10 Years of ERIM: Investing in New Knowledge Production

By Catherine Walker

The meteoric rise of the Erasmus Research Institute of Management, or ERIM, would make many a company envious. In a mere ten years it has tripled in size. It has risen from relative obscurity to become one of the top three players in Europe, and among the top 25 in the world.

Ale Smidts

“At the same time ERIM has changed quite dramatically from being a predominantly Dutch group to a very international collection of researchers. As a result of these and other developments we now compete with the best schools in Europe and the USA.”

Founded in 1999, ERIM is a joint initiative between Rotterdam School of Management and Erasmus School of Economics, bringing together the top researchers in business and management from each of the schools. Alongside its research programmes ERIM also has an advanced graduate programme in management that attracts some of the most promising young scholars from around the world who are increasingly finding jobs at top schools after completing their PhDs.

Within ERIM, research is divided into five broad streams: marketing; finance and accounting; strategy; organisation; and business processes, logistics and information systems. Also under ERIM’s umbrella are more than 20 specialist research centres, focusing on topics as diverse as customer value chains, mutual and hedge funds, neuroeconomics, entrepreneurship, closed loop supply chains, and sustainability and climate change.

A great breadth of expertise, but what sets ERIM apart is not so much the subjects it covers, says Smidts, as its capacity to draw on the strengths of top researchers from many different disciplines: “ERIM is unique in the Netherlands. Whereas other major institutions are economics-driven, we are truly multidisciplinary. Alongside people with a background in the core field of business administration, we have many psychologists, sociologists, economists, econometricians and also people from technical backgrounds, studying what happens to organisations and the links between organisations.”

This allows issues in business and management to be looked at through a variety of lenses, and the connections between those different perspectives to be explored, adds Wilfred Mijnhardt, ERIM’s Executive Director, who has been with the institute from the outset and has helped it evolve. “It has brought in new intellectual ideas which inform the whole research practice.”

Wilfred Mijnhardt

“More recently we’ve set up an Innovation and Co-Creation Lab, led by Harry Barkema and sponsored by DSM, as a joint venture with the London School of Economics and Political Science. They have started a project with Unilever’s R&D facility, looking at what types of team collaboration and information exchange are most effective in developing innovative ideas. There is also very important work going on within our INSCO PE centre, where our researchers in strategic management are working with the universities of Maastricht and Amsterdam and with TNO to provide a much deeper, evidence-based understanding of the impact of social innovation.

“There’s also a lot of interest from clients in how to deal with moral issues within organisations, given the financial crisis and, before that, what happened at Enron. Our new professor of Behavioural Ethics, David De Cremer, is developing new programmes to find the psychological underpinnings of some of the behaviours of managers and leaders, and also how to create trust, how to stimulate ethical behaviour in organisations. That’s a new addition to ERIM that will bring fundamental insights from psychology to board and organisational levels so that we can understand how people behave on moral issues within organisations.”

Just how has ERIM achieved its success?

From the outset ERIM has modelled itself on the best US and European schools, Smidts explains – its methods and approaches have much in common with leading schools such as Wharton, Stanford and UCL A, or Europe’s top two, London Business School and INSEAD. ‘We’ve always seen ERIM as very much part of a wider global community of business schools, and our researchers have built extensive relations with colleagues at leading schools around the world.”

One of the most potent instruments for change, Smidts believes, has been a very clear and transparent performance measurement system aimed at systematically increasing both the quantity and quality of research. Faculty who publish within top journals are rewarded with additional research time, better career prospects, and other types of support, both financial and practical. This system has focused minds and created a culture in which faculty have a common understanding of what is required. Of the initial ERIM community of researchers back in 1999, only 16% are still with the institute today, illustrating the enormous shift in faculty dynamics.

The financial and support infrastructure within ERIM has been a major factor in attracting new talent to the institute, adds Mijnhardt, who has played a major role in creating the stimulating research environment.

It has clearly paid dividends: “ERIM researchers increasingly publish their work in the very top international academic journals, and recently also in publications for more general audiences, such as Harvard Business Review. Top quality publishing is essential for raising the visibility and reputation of the institute,” says Smidts. “It showcases our researchers as experts in management, and our ratings have risen as a result.

“It is also helping us to attract increasing amounts of grant funding, from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and from European programmes. For instance, in a recent competition organised by the NWO, the ERIM doctoral programme was ranked among the very best in the country, across all academic disciplines.”

A dual impact approach

But ERIM is already engaged in its next big wave of strategic development. Over the next ten years ERIM will remain at core an academic research institute, focused on management and business research, says Smidts, but points to a marked shift in its strategy already taking effect:

“Two yardsticks that will be used to measure the success of research in management over the next ten years will be the impact of the research on the scientific community on the one hand, and its resonance with the business community and general public on the other. This marks the fundamental change within ERIM in the last couple of years to move beyond the traditional output-driven strategy towards an impact-driven strategy.”

Increasing ERIM’s academic impact (usually measured by citations) will mean ensuring that it can continue to attract top quality faculty who conduct research at the highest level. Maintaining ERIM’s place in the European top three is a key goal, but in an increasingly competitive environment, where other schools are constantly raising their game, this will certainly be a major challenge, Smidts concedes.

Increasing ERIM’s impact on business practice and society – and, not least, being certain of what that impact is – presents even bigger challenges. But Smidts and Mijnhardt both recognise that the advantages of such top-flight research cannot be fully realised unless this feeds through to inform business practice.

“ERIM has grown enormously in academic impact and reputation over the past ten years,” says Smidts. “Now we have to show the world more clearly, and emphasise more strongly to companies, what we have to offer.”

Executive education, an important vehicle for transmitting new ideas, is one area that Smidts would like to see expanded in future: “By doing more executive teaching our researchers come to know more about how people in business deal with and think about particular topics. Greater involvement by faculty in executive education means getting closer to your stakeholders and to your customers – and that can only be beneficial for us all.”

Feedback from stakeholders will be key to understanding where ERIM’s research is having most effect. “We are now part of a national pilot scheme, which aims to measure that impact. Stakeholders, such as business users, can testify as to our usefulness, and how they have used the results of our research in their business practice,” Smidts explains.

“We are one of the first business schools to start doing this,” adds Mijnhardt. “It’s a key strategic initiative for us – it’s the first step in selecting where we want to score as an institution, and where to focus our energies.”

If ERIM can attack that task with the same single-mindedness of purpose already shown in building its academic reputation, the next ten years look to be bright indeed.

Adapted from RSM Outlook, Summer 2010.