ESCP ALUMNI magazine - #203 - Septembre 2023 - 54

Campus ❙ Chairs and Professorships
The first offspring
of a true love story!
The ESCPxRIU professorship has begun to be fruitful for both long-time partners.
I
t has been more than a year since the school signed an agreement
with RIU Hotels & Resorts to undertake a professorship
about corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the hotel industry.
" After a five-year honeymoon, RIU and ESCP are now finally
married, " said Lola Herrero, Associate Professor at ESCP Business
School and Scientific Director of the Jean Baptiste Say Institute
for Entrepreneurship on the Madrid campus when the partnership
became a professorship after five years of developing projects
together. The marriage started off great and has already begun to
bear fruit - some of it planned and some totally unexpected. But after
all, aren't surprises the secret to solid relationships?
In its first year, the professorship implemented four International
Consulting Projects (ICPs) with students from the MSc in Hospitality
& Tourism Management (MHM), MSc in Marketing and Digital Media
(MDM), and MBA in International Management (MBA) programmes.
These were part of the AD-HOC Academic CSR consulting missions:
" Sustainability In ACT-I-ON " workstream, but they were not the only
component: the professorship's team carried out a " fifth " academic
consulting mission on how to design and implement a standardised
monitoring system for CSR projects, to be incorporated into the
RIU Method - a social innovation methodology developed by Lola
Herrero for selecting the social projects to carry out in each destination,
based on objective and scientific criteria and with two clear
objectives: people and biodiversity. Known as RIU-SSIP (Sistema de
Seguimiento e Impacto de Proyectos-destino), this consultancy was
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carried out in parallel to the ICPs and tested in the field; specifically,
in Cancun (Quintana Roo, Mexico), together with the RIU team, and
the destination's stakeholders. In this way, the ESCP team travelled
to work hand in hand with RIU's CSR partners in the destination.
The objective was to create in a collaborative/participatory manner
both the processes and the monitoring tools, which could be replicated
in other destinations. There were 15 days of bilateral co-design
workshops and project visits. From this fieldwork, some work
processes were created based on tools that, back home, the ESCP
team continued testing through 22 online workshops with social
investment projects in Mexico. " The SSIP-RIU process and its derived
tools are very practical for us because they have not only helped us to
measure the progress of the project but have also allowed us to learn
more about project management, " commented Fundación Aitana
Director Yoselin Vera. " This will help us in our day-to-day work and in
obtaining more resources for our task in the comprehensive care of
child cancer patients. "
The ICP on RIU's CSR diagnosis was also very helpful in mapping all
of RIU's CSR data. It laid the foundations that allowed the ESCP team
to continue researching, mapping and reviewing the state of the art of
scientific-academic research on hotel CSR and its dissemination, with a
view to creating a prototype for the creation of a knowledge structure
that can have a favourable impact on the promotion and consolidation
of social investment undertaken by the hotel sector. All this work
was accompanied by great general and academic communication
efforts. Together with the RIU team, the ESCP team talked about
the RIU method in important tourism forums. " The most important
thing in the first year of the professorship was what happened unexpectedly:
what we had not planned and yet materialised. The main
one was the creation of the fifth ICP on how to measure the impact
of social investment, " explains Lola Herrero. " Also unforeseen and
extremely welcome were the invitations we received to participate in
the UNWTO's 2022 Sustainable Destinations Summit and the 2022
ISTO (International Social Tourism Organization) World Congress. At
the ISTO conference, we were able to share some of the conclusions
of the work carried out throughout the year and this has given rise
to a synergic relationship with ISTO members for the creation of
working groups on reporting and indicators of social investment in
the tourism sector. "
Like all marriages, this one requires a lot of work but it should be long
and beautiful.
ESCP Alumni Magazine numéro 203 ❙ SEPTEMBRE 2023
ESCP ALUMNI magazine - #203 - Septembre 2023

Table des matières de la publication ESCP ALUMNI magazine - #203 - Septembre 2023
