The world is changing rapidly and sharply. Population growth along with the aging of many nations, climate change, the integration of some and the disintegration of other societies, the exponential intervention of technology in our lives, the scarcity of natural resources for a more numerous but more sustainable society, the challenges democracies and totalitarian temptations, new forms of access to information and new forms of study, pose new challenges to our companies, our families and the State.
Quick changes require ISEG to adapt, transform itself, and help those who want to take a learning path with us, to change too and be agents of change. ISEG has to change, change what it investigates and the way it teaches, to help economic agents to change. Deep down, continue to do what you've done throughout these 111 years of life: Understand when the time has come to change the medicine, because the patient is no longer the same.
Only an eclectic school that challenges itself can respond to this social need. That is why this School is not and will not be a madrasa of any economic or political current, being rather a diverse collective that challenges and overcomes itself.
Faced with such challenges, ISEG assumes itself today as a school where its academics and students, supported by its body of non-teaching staff, are the basis of teaching and research based on ethical principles, innovation and entrepreneurship, where, on these, grow 3 pillars: sustainability, internationalization and service to society.
The noble mission of investigating and educating lies at the base of our building, where people are located. ISEG wants to be a school that seeks knowledge to teach it and not a school that only teaches what it already knew. That is why its definition of mission states the aim of creating knowledge, in the first place, and then transmitting it.
The urgency of the changes that society imposes on us, namely regarding the fulfillment of the 17 sustainable development goals, make sustainability one of the strategic pillars that guide the choices of our research, teaching and even service to society with the ambition to to become a European center for concatenating and catalysing knowledge in the field of sustainable development.
The other two pillars are internationalization and service to society. ISEG is today an open platform that has not lost its function of trying to provide answers to the Portuguese with regard to their needs in the area of economics and management of organizations. But it wants to do it in an increasingly international way at the level of students, teachers and even employees. Therefore, its members intervene and reflect in different ways on Portuguese and foreign society. They make proposals. Participate in civil society. It is a School that is open to outsiders and opens to the outside. It is so, and so it must remain. It's in our DNA and they will have a guardian of that heritage in me.
Against this background, I am certain that the coming years will be fascinating!
João Duque
Full Professor of Finance
Chair
ISEG Lisbon School of Economics & Management
Universidade de Lisboa