About us

In the context of the liberal constitution of our society and economy, the question of what should be understood by desirable progress is becoming more acute. On September 17, 2004, around 50 years after the founding of the institute, around 150 former and current employees of the IFB came together for the anniversary conference in St. Gallen. The focus was on the following question: What do former and current employees of the IFB consider today, 50 years after the institute was founded, to be central issues and future challenges in management? Inspired by two impulse contributions by Professor Dr. Peter Ulrich and Dr. Beat Kappeler has led to extremely diverse, controversial and highly committed discussions on current topics such as dealing with uncertainty and change, corporate responsibility towards society, social justice, progress and innovation through constant scientific achievements.

The IFB was also striving for the future to make a valuable contribution to the analysis and design of the challenges and trends for entrepreneurs and managers through the research, teaching and further education program as well as through close cooperation with companies.

Today, the IFB research activities are aimed at corporate strategy and governance, organization theory, corporate acquisitions and alliances, as well as systems methodology and competition theory.

Of central importance was the development of international relations, primarily in the Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian and Asian regions.

The anniversary conference marking the 40th anniversary of the IFB in 1994 was dedicated to the topic of "Successfully managing entrepreneurial change". Exactly this topic should also become the formative program of the IFB, as far as the development of the institute is concerned in the following years. Of central importance was the development of international relationships, primarily in the Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian and Asian regions. In 1995, various American colleagues were invited to St. Gallen, while the directors of the institute themselves traveled to Japan to establish contacts with Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. Similar contacts were established with the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the Warwick Business School (University of Warwick, Coventry/UK. These contacts could be used in a targeted manner in the following years to attract several leading international scientists for guest professorships and guest lectures at the HSG in St. Gallen, which represented an enormous enrichment for research and teaching.

Intensive cooperation with foreign colleagues through guest professorships and guest lectures had meanwhile become an integral part of the research culture and the range of courses at the IFB, just as vice versa, lecturers from the IFB repeatedly took on guest professorships at Anglo-Saxon universities, e.g. in 2000 at the Sloan School of management in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Since 1998, the "Annual Report of the IFB" has also been published as an "Annual Report" in both German and English. In 1999, a fifth of all new publications by IFB researchers were written in English. And since 2000, due to the progressive globalization of business and science, the strong focus on the German-speaking area in all three fields of activity of research, teaching and further education has increasingly receded into the background at the IFB.

Even then, Hans Ulrich postulated the development of a management philosophy that, beyond purely economic objectives, must contain fundamental statements on social responsibility. In the years 1979/80, the 25th anniversary of the IFB was the main focus and gave reason to look back on the successes of the past few years. The institute can look back on more than 1,000 successful consulting assignments, hundreds of conferences and seminars with more than 10,000 participants. The institute's own publications amounted to over 200 titles, books and brochures, which were distributed in approx. 200,000 copies. Licensed editions appeared in French, Italian, Spanish and Dutch. The institute's services were well received both in the Swiss economy and abroad. The institute's own research in the areas of personnel management, corporate organisation, finance and accounting, decision-making methods, operations research and corporate policy has received international recognition, but especially the independent research approach of a system-oriented management theory.

In keeping with the tradition of the IFB, it was a major concern to carefully put the new management approach - the idea of ​​management as complexity management - into practice. After just a few years, the Institute for Business Administration was founded under the entrepreneurial direction of Professor Dr. Hans Ulrich on the HSG's largest university institute in terms of staff and finances: in 1964 it already had nine lecturers and thirty other employees. At that point in time, the annual budget exceeded 3.2 million Swiss francs, whereby the expenses could largely be covered by the income generated by the institute itself. At the end of this first epoch, around 400 personalities and companies belonged to the development society, which supported the institute with significant annual contributions. The consulting activity under the direction of Professor Dr. Hans Siegwart, who took over this managerial position from Dr. Hans Ulrich Baumberger had taken over, and which later under the direction of Dr. Ernst Nauer, developed a lively activity in the areas of organization, planning, human resources and accounting. Increasingly, the advice was also used by foreign clients. In 1964, the ten-day business seminar was held for the first time under the direction of Professor Dr. Robert Staerkle, which still plays a central role in the IFB's range of seminars. From 1967, the activities of the institute shifted more to the areas of training and further education as well as research.

The aim of the institute was a close integration of scientific methods and practical, application-oriented questions. After the end of the war, what was then the St. Gallen Graduate School of Economics and Business began a long-lasting phase of growth and differentiation. Strong and sustained economic growth as a result of post-war reconstruction led to rapidly growing student numbers in business administration. At the same time, efforts were increasingly being made in Switzerland to systematically anchor the subject of business administration and the more technically oriented business sciences at Swiss universities. Today's University of St. Gallen was founded in 1898 as a commercial academy by the former St. Gallen textile entrepreneurs, with wise foresight, but also out of direct self-interest in the qualified education of their descendants. Accordingly, it had an unmistakable practical focus and developed into the St. Gallen HHS Commercial College in 1911. It was not until 1938, forty years after its founding, that it received the right to award doctorates, which is essential for a university. The supreme body of the Institute for Business Administration was - as is still the case today - the Executive Committee, which was made up of professors from the Business Administration Department, a representative of the funding company and the Institute Director. The original research content included corporate organization, human resources, quantitative methods (accounting, data processing, operations research), corporate planning, sales, corporate management and corporate policy. At the forefront of the publication activities of the IFB were concise publications that were aimed directly at interested practitioners.