EFMD is delighted to announce the 2021 EFMD Excellence in Practice Gold Award Winners.

Since 2007, the EFMD Excellence in Practice (EiP) Awards have recognised outstanding and impactful client-supplier partnerships in the domains of Organisational, Talent, Leadership and Professional Development.

The 2021 Gold Award Winners in the following five categories are:

Organisational Development

Daimler & ESMT Berlin & Coverdale & Brand-and-Story
“Leading Transformation – Shaping the automotive transformation amidst turbulent times”

Oliver Fischer, CLO Daimler AG commented, “All who were engaged in co-creating ‘Leading Transformation’ are delighted and humbled to be one of the winners of the EFMD’s EiP Award. We aim to foster the deep learning required to shape the transformation of our industry – and learned how essential reimagining Learning&Development is.”

Talent Development

TRATON Group & ESMT Berlin & Mindset
“Enabling intrapreneurship and critical data consumption – A blended journey to enable business success after a merger and in times of Corona”

“TRATON and its brands Scania, MAN and VWCO feel very honoured to obtain this award. With Management Excellence we combined ESMT’s academic strengths with Mindset’s learning transfer platform Promote. It enabled us to create a unique talent program driving real behavioural change and generating factual business results. A true team effort!,” says Marianne Ekstedt, Head of Talent Management TRATON / Edward Boon, Program Director Mindset / Christoph Burger, Academic Director ESMT.

Leadership Development

Capgemini France & emlyon business school
“Making leaders – from training to transformation: pursuing a Promethean ambition”

“The ability for our leaders to develop trusting, effective relationships with their team members and across the organization and beyond is a key competitive advantage for Capgemini: ultimately, our core asset is people and only people. This is why, every year, we invest a lot of time and energy so that our leaders can grow, sharpen their people skills and slowly deepen their leadership effectiveness to create a corporate and social environment in which our talents at all levels will feel valued, recognized and developed. This is a strategic investment for us, but it is also the right thing to do; and this is something we spontaneously agreed upon when we partnered with emlyon executive education to jointly design and deliver Making Leaders across all business units in France back in 2018. The recognition this partnership is receiving today from EFMD truly is the result of teamwork, and as a team, with our partner, we have also grown and changed through the experience. This, perhaps, is one lesson we’ve all taken away from this leadership development initiative: no one is left by the side of the road, everyone involved is invited to partake in the change process and to grow alongside everyone else. We are most grateful to the EFMD for giving us a chance to share this and more with others, and also to learn from their own experience. Thank you,” commented Franck Baillet, Executive VP Learning & Development at Capgemini France on behalf of the Making Leaders team, (they know who they are).

Christophe Crozier Head of Learning & Delivery at emlyon executive education (custom programs) added, “Passion led us here” may well be my favourite quote, and there is no substitute to being recognised by such a leading institution in the field of higher business education as the EFMD when passion for our work has led us to create, jointly with our partner, an enduring learning & development adventure which really makes an impact not only on the participating leaders, but also on their teams, their clients and the managerial culture of the organization. It is with heartfelt appreciation that we celebrate this EiP award with our partner Capgemini today; if anything it raises the bar even higher for our future endeavors for, as is true in most other fields, we never stop learning. Indeed, to echo Franck’s words, it has been a learning experience for our team as well (professors, facilitators, coachs and staff) and today it is a team success that we share. Congratulations to all the L&D teams that worked hard to be selected for this highly-prized award. Well done.”

Professional Development

Audi UK & Alliance Manchester Business School (University of Manchester)
“Audi LEAD Programme: Future-proofing the Audi UK dealership network”

Commenting on their recent success, Karen Boulton, Network People Business Partner, Audi UK stated, “Audi UK is delighted to have received the Gold Award for our Audi Leadership Development Programme. The success of this development programme is based on a fantastic working relationship with Alliance Manchester Business School, who understood our brand strategy and values, and the importance of developing our leaders in our retail network. It’s wonderful to see how our leaders have grown and the value they are delivering to their businesses and our brand.”

Dr Lee Douglas, Client Director and Audi LEAD Programme Director (Operations), Alliance Manchester Business School | The University of Manchester added, “We are absolutely delighted to have been awarded the EFMD Excellence in Practice Gold Award.  At AMBS we pride ourselves in designing programmes that deliver real business benefit as well as positive individual outcomes.  This award places these dual individual-business impact outcomes at the core of its judging criteria.  As such, we are genuinely thrilled to have received the award.  It provides formal recognition that the programme we have delivered in partnership with Audi represents best practice in corporate education globally.  We are extremely proud.”

Social and Environmental Impact

Live for Good & CEDEP Global Executive Education Club
“Entrepreneurship for Good – Unleashing the potential of youth to impact and change the world”

Christophe Conceicao, Associate Director of Live for Good commented, “It is a true honor to receive the prestigious EFMD Award for our work with CEDEP. We have always had a deep commitment in helping this new generation of positive leaders to change the world, and partnering with CEDEP has allowed us to go further in the academic excellence of our program. We are very proud to have supported more than 200 social businesses thanks to committed partners and passionate people.

This award is a great recognition of the work done together and gives us a fantastic opportunity to involve even more partners in this wonderful learning journey.”

“CEDEP is delighted to receive this wonderful award together with our partner Live for Good. Our collaboration over the past 4 years has been an enriching experience and seeing the many young social entrepreneurs succeeding and making a sustainable and positive impact on our society and the environment is truly gratifying.

This journey has allowed us to create a unique ecosystem of engaged and determined entrepreneurs, to experiment new ways of learning and build a growing community of positive leaders.

CEDEP has been in the Executive Learning space for 50 years and the collaboration with Live for Good has yielded many unusual connections between the classical world of major industry players, and the generation of social entrepreneurs, thus creating new alliances, insights and opportunities for everyone,” added Thomas Hinterseer, Director of CEDEP, Global Executive Education Club.

Jan Ginneberge, Senior Advisor at EFMD Corporate Services added, “This year’s exceptional set of impactful partnerships turned out to showcase some interesting underlying trends in organisations such as the ambidexterity of preparing a next normal while keeping up the current practices at maximum quality levels – and coping with covid-19 restrictions during this transition.  And the attention to ecological and social impact of businesses which was not only the main focus of a considerable cluster of cases – and awards by consequence – but also a consideration in quite a number of other cases.”

EFMD is eager to provide visibility and support to all professionals in the L&D sector. The winners will be awarded during the next EFMD Executive Development Conference on 21-23 September 2021.

We would like to thank all of the applicants as well as the jury members for their successful cooperation and hope to receive further exciting cases next year. We are pleased to note the continuously growing quality of applications. Apart from the Gold Award winners, there were Silver Award winners and finalists selected from all of the entries.

Next submission deadline: 15 March 2022

For submission guidelines and expression of interest, please visit our website. If you have any questions or would like further information on the EiP awards, you can find out more in the EiP Overview Brief, or please contact Florence Gregoire.