Founding history of ERIM

In Rotterdam the academic study of management started during a wave of similar initiatives around the beginning of the 20th century, mostly in the United States. These initiatives were usually headed by local businessmen who saw the limitations of existing curricula for educating the (business) leaders of the future, and took place against the backdrop of organisations growing rapidly in their scale and complexity and in their (international) environment. In Rotterdam, representatives of the internationally oriented port-related business establishment, predominantly trained at the law schools of the universities of Leiden and Utrecht, founded the Nederlandsche Handelshoogeschool (Netherlands School of Commerce) in 1913 as a new source of the managerial elite in their companies. Later, in 1939, the school’s name was changed to Nederlandse Economische Hogeschool (Netherlands School of Economics), as a result of full legal recognition of academic training in management and economics in the Netherlands.

In 1973 the Netherlands School of Economics, which by then also included a school of Law and a school of Social Sciences, merged with the Medical Faculty at Rotterdam, leading to the start of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Within the new University the ESE, through its departments in the area of business economics, retained its economics perspective on management. From 1970 onwards, other disciplinary perspectives such as the behavioural sciences and industrial engineering had started to receive more attention with the establishment of the Graduate School of Management, a joint venture between Netherlands School of Economics/EUR and Delft University of Technology. In 1985, this Graduate School of Management became a distinct school of the EUR: the Rotterdam School of Management (RSM). During this period both RSM and the ESE established their institutes for research in management: ERASM (Erasmus Research Institute for Advanced Studies in Management) and RIBES (Rotterdams Instituut voor Bedrijfseconomische Studies), respectively. In 1998 the two schools brought together their best resources for research in the domain of management, and jointly founded a new research institute: ERIM. The KNAW officially accredited ERIM in 1999 and re-accredited it in 2003.