The Corporate Board Council (CBC), La Salle - Universitat Ramon Llull’s business council, continues to turn university–business collaboration into tangible impact for students, organisations and society. At its General Council meeting, the CBC reviewed its activities and the strategic projects that the campus is pursuing with the 28 leading companies that make up the Council.
The meeting, held in the Immersive Room at La Salle - Universitat Ramon Llull’s IASlab, highlighted progress on initiatives that connect the campus’s talent, knowledge and capabilities with business challenges in areas such as education, artificial intelligence, technology transfer and knowledge creation. These projects are structured around the CBC’s four areas of work: education and talent, innovation and technology transfer, networking and communication.
Rosa Maria Alsina, Provost of La Salle – Universitat Ramon Llull: “Last year, we began a new phase, and what started as a good idea has now become a reality. We want to sharpen our focus as a campus, and the Corporate Board Council is a priority within our Strategic Plan.”
Four years after its establishment, the Corporate Board Council is consolidating its role as a forum for strategic collaboration that goes beyond dialogue between university and business. Its member organisations identify challenges jointly with the campus and co-lead projects to turn this collaboration into new opportunities for learning, innovation and knowledge transfer that deliver impact.
Ana Ochoa, Global IT Barcelona Hub Manager de Nestlé and Co-Chair of the CBC: “We have made progress in integration, cohesion and engagement. We have created an environment of trust in which we share both challenges and lessons learned, and we are already beginning to see the results of this collective effort.”
Projects that turn collaboration into impact
Since its inception, the CBC has developed projects that connect the university directly with the challenges facing organisations and society, both now and in the future. Under the new mandate that began last year, the CBC has strengthened this model of collaboration and moved towards more active business involvement. At the General Council meeting, the co-leaders of the various projects—one representative from the companies and one from the campus—shared the main advances in each of the initiatives within the CBC’s four areas of work.
In education and talent, initiatives bring students closer to real-world professional challenges, preparing them to understand and navigate a constantly changing environment. At the same time, the campus and its partner companies are jointly developing new educational offerings based on identified needs. In innovation and technology transfer, several projects are entering an experimental phase following an initial period of joint work on artificial intelligence. The CBC also continues to explore responsible AI that serves people, while connecting companies’ innovation challenges with the research capabilities and expertise of the campus and the CBC ecosystem.
In networking and communication, the CBC is advancing the creation of shared knowledge and raising awareness of the ecosystem’s value. It does so through initiatives that pose new questions and encourage reflection on strategic and emerging challenges. At the same time, a renewed approach to communication aims to strengthen the Council’s positioning and raise the profile of talent, innovation, knowledge transfer and university–business collaboration.
Josep M. Santos, General Director of La Salle-URL and Co-Chair of the CBC: “We are operating in a new context, and this new CBC mandate also calls for a new way of working together. We must consider what each of us can contribute to our shared endeavour and combine our capabilities to create new learning environments, with approaches that prepare students for a changing reality without losing their curiosity or capacity to innovate. We need businesses to help us rethink the future of the university and, together, build a new way of being a university.”