The last few months have seen a number of conferences and seminars co-organized with fellow business schools. These “meetings of minds” provide essential opportunities to collaborate in the production and sharing of knowledge.

ESSEC, HEC and INSEAD joined forces on March 9 to stage the 28th edition of an annual Marketing conference at ESSEC’s Cergy campus.
A highly varied program comprised contributions from all three organizing schools, including from ESSEC Professor Arnaud De Bruyn (assistant professor, Marketing Department) on the theme “Customer Acquisition Strategies in Direct Marketing”, as well as the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania), ESSEC’s academic partner the University of Mannheim, and Stern School of Business (New York University).

Papers at the conference covered issues such as Path Research, Technology-supported Impression Management, and the Creation and Structure of the Commercial Internet.

The first Statistical Workshop in the series of the ESSEC-HEC Research Workshops on “PLS (Partial Least Squares) Developments” took place at ESSEC in Cergy on May 15. The workshop addressed the theme of PLS Path Modelling in the presence of a group structure covering methods, applications and software issues.

The workshop started with a lecture given by Professor Vincenzo Esposito Vinzi, one of the latest additions to the ESSEC Faculty and a member of the Department of Information Systems and Decision Science, on the basic foundations and the most recent research developments of PLS Path Modelling, a component-based statistical approach allowing the estimation of a causal theoretical network of relationships linking latent complex concepts.

Morning lectures were given by Jörg Henseler (Nijmegen School of Management, The Netherlands) and Michel Tenenhaus (HEC) whilst the afternoon session was given over to a distinguished panel of 4 speakers:

• Christian Ringle (Universität Hamburg, Germany),
• Silvia Squillacciotti (Electricité de France, France),
• Laura Trinchera (University of Naples “Federico II”, Italy),
• Tomàs Aluja (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain).

The workshop enjoyed the participation of 86 people, from both universities and private companies, representing 10 different countries and 3 continents.

The second workshop in the ESSEC-HEC series will address the theme of Kernel Partial Least Squares Regression and will take place in November at the HEC School of Management.