A word from the President
2019 has been a year characterized by goal-oriented work to prepare BI for future challenges in the best possible way. Our efforts pave the way for BI’s continued position as one of Europe’s leading business schools.
Admissions to BI’s full-time programmes were somewhat down in 2018. This made us spend a great deal of time on revitalization and innovation of our programme portfolio, which contributed to an increase in applications and admissions in 2019.
In the years to come, offering learning on the terms of the students will be essential. This demands us to offer relevant programmes with clear learning goals and study models that ensure our students’ ability to combine international exchange and internships during their studies.
We have also focused on establishing a more open, predictable, documented and learning quality culture. In 2020, BI implements a completely new quality assurance system that will enable us to document all processes related to the development and revision of our courses and programmes more systematically.
For the fifth year in a row, BI was ranked by the Financial Times as the best business school in Norway. Our own surveys also show that our students and alumni are very attractive on the labour market.
We are preparing for a future where business and industry and the labour market will undergo great changes. Several big investments in digitalization projects were implemented in 2019 and 2020. We are making sure that we succeed in digitalizing our own core activities and several important support functions for both students and staff. We have decided to establish a new department for data science from the autumn of 2020, as well as a research center in cooperation with the research institute Simula.
BI was proud partner of Oslo as European Environmental Capital in 2019. Sustainability was also a keyword when we opened our new, energy-efficient and highly modern campus in Stavanger in the autumn of 2019.
In the past year, we were also impressed with the students’ decision to merge BI and SBIO (student organizations) into a joint student organization from 1 January 2020. This contributes to making BI an even better school and will give BI students a stronger voice in national student politics.
Our work to prepare students and business for an international, digital and sustainable future will continue with unabated strength in 2020. I sincerely want to thank all students, staff and alumni who have contributed to the development of BI during the past year.
Inge Jan Henjesand
President