Boardroom Gender Quota at German Companies and Other MBA News Snippets

The Wharton School has received a US$10 million endowment for the JD/MBA program it runs jointly with the University of Pennsylvania Law School (Penn Law). The endowment for the dual degree comes from the charitable arm of corporate financing firm, W. P. Carey, which focuses on the support of educational institutions.

A four-year JD/MBA program has been on offer to those at the Wharton School and Penn Law since the mid-1970s. However, a three-year accelerated version, said to be the first available at an elite US university, was launched as recently as 2009. This represents a saving of two years on the time it would take to complete both a JD and MBA program separately. Both the three and four-year versions at the Wharton School and Penn Law will be officially renamed as the Francis J. & Wm. Polk Carey JD/MBA Program in recognition of the gift.

In further dual degree news, MIT Sloan’s Leaders for Global Operations program – which combines an MBA with a master’s in engineering – recently hosted Felipe Calderón, Mexico’s president between 2006 and 2012.

Addressing MIT Sloan’s Wong Auditorium, Calderón spoke about the challenges he faced during his tenure and his belief in the importance of having the right people around you to meet these challenges:

“You will face a lot of troubles, problems, challenges when you are governing,” Calderón told his audience at MIT Sloan “You should not ask to not have those kinds of problems. [It is] more important to ask or pray to have the people around you with the talent and courage and commitment to overcome the problem.”

As a student, Felipe Calderón gained a master’s in economics from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) – whose MBA program features in the top five of QS’s latest Latin American rankings. He then went to on to graduate with a master’s in public administration from Harvard University.

Copenhagen - Denmark’s capital and largest city - is proposing to rebrand the province of Skåne as ‘Greater Copenhagen’ in a bid to extend its standing on the international stage.

Trouble is, Skåne is actually a province of Sweden – connected to Denmark by virtue of the Øresund (or Öresund, if you’re Swedish) Bridge.

Could Denmark really get away with a branding invasion of its neighbor’s territory? Apparently, the Greater Copenhagen proposal is a collaborative one that would reap benefits on both sides of the border, by building on Copenhagen’s international reputation and luring greater levels of investment and innovation to the region.

“Together we will have 3.8 million people, 11 universities with 150,000 students and many PhDs, so we will come up as an interesting place to locate your European or Scandinavian HQ. That is what it’s all about,” Frank Jensen, mayor of Copenhagen said in report for the Guardian.

Copenhagen lies on the Danish island of Zealand (not to be confused with the Dutch province of Zeeland from which New Zealand derives its name) and, together with Skåne, is already collectively known as Øresund/Öresund. But, a region that is of vital importance to the GDP of both nations is not widely known outside of Scandinavia. The Greater Copenhagen idea seeks to rectify this. 

As you might expect, reaction to the idea has been mixed in Sweden. Swedish business newspaper, Dagens Industri, noted the potential loss of regional identity but supports the idea that rebranding Skåne as ‘Greater Copenhagen’ could provide its economy with a huge uplift. There’s even been an alternative mantle suggested, with head of the Invest in Skåne business lobby, Stefan Johansson, telling the Guardian of his preference for naming the region the ‘Scandinavia Bay Area’, in homage to the San Francisco Bay Area to which he believes Øresund/Öresund is comparable in science and the creative industries.

• Read about the future of Copenhagen Business School’s MBA program