There are four vectors of cooperation between enterprises and educational institutions essential for the development of the economy: generation of content innovations for educational programs, management reorganization, creation of income generation centers for universities and academic staff training.

This is what Olga Dergunova, Deputy President and Chairman of VTB Bank Management Board, GSOM SPbU Director, spoke about at the session of Eastern Economic Forum "Human Development in the Far East: The Key Asset Is People".

Over the last years, business has switched the focus of work with the education field and has begun to build more meaningful, thoughtful interaction with universities regarding the issues of educational program content development. According to Olga Dergunova, today companies not only finance universities, but also introduce their employees to Program Advisory Boards.

This is exactly what happens at the Graduate School of Management of SPbU: corporations and Business School's partner organizations participate in the creation of learning content, and this is the first thing essential for proper development.

The second one is adoption by universities of business process management systems applied at the corporate sector and implying, among other things, measurable performance indicators and result monitoring.

The third vector is new income source generation. Usually executive education programs appear to be such a source for universities.

GSOM SPbU combined its research base and practical experience of experts from the leading companies and created a unique educational product at the nexus of theory and practice: a range of online courses convenient for adaptation to certain business tasks. In spring 2022 the Business School opened the Center for Executive Education Online Programs to train line and middle managers.

Ordering learning services for their employees, companies can go further and implement their academic partners' experience to their own programs. For example, VTB Bank, the Business School's strategic partner, developed the course "Large Infrastructure Projects in Russian Federation Regions: From Idea to Implementation" tailored for representatives of government agencies, development and business institutes. The final module of the program took place in July at GSOM SPbU Mikhailovskaya Dacha campus. According to Olga Dergunova, such programs are necessary so that the government and businesses investing in territories could be confident with the well-prepared employees.

The fourth vector of education field development is creation and expansion of academic staff skill improvement programs.

"Frankly speaking, only over the last several years we began our continuous cooperation with professors and started to create educational programs for them to learn how modern business models are organized, how decisions are made and other skills that we teach to our employees. For the next few years, the task, as we see it, is to invest in educational programs for academic staff in new modern formats, which will help to create new training practices," — said Olga Dergunova.

For this kind of work, GSOM SPbU opened the Teaching Excellence Lab (TEL) in Business Education that develops up-to-date methods of teaching in the digital environment, including hybrid classrooms, and shares this expertise with other higher educational institutions and corporate universities.