Strategic Plan 2025

Strategic Plan 2025

Compass and map: “Strategic Plan 2025”

In recent years, the University of St.Gallen (HSG) has grown notably and has undergone structural changes. In 2017, Roadmap 2025 was established which set out guiding principles to guide future decisions. This vision has now been developed into a Strategic Plan which concretely defines the guiding principles and goals for the University until 2025.

The focus areas of the Strategic Plan.

Since its foundation, the University of St.Gallen (HSG) has been committed to an integrative approach, which it pursues equally in teaching, research and continuing education. The Vision 2025 is based on a solid foundation. However, staying true to itself does not mean stagnation nd frugality.

Building on the vision, the HSG drew up a roadmap in 2017 as a framework for orientation. Since then, the HSG has gained disciplinary breadth with the establishment of the Joint Medical Masters and the founding of the School of Computer Science. It is precisely when many changes have to be processed that the strengths and weaknesses of an organisation become apparent. Accordingly, it was time to translate and concretise the Roadmap 2025 and substrategies into a Strategic Plan. Strategic guidelines and goals were defined in eight focus areas, the achievement of which will be monitored on the basis of defined success indicators.

The “Strategic Plan 2025” acts not only as a compass pointing the way, but more like a map showing intermediate stops and the best paths.

The Strategic Plan is a flexible instrument that provides the HSG with guidance at all levels of governance and forms the basis upon which we can plan our immediate future. With the founding of the Vice President’s Board for Institutes & Executive Education, the HSG has also prepared itself for new challenges, while setting the course for the future in research and teaching.

With the redesign of academic career paths, the HSG is attractive and competitive for a new generation of excellent researchers. The University of St.Gallen is constantly improving the framework conditions to enable impactoriented top-level research. In this way, its research should not only gain increased international recognition, but also remain connected to practice and achieve social impact. The success of research and work is ultimately measured by whether the HSG makes a contribution to society.

Social responsibility also guides the HSG’s strategy in teaching and training by sensitizing future and current decision- makers to the consequences of their actions and equipping them with the tools to act in a sustainable and ethical manner. The HSG’s SQUARE offers an inspiring environment for this, where university members and externals can work as a community, across generations and hierarchies, on solutions for tomorrow. The spirit of experimentation and innovation at SQUARE should ultimately have an impact on the University as a whole and influence the spirit of its future location at Platztor.

Regional engagement

One of the eight focus areas concerns our international and regional commitment. Specifically, we have set out to «safeguarding St.Gallen as an educational location in the long term and contributing to the creation of economic and social value in the region. As an important regional player, we contribute to key issues, while focusing on maintaining and consolidating collaborative relationships.» We maintain such strong cooperative relationships with «Startfeld» and the «Smartfeld» education lab. A visible sign of this connection between knowledge and impact was the appointment of the long- standing managing director of the Startfeld Foundation and initiator of the Smartfeld education lab founded in 2017, Dr Cornelia Gut-Villa, as an honorary senator during the Dies Academicus 2022.