For the new year LUISS is preparing academic programs that look towards a business world that is increasingly global and responds to the demand for new qualified and competitive professionals.
Three guidelines characterize the new LUISS programs for the 2015/2016 academic year: innovation, internationalization and entrepreneurship. "What we would like,” says Giovanni Lo Storto, General Manager at LUISS, “is to give students a way to learn with practical and sophisticated educational tools and techniques, so that they are able to generate virtuous changes and anticipate the evolution of professional trends."
According to a recent survey in The Economist, the most in-demand profiles over the coming years will be those in web and digital: from data scientists, responsible for the analysis of big data, to digital managers, skilled in digitalization processes within business management systems, to innovation entrepreneurs, experts in the area of technological innovation. LUISS has responded to these changes with three new master’s programs.
The program in Innovation & Entrepreneurship, held in English, will provide methods for managing the innovative processes involved in the creation of new businesses, while the master’s degree in Marketing and the major in Marketing Analytics & Metrics are aimed at creating teams of expert “readers” and interpreters of the data supplied by the web that are oriented towards business. Finally, the new master’s degree program in Digital Management teaches the tools needed to manage the innovation and digitalization of organizational processes in public administration as well as in private companies and business services.
These new LUISS initiatives are aimed at enhancing its students’ strengths, to transform them into graduates capable of choosing the jobs that best suit their profiles. This has led to the creation of student biographies: a project where each student, starting with their first years at university, builds a dossier of their skills in various disciplines and their soft skills, that is, skills they can use in everyday life.
Students will then have the opportunity to meet directly with an employer through the program Adoption Lab, a professional training workshop involving small- to medium-sized businesses that are committed to "adopting" students in undergraduate programs as well as multinationals and large companies ready to discover and support the talent of graduates with master’s degrees.
LUISS is also strengthening its internationalization efforts thanks to a mobility plan implemented through 150 cooperation agreements with prestigious universities all over the world, 20 Double Degree programs and over 50 foreign visiting and full professors. Moreover, to give students a real passport to mobility across borders, LUISS is the only Italian partner within the professional education network Quantitative Techniques for Economics and Management, which allows students to do internships in three different countries over two years.
Finally, more and more space will be given to entrepreneurship and workshops for the development and design of business ideas such as the incubator-accelerator LUISS ENLABS, the startup factory that has created 250 jobs among aspiring entrepreneurs under 30, and two experimental workshops, i-Lab LUISS and LUISS ADVENTURE, aimed respectively at the university’s students and those doing the Master in Business Administration at the LUISS Business School.