25 October 2007
SEAT, the VW subsidiary based in Spain, ESADE, the Barcelona business school and the Art Center College of Design, the California design school, have signed a collaboration agreement to launch joint activities and projects in the fields of training, skill-enhancement, research and development aimed at implanting a culture of innovation in diverse spheres.
This follows ESADE and Art Center College of Design's long-term agreement to collaborate signed earlier this summer. That agreement called for the two institutions to create a joint platform for postgraduate education, research and business networking that will contribute to the development and market orientation of the field of innovation and design.
ESADE and Art Center Agreement
In making the June announcement, Mr. Koshalek said, “We are thrilled to enter this partnership with ESADE, one of the world’s great leaders in business education and one that we have long admired. Together, we will be creating a new paradigm for international design education – not only by developing extended, collaborative opportunities to exercise creativity in the larger world, but also by redefining the designer’s role in offering solutions to the issues of the future. Our activities in Barcelona will be a critical part of Art Center’s identity and serve as a cornerstone of our overall global strategy.”
Carlos Losada highlighted the decisive importance for ESADE of this agreement with Art Center: “Market globalisation is creating unparalleled trends and opportunities, and even entirely new industries. As a result, we need to be at the cutting edge of things to come up with new management models and ways of understanding business. Art Center College of Design, a world-leading centre in creativity and design, will enable us to develop new multidisciplinary scenarios, and broaden our perspective on originality and innovation.”
Art Center, already highly influential throughout North America and the Pacific Rim, aims to expand its role as a global player with Barcelona as the focal point for a wide European footprint that extends across the Mediterranean and beyond.
In Barcelona, Art Center will introduce its postgraduate design and innovation expertise, mainly with education and research, through partnerships with other world-class institutions, thus not requiring a new local campus. In choosing Barcelona over other great cities for this long-term commitment to global influence, Art Center recognises the city's industrial heritage and peerless tradition of architecture and design as well as its global reputation as a dynamic city of opportunity that has become a beacon for talented individuals from all over the world.
The SEAT Agreement
The official signing ceremony, held at the ESADE Barcelona headquarters, was attended by Richard Koshalek, director of the Art Center College of Design, and Carlos Losada, director of ESADE. SEAT was represented by Ramón Paredes, Vice-President for Human Resources.
For Ramón Paredes, this alliance between university and industry “provides yet another example of the growing need for companies to join forces with the academic world so as to capitalise on talent as a differentiating asset and with an eye on the future, particularly in the sphere of research and design, two of the defining features of the Spanish brand.”
For Carlos Losada, director general of ESADE, this three-way agreement is “an unbeatable example of how cooperation between business and academia plays a pivotal role in the market orientation of research, innovation and design; a challenge that no doubt both companies and business schools must take up together”.
Richard Koshalik, President of the Art Center College of Design, comments “We are very satisfied with this agreement with SEAT, the first corporative commitment in the context of the strategic relation with the Art Center and ESADE. This collaboration represents a new framework of development in the relationship between design and corporations. Our efforts are being channelled towards a more extensive and effective innovation, capable of meeting the major social challenges of our immediate future”.
This agreement stems from two of the objectives SEAT has set itself within its strategy for the next two years: to become a quality and design benchmark for larger production-volume car manufacturers –the reason why a link with the Art Center College of Design, the best in this field, was chosen – and to become the most attractive employer in Spain, to which end it has established this link with the world-leading business school ESADE. This project forms part of the support and collaboration framework that SEAT maintains with diverse academic institutions. More specifically, SEAT has worked closely with ESADE since 2005, welcoming students wishing to gain hands-on professional experience, as well as cooperating with end-of-degree assignments. To this fruitful collaboration should now be added the Art Center College of Design, a Center which has chosen precisely ESADE and SEAT as its European ‘partners’.
Art Center College of Design Since its creation in 1930, the Art Center College of Design has been a global leader in training in art and design. Its graduates have inspired changes in society by solving problems through design. The Art Center offers first-degree and post-graduate training in diverse branches of art and design, as well as publicly available training programmes for all ages and levels of experience. The Art Center College of Design has its headquarters at Pasadena, California, teaching courses being provided at its campuses at Hillside and South. The Art Center Barcelona Project is the result of an initiative of the Art Center College of Design in order to create a European benchmark institution in education and post-graduate training centred on the strategic role of design.
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