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Ninth e-Leadership Cluster Event in Paris: France on its way to delivering skills for transforming the economy

CIGREF has been working on the topic of competence frameworks and development already since 1991 contributed to the development of the e-Competence Framework and just published the 2014 edition of the ‘Nomenclature RH: Les métiers des systí¨mes d’information dans les grandes entreprises’.

The chairperson Bruno Lanvin, Executive Director of INSEAD’s European Competitiveness Initiative opened the event at the UNESCO building in Paris speaking about the ‘Darwinian necessity’ to pick up the topic of digital transformation and e-leadership since e-leaders are to lead the digital transformation to ensure survival of the business. He invited decision makers in organisations to more ‘focus on developing visions of what ICT can do’ instead of focussing on product development and cost reduction only. He also called on CIOs to become true e-leaders by being ‘themselves the bridges’ they wanted to see between market demand and supply of ICT-based services. Participating representatives from industry, public administration and NGOs sent clear signals that there is a growing and critical lack of e-leaders in the economy, that is, individuals who are at the same time ICT savvy, business savvy and have the ability and skills to lead multi-disciplinary teams across functional and geographical boundaries.

The event was attended by several of the top companies in France, associations and government representatives.

In his conclusions the chairman, Bruno Lanvin highlighted the key issues and results of the day of which only a few are highlighted here. He made the point that awareness for e-leadership has arrived: policy makers have understood that it is a matter of collective responsibility between industry and the higher and executive education institutions. Training of an e-leadership culture has to take place at all levels, from primary school to life-long-learning. Partitions need to be removed to generate an innovation culture across all sectors and foster inter-disciplinarity.

Universities and business schools need to speed up their efforts to adapting existing curricula and developing new ones to best address the needs of industry and labour markets. Pasc@line is seen as a worthwhile initiative which has shown that we need to build on the enthusiasm of the ‘Y’ generation. The education ecosystem (involving industry as the demand side actors) is still in the process of crystallising, and could benefit from the emergence of different types of ‘brokers’ as shown in the European Commission e-Leadership initiative.

Development of an appropriate ‘education ecosystem’ was seen as a key direction for closing the skills gap since interaction with like-minded individuals was seen as essential to keep up with the pace of change.

With the European e-leadership initiative the European Commission is now providing valuable means to reduce the e-leadership skills gap.

The full summary report and all presentations can be downloaded here: http://eskills-guide.eu/events/france/

Impressions from the event on ‘e-Leadership for the Digital Economy’ organised by CIGREF under the umbrella of the European Commission’s initiative to promote e-Leadership on 6th November 2014 at UNESCO, Paris.