quotas), which set a restriction to firms’ emission rates. In the case of non-compliance, firms would have to pay

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g Effect Economy? a fine. This instrument is ecologically efficient, but requires intensive monitoring and is not cost effective. Market-based instruments, like taxes or transferable permits, are the cost efficient way to price the use of environment. In the case of taxes, firms are not forced to emit less, but will comply due to the modification of their marginal benefit curve. In order to set the efficient tax rate, the total marginal abatement costs for firms and the marginal benefit of pollution have to be know by the regulator. This requires a high amount of information, and risks to miss the environmental target. Tradable emission permits, on the other hand, create a tradable right of usage for a normally non-tradable good. The total emission target is set and the companies start trading – a firm will sell if it can avoid polluting at a least cost that the buyer firm can. The trade takes place until “supply” equals “demand” and the permit price per unity of emission is fixed to a constant level.

In conclusion, when used as a regulatory instrument, markets achieve the environmental target at the least possible cost. Yet, ecological efficiency and costs are not the only arguments that decide upon the regulation instruments. Last, but not least, policy plays an important role. Whether the government of a certain country decides to initially allocate the emission permits for free, or by auction, would have a major impact on the social acceptance of the system.

The Impact on World Economy and International Negotiations

On a national level, there are therefore no worries about environmental regulation. But what happens in a world with no central policy? As no legislation or penalties are possible on an international level, it is clear that a strategically behaviour could appear, and countries could attempt to “free-ride”. If some countries agree to lower their emissions, the whole planet would benefit anyway, letting therefore space for others to decide

not regulate. The countries that do not cooperate would spare costs, while the others would bare all the costs of pollution reduction and yet benefit less from their actions.

The European Union, constraint by its dependency of resource imports, has a very high interest in becoming more energy efficient and raising the use of renewable energies. Due to its energy policy, the EU plays today a leading role in international environmental negotiations. After ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, under which emission trading takes place at country level, the EU established the ETS (Emission Trading System), which will take place at firm level, starting in 2009. The target is to reduce 8% of emissions until 2012.

The main opponents of the European countries were states that did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol back in 1997: US, Australia, Japan, New Zeeland, Norway. Today, the US – with 25% of world greenhouse gases emissions and high production of coal, natural gas and crude oil – has remained the only developed country in the world that did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

Yet, after the UN Conference on Climate Change held in December 2007 in Bali (Indonesia), all participant states have agreed to negotiate a new global warming treaty by 2009 (as Kyoto runs out in 2012).

So after years of negotiations on the subject, the countries of the world seam to have agreed that taking immediate action will cost less then paying for the consequences of climate change.

Weather the planet will pay by mid century 1% or 20% of its GDP for trying to cope with global warming, it depends on the cooperation and serious implementation measures in each of the countries of the world. 

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Ecoefficiency: Philosophy, Theory, and Tools

dr. john r. ehrenfeld

Many applications of industrial ecological thinking and methods draw their practical implications from ecoefficiency—a strategic concept popularized over the past decade or so largely by industry.

Ecoefficiency was first described by Schaltegger and Sturm (1989) and then widely publicized in 1992 in Changing Course (Schmidheiny 1992), a publication of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). Since then it has been accepted as the key strategic theme for global business in relation to commitments and activities directed at sustainable development. The WBCSD describes ecoefficiency as “being achieved by the delivery of competitively priced goods and services that satisfy human needs and bring quality of life, while progressively reducing ecological impacts and resource intensity throughout the life cycle, to a level at least in line with the Earth’s estimated carrying capacity.”

The concept’s practical and theoretical importance lies in its ability to combine performance along two of the three axes of sustainable development, environment and economics. Issues concerning equity and other social properties are not included in the concept of ecoefficiency. The notion that increasing economic development would have to be correlated with lowering of environmental impact is not a new concept. This relationship was first popularized through the so-called I=PAT identity. Invented by Ehrlich and Holdren in the early 1970s, the relationship implies that to hold or reduce environmental impact (I) as population (P) and affluence (A) increase, technology (T) would have to become dematerialized (Ehrlich and Holdren 1972). Later, environmental scholars spoke of Factor 4, Factor 10, or more as estimates of just how much dematerialization would be

needed to offset economic and population growth (Reijnders 1998).

This broad description conveys the general thrust of the concept but offers no specifics as to how to reduce it to practice. The First International Conference on Quantified Ecoefficiency (Leiden), in 2004 highlighted this lack in its focus on providing quantitative interpretations of and methods for ecoefficiency.

Ecoefficiency is fundamentally a ratio of some measure of economic value added to some measure of environmental impact. The higher the value added, the more efficient is the use of environmental services. Alternately, some invert the ratio, which then generally becomes known as eco-intensity. Marginal values may be used to determine relative performance among alterna-

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tives. The number of possibilities associated with the term hints at one of its problems – simply understanding what is being discussed under the rubric of ecoefficiency. But this problem, which can be handled by careful communication, pales in relation to the next: quantification.

• Choosing among alternative processes and products (microscale); • Evaluating the performance of a company or other organizational entity; • Evaluating the performance of a country, region, or other macroentity.

I use quantification broadly as the process of choosing and enumerating the expressions that will become the numerator and denominator of the ratio. Both are problematic. Computing the denominator (environmental impact) faces the same issues that are common to life-cycle assessment or any other environmental assessment methodology: What impacts should be included, what boundaries are appropriate, what output metrics should be used (mass, effects measures, values), and so on.

The chemical product company, BASF, uses a simple form of ecoefficiency to choose among alternative processes and options. By plotting the cost (or value) and impact relative to a “reference” process/product on a two-by-two grid, those options that produce gains in both dimensions are easily distinguished. This simple tool and similar variants are very useful for strategic decisions within a firm, but are only loosely connected, if at all, to global improvements consistent with the limits driving other related concepts such as Factor X.

The economic expression is somewhat less controversial, although not without problems.

Some are analytic and others normative. Because sustainable development is about both human welfare and justice, one needs to ask whether a measure that is limited to the neoclassical notion of aggregate social welfare is consistent with this overarching context. Even if the answer is yes, the question of the validity of standard measures of welfare remains. How should the contribution of a firm be computed? The usefulness and acceptability of ecoefficiency is now and likely will continue to be buffeted by the same arguments that have affected the acceptability and legitimacy of both the numerator and denominator.

This issue cannot be resolved without examining the way the results of ecoefficiency calculations are interpreted and applied in practice. The Conference speakers pointed to several potential uses. The main possibilities are as follows:

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The same can be said of macrolevel applications of ecoefficiency. Ecoefficiency can be used to examine alternative governmental policies in the same way that companies rate product alternatives. It can also be used to characterize the performance of an economy by adding up the aggregate social welfare or value added and dividing by the total environmental impact. This procedure may be useful in comparing one nation or company to another, but again tells little about the direction of progress toward the goal of sustainable development. And again the shortcoming has both a practical and a theoretical basis.

Enumeration at this level necessarily requires aggregation and simplification, which are strongly value-driven processes, but technicians generally determine ecoefficiency, working without any public input into the determination of what values are appropriate. Also, as I mentioned The Author Dr. John Ehrenfeld, Director of the Technology, Business and Environment Programme at MIT Reprinted with permission of the Journal of Industrial Ecology. This article originally appeared in Volume 9, Number 4, 2005. It has been modified slightly.

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already, there is great controversy over the validity of standard social welfare functions (GDP, for example) and product (value added) or process (total cost accounting) formulas. Methods are approximate and in practice suffer from limited availability of data. They tend to be complex and lack transparency, so that the result of their use is difficult to communicate to the public and even to key decision makers.

But a more important question always lurks in the background. Ecoefficiency is a notion that is meaningful only in the context of the economic model of sustainable development. Although the WBCSD’s statements indicate that production output should be kept “in line with the Earth’s carrying capacity,” there is nothing in the analytic representation of ecoefficiency that provides a clue to this. Standard economic theory assumes that limitless resources will always be available as scarcity incentivizes sufficient innovation to produce substitutes. Carrying capacity simply does not enter the economic calculus. The present, clearly unsustainable state of the world trumps this

theory, rendering ecoefficiency only a partially useful concept.

Notwithstanding this limitation, more ecoefficient choices are always to be preferred over poorer choices, and in this sense ecoefficiency can be a useful tool for strategists and policy makers.

On the other hand, its casual use can become seen as the “solution” to unsustainability (as business seems to be saying), shifting the burden (in the language of systems dynamics) away from the search for effective solutions.

Maintaining sustainability, for example, in terms of not exceeding carrying capacity, in an absolute, global sense is the goal, even of a process model such as sustainable development, in which this explicit goal is implicit. If ecoefficiency is to become a useful indicator for determining choice, it must be coupled with other indicators and tools.

Even the direction of change toward sustainability would be negative if increases in ecoefficiency were to be offset by larger increases in total output. Current gains in ecoefficiency, according to both corporate and governmental data, are small, far short of the radical jumps consistent with factor X or other models that reflect the Earth’s limits.

It seems much more compelling that policy and product innovation should seek substitutes that radically reduce the amount of stuff that humans all over the globe use to produce well-being. 

REFERENCES (1) Ehrlich, P. R. and J. P. Holdren. 1972. One-dimensional ecology. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 28(5): 16–27.

(2) Reijnders, L. 1998. The factor “X” debate: Setting targets for eco-efficiency. Journal of Industrial Ecology 2(1): 13–22.

(3) Schaltegger, S. and A. Sturm. 1989. Ökologieinduzierte entscheidungsprobleme des managements. Ansatzpunkte zur ausgestaltung von instrumenten. [Ecology induced management decision support. Starting points for instrument formation.] WWZ-Discussion Paper No. 8914.

Basel, Switzerland: WWZ. (4) Schmidheiny, S. 1992. Changing course: A global business perspective on development and the environment.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Fuel Consumption-optimised to any Destination: From the Eco Route to Adaptive Route Calculation Consumption-optimised driving means driving “green”, for the most part, at least – that is the goal of new route recommendations that Bosch subsidiary Blaupunkt will offer in the route selection of vehicle navigation systems as a new, additional option in the future. In addition to the selection of a quick or a short route, it is also already possible to choose a so-called eco route. This route takes environmental as well as economical aspects into account. In the future, it will also be possible to define vehicle-specific profiles that are also based on individual driving behav-ior to enable consumption-optimised “green” routes.

A Fine Balance between Distance and Time

Navigation systems allow drivers to select different routes according to the route options.

Taking into account just one option often make a big difference in which route is calculated. The short route, for example, usually uses country and district roads, taking the driver through towns and villages on roads with lower speed lim-its. In contrast, the quick route favors roads without a lot of intersections like highways, national roadways and city bypasses and might be considerably longer in terms of the kilometers travelled. Systems from Blaupunkt are more advanced than that. They weigh the distance against the time, i.e. different road attributes such as towns to pass through or intersections to cross, and calculate the most environmentally friendly and economical routes.

On the Road in the Future on Consumptionoptimised Routes

The next development planned by the Blaupunkt engineers includes a process to improve the profiles defined by different vehicle-specific characteristics and driv-ing behavior. In addition to the fuel consumption for the actual distance, this op-tion also takes the consumption for the expected acceleration phases into account. This

includes such parameters as the vehicle type – size, weight, con-sumption and the type of drive – as well as the driver’s driving behavior. Is it a racy driving style with lots of acceleration and starts and stops or a cooler, calcu-lated approach, observing all the speed limits and with a keen eye on the other traffic?

Driving behavior makes a positive contribution to environmental protection As a result, calculating the consumptionoptimized route incorporates vehicle pro-files and driver-specific influences, along with data on the type of road traveled and the known road attributes. Depending on the route profiles, vehicle type and driving behavior, the route recommendation is highly individual and saves fuel on the best route to the selected destination. 

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34 events In the Heart of North West Germany Maximilian Lechner

Marc Obieglo From the 1st to 7th of November sheer madness haunted our beloved city of Bremen: over 170 of you ESTIEMers plus about 30 Alumni gathered to hold the 35th ESTIEM Council Meeting. It was the first time for our Local Group Bremen to arrange an event of this size, and it was a great pleasure especially as we were celebrating our fifth anniversary!

We are happy that ESTIEM gave us the opportunity to host this event and can recommend it to every active Local Group. Of course, the amount of effort put in is huge, but in the end when you can literally see everyone enjoying what the team has done and you get awesome feedback you understand it was all worth it – probably one of the best learning experiences you can have as a student.

Special thanks to the organising team that made us all enjoy seeing the city, learning about local culture, having fancy parties in funny costumes, supported us during hard working sessions and recharged our stomachs at the end of the day – you guys were awesome: Sebastian, Timm, Swenja, Salar, Burak, Bastian, Tobias, Dennis, Elias, Jose, Anja, Verena, Jan, Friso, Birte, David, Tobias, Christian, Markus, Oliver, Konrad, Tillmann, Christina, Benedikt – we had a great year together!

We would like to thank all participants for making the week worthwhile as well as the Board 2007 and the Council Meeting Eindhoven organisers for their support.

See you somewhere in Europe! 

Council Meeting Bremen

Enjoy the Island!

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EVENTS

Vision Cambridge

The name of the Vision was ‘Branded!’ Many people think of branding simply as a logo. If you are maybe one of them, after this Vision you would probably change your mind about it!

Nowadays most companies define branding as one of their core competencies. For example, working at P&G is about more than business, it’s about brands. Their brands are the heart of the company and the heart of all their decisions. During the lectures we were listening to experiences about creating and managing brands of some big companies. The guys from Accenture, consultancy agency, lead us through a workshop. It was a very interactive session that everybody enjoyed.

Some of us hadn’t known much about destination branding, so we found the lecture “Putting Northamptonshir back on the map” very interesting. All together we were exploring the world of brands and what makes a brand successful here in the 21st Century.

After all day spent with some company representatives and their famous brands, in the evening, in front of Guildhall on the market place, we met our guide. It was a cute old lady. I forgot her name, but I certainly remember some of her stories. She took us on a journey through some hidden streets of Cambridge, still inhabited by some strange fellows. I doubt you can assume what it was about, but I can tell you that it was my first ghost tour. We were standing in front of some haunted houses and chapels, listening to some incredible stories! The lady was so serious

all the time and she seemed like she really believe in all those legends. But when we asked her if she had ever seen a ghost, she told us she hadn’t, but her neighbour had!

It was interesting that the whole Vision was one case study about the ESTIEM brand. At the beginning we were divided into couple of groups, in which we were supposed to discuss the way that companies perceive ESITEM, how other students see us and how we see ESTIEM by ourselves. By attending lectures and workshops during the seminar we got some really useful input and in the end we tried to implement the acquired knowledge and some new methods in order to improve the ESTIEM brand. On the last session we succeeded to see some real problems of the ESTIEM brand and to offer really creative solutions.

During our free time we had the chance to visit some of the oldest Colleges in Cambridge.

Each of them has its own library, dining hall, chapel and, of course, some crazy stories (like the ones about duck and secret society, poor tourist on the lawn…).

Then it’s coming the episode about ESITEMers in crazy London. Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abbey, Tate Britain, St Paul’s Cathedral, Camden Markets, London Eye, Hyde Park… it’s simply huge: you should definitely experience it! The nights we could have spent chasing ghosts or Harry Potter, but going out in some famous Cambridge night clubs was much better an idea I guess. 

ana mihajlovıc

This January some ESTIEMers managed to find rail gate number 9¾ and simply – by passing on other side of the wall – entered Harry Potter’s fabulous world. Actually, we were little wizards who were learning, having fun together and sharing secret tricks for five phenomenal days spent in Cambridge!

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The Business Taste of Russia! marıa kravcova

As St. Petersburg wasn’t in the list of those Local Groups, which organise Vision Seminars this year, we decided to make our own project. Something not as serious as Vision, but not just fun as Activity Week. We tried to do our best… Let see what came out of it!

It was our first lunch at Council Meeting Bremen…

One girl came to me and said: “Hi! I’m Anna. I’m a participant of the Business Seminar, which you organise.” She told me all this with a huge smile on her face.

My first thought was: “If all our participants are like Anna, we will have a great event”… And I was right!

As all of you probably know, the last week be-

Business Seminar St. Petersburg

vent us from taking the city tour! We walked around the city and sat in a café to warm up a bit.

That day we also had a lecture about Russian Stock Market, we learned a lot about it and we compared it with the European one. And we finished our day among ESTIEMers in the famous Metro Club!

On Thursday we were in a hurry because we had two company visits, which took place in different parts of the city! First company was Baltika – the biggest Russian beer producer. It was really interesting to know the “inside” part of this business, which is very developed in Russia. The second visit was to a tourist company. We had a lecture and even a small excursion with the company representatives! This day we had one more excursion: a really nice and a bit cold night sightseeing tour!

Friday began for us with a lecture about Technological Entrepreneurship, where we heard a lot of useful things.

An excursion to the most famous museum – fore the event is the most strenuous for organisers.

Hermitage – was also planned on Friday. We thought Everything is ready but it always seems that something that making a simple excursion is a bit boring… so we is missing. The thing is, we had this crazy week right organised a competition with solving riddles, running after Bremen. Actually, we called our seminar “a family in different halls, searching for paintings… event” because there were thirteen participants. Maybe To make this day full of cultural events, we decided that is the reason why such a warm and friendly atmos- to go to the theatre. Have you ever been to a Russian phere accompanied us during the project? theatre? No? Then you missed a lot!

Wednesday began at 11:00 a.m. when we met on Nevsky Prospect, St. Petersburg main avenue, and started our search for the Doll Gallery. By the time we had found it we became a bit frozen. Seemed like St. Petersburg had decided to show our guests all the beauty of Russian winter! But the weather didn’t pre-

Usually participants thank organisers for a good event. But now I want to thank all participants for this unforgettable week! Turks who loved the parties so much, they could hardly get enough… Germans who were really good roommates and were never late… 

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EVENTS

Marketing in the Network Economy Vision K2K Local Groups Kaiserslautern and Karlsruhe decided to do something together again, between December 2nd and 9th! And that something was our Vision K2K “Marketing in the network economy”.

As the last day was full of activities Friday was meant to be a bit more relaxing. After a lecture concerning marketing and the web by a local professor we went to ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe) which is the centre for Art & Media in Karlsruhe where we visited the exhibition “You_Sir. The Century of the Consumer”. In a one-hour guided tour we learnt how artists tried to put the audience in the middle of their artworks and the different approaches to it during the last 50 years.

On Saturday we made an excursion to the Daimler Museum in Stuttgart. There the participants visited an exhibition about the automotive history. After coming back the participants had to prepare dinner themselves for the highlight of the Karlsruhe part: the legendary tram party sponsored by Ferchau! During a tram party, about 170 people drive around the city in a tram having drinks and dancing to music.

The next morning we had breakfast together and then we already had to say good-bye to the participants and promised to see each other somewhere in Europe. This event had been a lot of fun to the organisers and we want to thank all the participants that visited us. 

Tobias hemmerlein

On Monday the academic part started: we went for a company visit, with a very nice and a little bit confused local guide. After that, we attended a lecture by Prof. Oliver Wendt concerning Pricing in network economies. We learned about the challenges and obstacles on the subject, the differences between Pricing in the presence of Supply Side Network Effects and Demand Side Network Effects .

The next day started with a lecture concerning entrepreneurship by Dipl. Kfm Felix Hansen.

The lecture consecrated itself to definitions, concepts, examples and practical implications all around the subject. We learned about the historical concept of the idea “Entrepreneurship” and the related knowledge management. After that, we took a tour to the famous Fritz Walter Stadium with another very nice local guide. The rest of the day we spent in the city at the Christmas market, until we went to the next party stop.

On our last day in Kaiserslautern we had a brunch. After that, our participants took the train to Karlsruhe. After bringing everybody to their hosts we made sure that people were able to get to know Local Group Karlsruhe better.

The next day started with a scavenger hunt through the city of Karlsruhe. By following hints the participants explored the city and its most

But why?

Andrea Deutsch

After a really long time of planning, we were glad as the first participants arrived at Kaiserslautern on Sunday morning. Participants from Finland, Turkey, Poland, Romania, France and Germany took part. Though the weather was really bad, we had a lot of fun. To get to know each other better, we went bowling Sunday and hoped for the participants missing to have a good ride through the rain and storm.

important “sights”. After that we met at the campus where we had two lectures. The first one was from a company called Lanxess. We learned about iron oxide and new and innovative distribution channels you have to use in order to stay competitive. The second lecture was from Merck and we learnt how Merck as a manufacturing company uses push and pull marketing in order to sell their products. After a brewery visit in the evening we played a fun German Christmas game called “Wichteln”. For this occasion, everybody brought a small present, which was wrapped and put on a table. By rolling a dice, anyone with a six could unwrap a present. This way everyone got a present from an unknown person.

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Bosch-ESTIEM Workshop 2007

Henriette Tas

On 22nd and 23rd of November it was time for a new edition of the Bosch-ESTIEM workshop. Around 20 enthusiastic members of ESTIEM travelled to Abstatt (near Stuttgart) to get to know more about Bosch as a company and in particular to learn more about purchasing within Bosch. It all started after lunchtime with a lot of information about Bosch and a pile of chocolates, so we would not run out of energy. So take a seat and hold on!

The afternoon started with a short introduction about Bosch and the workshop. And since no ESTIEM event can start without a get-to-know game, all participants as well as the accompanying employees of Bosch were introduced to each other with a small game – again including chocolates!

The next presentation focused on the way Bosch organises its purchasing department and went more into depth about facts and figures around purchasing within Bosch. It gave a good insight in the size of Bosch and what kinds of goods, but also services, need to be purchased. A very informative beginning of the workshop, but we all followed it closely not to miss any useful information for the program of the next day: the case study.

The reasons to come to the Bosch workshop appeared to be rather similar for most ESTIEMers.

Not only provides the workshop a fun way of meeting some ESTIEMers; and it is a very interesting event concerning the content to expand and deepen our IEM knowledge; it is also an ideal way to learn more about the opportunities Bosch provides for students and starters and for Bosch to see which ESTIEMers would be valuable to them.

So, the stage opened for the purchasing trainees to share their experiences in Bosch with us.

To get an idea of a production system of Bosch, a plant in Feurerbach was visited. This is one of the oldest and biggest plants of Bosch and we had a closer look at the production process of the CP3 and CP4 high-pressure diesel pumps. This was very interesting, because in the production processes of the two pumps different approaches were used and therefore the organisation of the

production process was totally different. This gave really interesting insights in advantages and disadvantages of both processes. Though absorbing information became slightly more difficult, and it was time to check in to the hotel and go on with the informal evening program.

To conclude the first day of the Bosch-ESTIEM Workshop 2007 we had dinner in a lovely cellar restaurant where we could try the famous spätzles.

This is a regional (noodle/spaghetti like) specialty, made of kind of egg and flour dough. To continue this amazing evening we went to a bar where the great atmosphere helped getting to know each other a lot faster.

Unfortunately, the fun of the night got back to us when we had to get up for the second day of the workshop. Luckily this did not have any impact on motivation and a great day would come. On Friday we worked the whole day on a purchasing case study. The assignment was to work as a purchasing team and to choose the right supplier for Bosch.

Lots of information was given and calculations had to be made as well. Finally the decision had to be made on as well qualitative as quantitive decision variables. Different groups had different methods to decide what variables where the most important. This resulted in a ranch of diverse solutions and presentations. In the end the trainees showed us the solution, which is best according to Bosch.

The case study gave much more insight in the purchasing methods of Bosch, and reflected what problems can occur in the purchasing process.

The Bosch-ESTIEM workshop 2007 came to an end and everybody enjoyed the workshop thoroughly, learned a lot about purchasing within Bosch and got a better view on working for Bosch.

Tired all participants went home. And I also must say I had a great time! 

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EVENTS

TIMES Semi-final Novi Sad

During the two days of the competition, the participants solved two case studies of our sponsors: Carlsberg Serbia and Lafarge BFC. The main assignment of the first case was determining the marketing strategy of one of Serbia’s most famous beer brands. The second case was actually a mixture of engineering and management, since it involved optimisation of the production process, as well as setting up the strategic development for the future period. Besides the two sponsors mentioned, our event was also supported by a third sponsor, OTP Bank, as well as the Faculty of technical sciences, and many other supporters, institutions and media.

Adding ESTIEM spirit to the competition resulted in a fantastic combination of an competitive and academic and some fun and relaxed activities.

“Climbing up the sunshine mountain” at the opening and final ceremony, in front of more than 100 guests each time, only proves that point. The city tour on the first day, along with beautiful weather in the middle of February, positively affected the already good atmosphere among the participants before the competition started.

The gala dinner took place in one of the most exclusive restaurants of Novi Sad. The opportunity was perfect for announcing the winners of the Semi-final, the best presenter, as well as for handing in the prizes and gifts of the sponsors to the winning teams. As expected, the competition was full of suspense until the very end. The jury, consisting of company, faculty and consultancy

representatives, had a difficult task to assess the performance and success of the teams. After serious calculation and discussions, the results were finally out: 1. Warsaw 2. Groningen 3. Eindhoven Each and every one of the teams left a good impression and only a small difference in the final results decided the final winner of this Semi-final.

Although there can be only one winner of each competition, all teams showed a great amount of enthusiasm, team work and knowledge.

Local Group Novi Sad prides itself in the fact that it’s one of the most active local groups and especially, on having the opportunity to organise the Semi-final. Words of appraisal given by the participants only shows the success of this event.

What’s even more important for Local Group Novi Sad is the fact that a significant number of newcomers took part in the organisation of the event itself, and, in that way, felt the true ESTIEM spirit! Gratitude goes on to all our members!

To sum up, the TIMES Semi-final 2008 in Novi Sad was a true success! So, what would be your next move? To come and visit Novi Sad, of course! 

Mladen Radisic

After seven international ESTIEM events, Local Group Novi Sad organised its eighth and so far biggest and most important event: TIMES Semifinal Novi Sad 2008. From February 22nd to 25th, our wonderful town was the host of seven teams: Belgrade, Eindhoven, Groningen, Istanbul Bogazici, Skopje, Tampere and Warsaw. Unfortunately, the remaining three teams couldn’t make it to Novi Sad, for different reasons, but that didn’t affect the quality of the competition and the good times we had in Serbia’s capital of culture…

40 Professional

The Oerlikon Group is Partner of ESTIEM since January 2008.

It consists of six business units, that are active in machine and plant engineering: solar technology, thin-film coating, vacuum systems, textile machines, drive systems and precision components. In 2006, more than 19 000 employees at 170 sites in 35 countries generated sales of CHF 2.3 billion at an EBIT of CHF 329 million. Sales of considerably more than CHF 5 billion are projected for 2007.

Thin Films as Solar Collectors Experts today agree: photovoltaic technology is the energy source of the future. While the costs of fossil fuels continue to rise in the face of increasing demand and the growing shortage of resources, the generation of electric power from solar energy will soon reach grid parity, with thin-film photovoltaic technology leading the way. Forecasts of annual growth rates up to the end of the decade confirm this trend: a mere 2% rise in primary energy consumption will translate into a growth rate for photovoltaics of some 50%, with the specific field of silicon-based thin-film technology and related plant engineering expanding at even higher rates. This area is thus the fastest growing market, not only in the field of regenerative energy sources, but in the entire energy sector as well.

Unimagined Possibilities

The advantages of thin-film technology over conventional polycrystalline solar cells (which are based on wafers like those also used in the semiconductor industry), are many and varied. Thinfilm modules use some 200 times less silicon – a significant reduction, which means that in Central Europe these units can deliver the same amount of energy it took to fabricate them, or energy payback, as it is known, in as little as two to three years. In contrast, monocrystalline solutions require double that time for energy amortization, and the costs are also correspondingly lower. The availability of the raw material needed - gaseous silicon-hydrogen compounds - is unlimited and there is no competing demand for it from the computer chip industry. The light-converting semiconductor material can be deposited on large surface areas, enabling module manufacture without the need for cell assembly. The lighter design opens up entirely new possibilities for architectural applications. Moreover, this young technology still possesses great potential for optimization.

50% Increase in Efficiency

Oerlikon Solar has been involved in developing this future-oriented technology since its early days, playing a decisive role in its advancement. In 2007, once thin-film technology using amorphous silicon had been successfully established, the company also brought its micromorphous tandem cell to the market. Compared with cells made from amorphous silicon this new solution, which constitutes the second generation of thin-film technology, possesses an additional microcrystalline silicon film. This double-layer structure makes optimum use of the sun’s light spectrum, as the two layers combine to convert the entire spectrum of solar irradiation, in the visible as well as infrared range, into electric power. This is why the efficiency of a micromorphous tandem cell is some 50% higher than that of the amorphous cell, thereby achieving overall efficiency potentials of 10% and higher.

Power the World

There is no doubt about it – solar energy is booming. Already today, everyone is talking about power from the sun as a clean alternative to fossil and nuclear fuels. There is still little awareness, though, of the gigantic potential of this energy source. With 120 000 terawatt/year (annual worldwide energy demand currently amounts to 13 TW), the sun offers sufficient clean energy to meet total worldwide demand for energy over the long term. These facts are generating considerable economic interest and offer the perspective of a gigantic market for the future. The thin-film PV market is a significant beneficiary of this development.

Oerlikon Solar, leader in the field of thin-film solar technology and currently the only provider of proven turnkey production facilities for solar modules of this type, is looking forward to further expanding its activities and position on the market. 

Working in Consultancy

Opportunities for Industrial Engineers

In today’s fast-changing business world, organisations face complicated questions and problems. The best solutions and improvement ideas are generally identified with a structured mindset, quantitative-qualitative analyses and a human touch. In this regard, industrial engineering provides students with the opportunity of experiencing the best of two worlds, engineering, analysis (the hard side) and business cases, real issues with the human factor (the soft side).

During their studies, industrial engineering students work on various topics such as profitability, logistics and process improvement. Furthermore, they have the opportunity to study real-world business cases. Over the recent years, in addition to “business as usual”, new job opportunities have emerged for industrial engineers. “Business as usual” describes certain jobs, which require the knowledge of basic industrial engineering principles such as manufacturing, supply chain and

quality improvement. Currently, most of the industrial engineers work in these types of classical jobs. However, the recently emerged “new world jobs”, mostly related to case analysis and problem solving, provide great personal development and compensation opportunities. Due to their educational advantages, industrial engineers are considered to be one of the ideal job candidates in the new world sectors such as consultancy, investment banking and private equity.

Since globalisation has become a major phenomenon over the recent years, the growth strategies of organisations have changed. Currently, neither decreasing production costs nor presenting new products in saturated markets are as profitable as penetrating into new markets, especially in developing countries. As a result, the demand for multi-country operations is increasing as well as the need for consultancy and investment banking services. Although, consultancy services temporarily lost their appeal after the burst of the “dot.com” and “telecommunication” bubbles between 2000 and 2002, the demand for consultancy services in Europe has sharply increased after 2002 and consultancy has once again become one of the top sectors within the last decade.

OZAN ozaskınlı

As the industrial engineering education comprises of diverse projects and internship programs, students have the opportunity to develop their analytical skills and business understanding. Until recently, industrial engineers mainly focused on “business as usual”. However, with the new world business trends, tremendous job opportunities, which mainly focus on problem solving and decision making, are emerging especially in consultancy, investment banking and private equity funds. As a result of the high growth of these sectors within the last three to four years, industrial engineers are becoming one of the top candidates along with MBA graduates. This article aims to provide an overall perspective about new world job opportunities for industrial engineers based on the experience of Helix Management Consultants working in alliance with Booz Allen Hamilton.

PROFESSIONAL

42

On the other hand, investment banking is a sector, which has been mainly developing through the increasing merger and acquisition (M&A) activities and new business start-ups. The number of M&A activity has gradually increased over the last five years. In the European investment-banking sector, revenues of around USD 23 billion were generated in 2006 as a result of a compound annual growth rate of around 30% in revenues from 2002 to 2006. It is estimated that revenues will also continue to grow in the following years.

With the increasing global capital flow, private equity funds have also gained importance as a source for companies that are in financial distress as well as young firms that offer a significant growth potential. The aim of private equity funds is to capture profit opportunities in growing companies through buyout investments. A sharp increase has been observed in the number of private equity funds over the recent years. In Europe, the amount of investment has increased from USD 32 billion in 2002 to USD 148 billion in 2006. In addition, private funds under management have reached USD 150 billion in 2006 with a compound annual growth rate of 44% since 2002.

The tremendous growth in the consultancy, investment banking and private equity fund sectors are translated into many job opportunities.

Since the main goal in these sectors is to perform accurate analysis and to create the right action plans in order to solve problems or make the best investment and buyout decisions; superior analytical skills as well as a thorough business understanding are expected from job applicants.

As a result, these sectors are all in a quest for the most talented candidates. In order to attract the best, they are generally willing to pay the highest wages. Therefore, the average compensation in Western Europe and the United States (base REFERENCES (1) International Financial Services London – IFSL Research – Private Equity 2007 (2) International Financial Services London – IFSL Research – Financial Market Trends Europe vs US 2007 (3) Top MBA – International MBA Recruitment and Salary Report 2007

salary plus bonuses) is around USD 130 000 for MBA graduates.

Currently, MBA graduates are the ideal candidates for a job in these sectors. However, a common view is that the growing staff needs of these sectors will be increasingly met through the recruitment of industrial engineers. For instance, 40% of the current workforce in Helix Management Consultants consists of industrial engineers. In this regard, the demand for MBAs in these sectors will also point out the job opportunities for industrial engineers. By recruiting 45% of the MBA graduates in the world, consultancy and financial services were the top MBA hiring sectors in 2007. In consultancy services, the share of MBA graduates among the new hires is 22% with a 39% growth in 2007. In financial services, the recruitment of MBA graduates is essential, as they are highly suitable for the M&A departments. On the other hand, as a new sector, private equity funds are also highly attractive for MBA graduates. The share of MBA graduates who prefer private equity funds has substantially increased during 2007. As a result, these sectors recently recruit nearly 50% of the MBA graduates around the world.

All in all, with a diverse academic curriculum, industrial engineers are able to link analytical skills with real business cases and adapt to different topics. The new world jobs in consultancy, investment banking and private equity funds, which require fast adaptation to dynamic business needs, will provide tremendous job opportunities for industrial engineers. Students who develop themselves in problem structuring, analytical and result oriented thinking will be among the best candidates for these hot job opportunities. 

iNSIDE estiem 43 Cultural Prejudice

Gourmet as Serb?

Serbs are Gourmets

Serbs are very Jealous

There is a phrase, which says: “Love goes trough belly”. So, if you want to charm your love, you should start learning how to cook. 

Since we are proud nation, we always fight for our ‘territory’, especially if we are talking about man-woman relations. There is a phrase: ‘Balkan syndrome’ which explains that we are keeping our property churlishly from the others.

So, if you find someone you like and he/she is busy, just forget it! You don’t need a problem.

Serbs are Improvisers

Why do we need a plan for anything? It’ll take some time for writing. Isn’t it easier just to follow your hear and experience till final result?

Sometimes, people find us un-organised just because we are not loosing time on planning.

Following out example, you’ll see it’s not always important to prepare each step! At the end, we always finish our obligations right on time!

SOME LESSONS IN SERBIAN You are very beautiful

Veoma si lep

How are you?

Kako si?

Cheers

Živeli

Hi

Zdravo

This is our first love.

We adore preparing meals, find some new cook receipts and surprise our friends with nice, tasty dinner. Since Serbia is connection between north and south, there is a mixture of different spice.

You can find Turkish, Hungarian, Italian and French kitchen.

Katarına gavrıc

If you visit a website talking about Serbs, you will see a description such as: brave, proud, beautiful, intelligent, friendliness.These are standard epithets, but there is something more interesting about us.While I was thinking which description is the best, I found myself in doubt since we are different from person to person. But, I will try to make some things clear.

INSIDE ESTIEM

44

Successful ESTIEMers Marko Ljubicic

Nikola Zivlak

It is well known that ESTIEMers are open-minded people, who love to discover the world around them. As most of the other ESTIEMers, Nikola Zivlak and Marko Ljubičić had the chance to visit so many countries around our beloved Europe, with the furthest point to the East being – Istanbul. Well, that is not so far away, is it?

Ergo, something had to be changed. Upon their graduation in late 2006, and obtaining M.Sc. titles from the Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Serbia, Nikola and Marko had so many roads open. Internships, job opportunities, one road leads to Berlin, another one to London, Grenoble, Porto, Helsinki… It all sounded great, if not perfect, but

they still hadn’t discovered the distant East, the true Orient, and the civilisations so different than our common intertwined European culture.

Alea iacta est, it will be China.

Several months later, the two ESTIEM alumni found themselves in Shanghai, the largest city in the world’s most populous country. Having been granted scholarships by the Chinese government, Nikola and Marko began their Ph.D. studies in Business and Management at Donghua Daxue, one of China’s top 100 and among Shanghainese top five universities.

They have never actually been more strongly immersed into an environment so much different than anything they have encountered before, an environment where not a single word could be understood, among the people whose culture, customs and philosophy in life was to a greater extent different than those of the Europeans. But, to their amazement, the story of the ‘Land of the Dragon’ soon started to unveil, just like the meaning of ‘hanzi’ (such as the one for ‘house’ (家), representing a pig under a roof, i.e. ‘security’, ‘stability’ and ‘peace in home’), characters that are a ‘living’ testament from the times the ancestors of the Chinese etched these beautiful pictures in stone and carved them in bones. They began to enjoy uncovering the tale of one of the four ancient civilisations in the world, through the vivid pictures that appear before the eyes on the faces of the people in the streets, on the subway and in the university canteen. This old man could be an ancient wise man; that girl you can easily picture as a woman with a straw hat on a vast rice field centuries ago; this young fellow is surely a descendant of a brave soldier from Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s army the tourists so greatly admire in Xi’an’s terracotta soldiers.

45

in China Although everyone learned about it in school, and read much about it in books and media, we live in a kind of latent ignorance of Zhonnguo, and are essentially unaware of the importance of this country in global terms. We, the rest of the world, are so bombarded with talk of China’s ‘economy’ that one could be forgiven for forgetting that flesh-and-blood people actually live there, and it is frightful how readily our economics-obsessed societies can reduce so many lives to a statistics sheet.

Despite of the language barriers and cultural differences (Did anybody say ‘chopsticks’?), the two guys managed to fit in nicely. Their Ph.D. programme supervisor, professor Xu Ming, the university staff, and other students, accepted the newcomers warmly and with a wish to make their life more enjoyable and feel just like being at home. Donghua University is increasingly investing into its development, opening a completely new campus on the outskirts of Shanghai with superb facilities, with more and more people coming from abroad to study there. The trend of learning Chinese and studying in this country is becoming more and more evident, and China is surely to become one of top choices for education in the future. Nikola and Marko hope there may be more ESTIEMers coming (some others are in Shanghai already), and there are even rumours about establishing ASTIEM, as our beloved organisation’s Asian sister.

If there are any junior members who wish to learn more about Shanghai, China, or Asia, they can freely contact Nikola and Marko at zivlak@gmail.com, and Mr.Ljubicic@gmail.com. 

INSIDE ESTIEM

INSIDE ESTIEM

46

Show What You Know

Case Study Show in Belgrade

Milica Pejovic

The story begins in the end of 2006 when a group of ESTIEMers put their thoughts into one idea. They wanted to create a special connection between students and leading companies. A connection, that gives students a chance to meet real business life before finishing studies and prepare them for business reality. For companies this meant that they could see potential employees in real action and collect the best of them, and also to get new and fresh ideas and solutions for present business challenges.

This interesting idea got its name at the beginning of 2007. It was called “Case Study Show” and that name still remains. In January 2007 I joined ESTIEM, and Case Study Show was the first project that I encountered. I was attracted by the enthusiasm and beliefs that came from one special group of people, all gathered in the Case Study Show project and I applied for the organisation team. I hardly knew anyone, and I also didn’t know much about organising something that big and unusual, but somehow I knew that this is going to succeed and it’s going to be great! And I was right.

After four months of work, in May 2007, we had a real show. It was the biggest project of Local Group Belgrade and not only there, but on the Faculty of organisational science in Belgrade, too. The concept is simple: each company chooses the business area from which it will give the case study. Students apply by sending their CVs and rank companies they are interested in. The companies’ representatives are the ones who are

responsible for participant selection. What comes next is couple of days of students solving cases in teams, then two days of presentations and one of workshops.

On the first Case Study Show, CocaCola, L’Oreal, DaimlerChrysler, Saga and Uniqa participated and there were four teams per company solving a case, with usually four students in each team. Teams had seven days to solve the case, and after that they presented it to the company.

Presentations lasted three days, from May 10th to 12th, and all of them fascinated managers of the companies, but also the wide audience and the media. It is important to stress that this is not a contest; there was no winner, but several students, who were on their final year of studies, got their first job. All student-participants attended workshops, which were organised by the companies they done their case for. On those workshops they worked on other, small cases, learned about company, about their selection process, how to get the first job, practice different skills etc.

During those three days there was another manifestation organised in the faculty yard – Company Show. Companies had branded stands and they were able to make direct contact with students, answer their questions and promote themselves. After the official closing, there was a huge celebration, which gathered all participants in one, informal way. Many important contacts and relationships were made during this event.

All of this gave us energy and motivation to include students from other countries, which resulted in Case Study Show 2008 being open for all ESTIEMers. The idea expanded through Europe and the aim is to create multinational teams to bring business reality even closer to us.

Also, it is a great opportunity for our students to meet students from other countries, cultures, way of thinking and education systems and learning approaches. So, why wouldn’t we have every year a different country as a host? Why wouldn’t we include giant companies on their highest global level? By making it an ESTIEM event, we could add value to our special network of students, companies and universities. 

47

INSIDE ESTIEM

Skopje Where is that?

The Industrial Engineering and Management sector is a part of the Mechanical Faculty, which is under the State University “St. Cyril and Methodi”.

Local Group Skopje has taken part and has organised plenty of events so far. Our first president keeps in contact with the Local Group and still follows our work. This enthusiastic group of students recruits new members all the time. We mainly concentrate on recruiting the younger members and involving them in, as many as we can, ESTIEM activities.

The ESTIEM spirit is mainly presented through reports after attending an ESTIEM event, through pictures, questions and talk, talk, talk.

We involve these students in events we organise so that they can gain organisational skills and get the idea of how an ESTIEM event is organised.

Previous experiences have shown that usually those members that are the most active are the future leaders of our Local Group. The last event we organised was the Venture Network Pilot Event in March. All of our new members that took part in organising and hosting, were highly motivated to keep their active status in our Local Group and continue with their involvement in our

activities. I also have to say that the alumni from our Local Group, who were very active members of ESTIEM, are always there for us and always collaborate with us, which is a great plus in point of gaining new experiences from them. The biggest support we get is from the Business Start-Up Center (BSC) and our professor Radmil Polenakovik. BSC is a centre for supporting new business ideas. They organise lectures about generating ideas and starting new businesses and at the end of every season the participants have a competition and present their business ideas. Experts from different areas judge the ideas and the first three places get facility, office equipment and money to start their new business. Local Group Skopje and BSC do a lot of projects together, and we mainly help in the promotion of this centre and participate in their activities.

The biggest problem in our Local Group and the biggest priority at this moment is finding sponsors to support our activities, so that we can be more active in organising and participating activities, which will help us keep the active status in ESTIEM. To hold up the spirit, we organise nights out and prepare for the “party hard” exam. 

Ljubica Stefanovska

A small geography lesson at the beginning! Skopje is the capital of the Republic of Macedonia, which is situated in south-east Europe. Our first neighbours are Serbia, Albania, Greece and Bulgaria. Skopje is in the north part of the country and half of the Macedonian population lives here.

INSIDE ESTIEM

48

Back to Action! what’s happening in Lısbon?

Carlos Batarda

Local Group Lisbon was found in 1993, and, since that time, it has organised several important ESTIEM events. Lisbon was the venue for the 1994 Autumn Council Meeting and organised an Activity Week in 1996 that featured a “Portugal Tour”. Our Local Group also organised a TIMES Semi-final in 2000 and the TIMES Final in 2001. We had a Vision as well, in 2005, besides other smaller events, such as the Post-Council Meeting in 2006.

However, recently things have not been going so smoothly. The period between 2002 and 2005, our team tried to get new members.

Nevertheless, the contribution of the “young crew” was limited, because although we took part in some meetings, events like the 2005 Vision were organised without our help.

This meant that the famous ESTIEM spirit was not as well established in our minds as it could/ should have been. We organised the Post-Council Meeting in 2006, which actually went quite well, but a period of some inactivity followed. The older, more experienced people finished their studies, some of us went on Erasmus, and the fact is, we weren’t motivated enough. We missed Council Meeting’s and events. Last year, just before the Autumn Council Meeting, we received an ultimatum stating that if we don’t attend we can be extinct. Most people from my Local Group had decided to “fight” for our rights! I was in a dilemma. Should I leave the Local Group and condemn it to extinction, or try to get it “up and running” again? Tiago’s (the friend of mine) support was decisive. The two of us decided to go to the Council Meeting and stay in the Local Group.

In the end, it was a good choice.

We recruited few members and put ourselves to work. Our job was, and still is, to form a capable and motivated Local Group before the end of this school year. Our main target are students from the first years. We have 10 new members until now.

We developed a new website where we presented our events and projects. We saw that it’s important to have international and local activity. Local Group Lisbon could become not only the link between ESTIEM and IEM on our University, but also the schools IEM students association. Therefore, we are organising, together with Materials Engineering students, an intensive course on Quality Management and Auditing, provided by a company. So far, the number of interested people from our University has surpassed our expectations, which was positive for the image of Local Group.

But we did not forget the International part. In December we had the TIMES Local Qualifications. We cannot say we are victorious yet, but so far the results have been promising.

At first we were afraid that students wouldn’t be interested in ESTIEM, but it proved to be just a matter of hard work and marketing.

Since this is the last semester for some of us, we are so happy for having this last opportunity to participate in ESTIEM and can only regret that perhaps we discovered it too late… Rather late than never. 

49

Alumni Report Florian Kroger

Dear ESTIEMer, The bursting of the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001 marked a turning point for the web. Many people concluded that the web was overhyped, when in fact bubbles and consequent shakeouts appear to be a common feature of all technological evolutions. Shakeouts typically mark the point at which an ascendant technology is ready to take its place at center stage. The pretenders are given the bum’s rush, the real success stories show their strength, and there begins to be an understanding of what separates one from the other.

The concept of “Web 2.0” began with a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International. A couple years later we find a countless ESTIEM Alumni joining this trend, for example starting new businesses or simply being part of the user generated content.

How to find us?

You can find members of ESTIEM Alumni for example in Linkedin, Facebook, Xing or any other popular network. The great majority of Alumni have included the term “ESTIEM” in their profile, so searching for that normally proves successful.

Check us out at LinkedIn, where we have our own group. Apart from finding your friends from long ago, you can also have the ESTIEM Alumni logo added to your profile! If you want, apply at the following link: www.linkedin.com/e/gis/2072/7F7EE32ACFC0 Xing, formerly known as OpenBC is another professional networking site. Xing allows you to put up your own profile including professional and

private interests. This network is rather business related, but also has discussion groups for a wide range of interests. Check out Xing by entering the link below: http://www.xing.com/ Additionally there are a lot of ESTIEMers (and ESTIEM fun and nonsense) present on Facebook.

If you want, go and check out which of your former local responsible or ESTIEM board put up their profile! http://www.facebook.com/ So the next time when you work on finding sponsors for your Vision seminar or need a good case study for your TIMES qualification please don’t hesitate to search one of the mentioned sites and contact an Alumni member. You will be surprised how fast you will get response or a little help – even if that help is just another contact person. 

INSIDE ESTIEM

50

Check the latest updated event information at www.estiem.org and register for your favourite events through the ESTIEM portal. See you somewhere in Europe!

AGENDA

ANGENDA

APRIL

2 – 6 Apr Visionary Marketing Seminar | Linköping “Functional Sales

7 – 11 May Visionary Marketing | Warsaw – A New Marketing Concept” “Promotion and Advertisement in Production

9 – 14 Apr 36th Council Meeting | Hamburg Companies”

23 – 27 Apr Visionary Marketing | Skopje

9 – 12 May ESTIEM Alumni Meeting | Sevilla “Customer Satisfaction”

14 – 18 May Local Responsible Parade | Porto

15 – 18 May Regional Coordination Meeting | Dortmund

21 – 25 May Visionary Marketig Final Conference | Istanbul Bogazici “New Marketing Strategies in the New Age” 27 – 31 May Activity Week | Poznan

MAY

08 JUNE

JULY

2 – 6 July Activity Week | Paderborn 27 july – 10 Aug Summer Academy | Hungary “Human-Centred System Design – People, Organisation and Technology”

SEPTEMBER

AUGUST

10 july – 24 Aug Summer Academy | Serbia

“Deep Entrepreneurship – Manufacturing Europe’s Future”

8 – 13 Sep ESTIEM College | Karlsruhe

OCTOBER

1 – 5 Oct Europe3D Belgrade

20 – 24 Oct Activity Week Ilmenau “ESTIEM meets Inova”

23 – 26 Oct Meet Bosch in Hockenheim

NOVEMBER

1 – 8 Nov 37th Council Meeting | Famagusta

DECEMBER

11 – 12 Nov Bosch ESTIEM Workshop

�

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Please check www.oerlikon.com for current openings and general job possibilities.