-Reshma Ravishanker (Bengaluru)

Renaud-Coulon: global network

Annick Renaud-Coulon is a transnational expert on corporate universities and the Paris-based Founder and Chairwoman of the Global Council of Corporate Universities (GlobalCCU). She defines corporate universities as “educational structures based in private and public, commercial and non-commercial organisations, to implement the business strategies of the organisation and to embody the corporate culture in its stakeholders”. Promoted in 2005 in France, GlobalCCU operates in five continents. In India, Aditya Birla, Anand Automotive, Essar, Infosys, TMTC and TVS Motor have been conferred awards by GlobalCCU.

Newspeg. The 2023 GlobalCCU Forum was convened for the first time in Asia, in Bengaluru on May 17-19. The international event celebrated the 2023 GlobalCCU Award winners and ten-year anniversary of the global contest.

History. An alumna of the faculty of law in Reims University, Renaud-Coulon began her career in an industrial company, as director of its training department. She then set out on her own as an independent consultant. As part of her research on ‘Best Practices of Decentralisation,’ she studied and visited several companies in Japan, South Korea, Switzerland, and the US. In the millennium year, she suo motu conducted the first extensive survey/study on the corporate university phenomenon titled ‘Corporate Universities, Corporate Institutes, International Comparison and Evaluation’.

Her 18-month research culminated in an 800-page three volume book, featuring 70 monographs from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, France, India, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Russia, USA, Spain, South Korea, Switzerland and the UK.

Subsequently in 2002, she launched the European Club of Corporate Universities, a community of practice designed for learning and development corporate university professionals. “It was the time of increasing globalisation, where corporate education professionals were redesigning their learning organisations to develop multicultural skills to operate in new countries in which their parent organisation were investing. That’s how GlobalCCU was born in 2005,” recalls Renaud-Coulon.

In 2008, she succeeded in organising the first GlobalCCU Forum in France at the Veolia Campus and at Sorbonne University on the subject: Make your Corporate University a lever of your Corporate Responsibility, an initiative that attracted delegates from five continents.

Since then, GlobalCCU has developed a range of services. Among them: the GlobalCCU Awards, GlobalCCU CU Certification; GlobalCCU Brand Certification; GlobalCCU Masterclasses and the GlobalCCU Membership Community.

Direct talk. “Like traditional universities, corporate universities are important spaces for enlightened education for judgement and thinking that can help people understand our human and environmental interdependence around the world. Both are complementary. While education systems devote all their efforts on the essential development of people from a long-term perspective, corporate universities have to deliver impactful learning and development solutions for people, business, society and the planet in a shorter time.” says Renaud-Coulon.

Future plans. Next on the cards is the launch of the GlobalCCU Membership community’s second programme in September/October with the active support of corporate universities, particularly in India, Indonesia, and Brazil. “After our very successful GlobalCCU Forums in Bengaluru and previously in Sao Paulo, I am very pleased to see our corporate university community growing in the Global South.” she says.