Corporate Universities

First results
Corporate Universities in Germany

Corporate universities are a special kind of "learning structure". This term originates in the United States, where attempts have been made to improve the immediate use of learning processes for a company’s strategic challenges. The best-known example is General Electric’s Corporate University. Jack Welsh used it as a platform for permanently providing the huge company with transformation impulses. In the last couple of years, corporate universities have also boomed in the German-speaking world. In order to explore this development on a theoretical level, we have initiated an extensive research project in cooperation with the University Witten.

Our research topics within this context are:

• What do corporate universities contribute to renewal processes and the restructuring of businesses?
• To what extent do corporate universities actually initiate structural innovations in businesses? In which cases were existing Continuing Education departments simply renamed?
• How do corporate universities contribute to the creation of business-wide networks in terms of benchmarking and exchange of experiences?