Olga Loseva, Executive Director of Stockholm School of Economics, Russia:
- Stockholm School of Economics opened a representative office in St. Petersburg
in 1997. We were the first Western school on the Russian market of business
education and probably the first business school that opened Executive MBA
program in Russia. The first students graduated from the program in 2001.
Now we have about 800 graduates of MBA programs and more than 700 graduates
of other public and corporate programs.
Any organization that is the first to open a new market works in conditions
of uncertainty. Of course, in 1997 it was not very clear how demanded such
education would be. It was even more difficult to create a system uniting
standardized Western experience and stringent MBA requirements with needs
of an absolutely special Russian student – a person working on a quickly changing
market and hence oriented at changing of standards and search for unexpected
solutions. The main achievement of Stockholm School of Economics in Russia
is probably the fact that this has been done. To be more precise, it is being
done permanently: we are living, developing and changing together with the
Russian market that is not an abstract notion for us and but means today's
and tomorrow's problems of our graduates – representatives of the companies
with which we work. It is not simple never to lose contact with the growing
audience. Along with this, it helps us to react to changes quickly.