10th anniversary of the ESADE Sant Cugat campus

Now celebrating its 10th anniversary, the ESADE Sant Cugat campus has already become a driving force of ESADE, innovation and globalisation. At a recent event at ESADECREAPOLIS, the ESADE managing director, Koldo Echebarria, reiterated his commitment to this campus and its sustained future growth.

During his speech, Echebarria emphasised that "the consolidation of academic activity on this campus in the future" will make it "one of the finest campuses in the world for studying management and law." The campus was opened in 2009 by King Felipe and Queen Letizia of Spain, and since then it has hosted the ESADE Full-Time MBA, bachelor’s degrees, masters and research programmes, and also ESADECREAPOLIS, an innovation park spanning 17,520 sq.m. where academia and business co-exist and converge.

Since last year, the ESADE Sant Cugat campus has also been the headquarters of the Rambla de la Innovación, a new ecosystem providing support for teaching and entrepreneurship: yet another step in the development of the ESADE education and academic model based on the student experience. The Rambla de la Innovación enables students to interact with companies by taking part in challenges at the Fusion Point, develop their entrepreneurial ventures at the Egarage and EWorks studios, create prototypes in the FabLab and carry out experiments in the Decision Lab.

International Campus

Over the last decade, the ESADE Campus at Sant Cugat has given fresh impetus to ESADE globalisation. In addition to its facilities with state-of-the-art technology, the numbers of ESADE students has soared from 1,088 international students from 82 countries in 2008/2009, to 2,855 from more than one hundred countries this academic year. As a result, the percentage of international students at ESADE has climbed from 26% a decade ago to more than 45% today, and even more than 95% on some programmes such as the MBA.

In these ten years, the number of lecturers teaching at ESADE has also increased considerably. At the end of 2009, its faculty included 14 non-Spanish nationals, i.e. 12%, whilst this year 25% of its teaching staff is international from 20 different countries.

Main focal point: innovation

The ESADE Sant Cugat campus – more than 46,000 sq.m. devoted to teaching, research and entrepreneurship – pioneered the implementation of the Bologna process and became a benchmark for innovation and entrepreneurial initiatives along the way. A place where companies, students, academia and the scientific community can pinpoint new opportunities and find solutions by working together in a wide variety of challenges, experiments and joint projects.

In this respect, the Rambla de la Innovación has joined forces with ESADECREAPOLIS and the other teaching facilities, including particularly the MBA campus, to create a bespoke platform enabling students, lecturers and executives to make their ideas and innovations happen thanks to the Open Innovation concept.