MGIMO’s Strategic Press Conference in TASS

MGIMO’s Strategic Press Conference in TASS

17 October 2019

October 17, TASS Information Agency hosted a press conference on the new MGIMO Strategy. The event was attended by the University’s Rector Anatoly Torkunov, BCG partner Anton Stepanenko, and MGIMO’s Vice-Rector Artem Malgin. Moderating the discussion was Mikhail Gusman, TASS’ first Deputy Director General, as well as a member of MGIMO’s Boards of Trustees and Overseers.

The conference opened with Anatoly Torkunov outlining the key priorities  of current MGIMO’s development  — further enhancement of its business education, deepening synergy with top Russian universities in implementing cross-disciplinary programs (the University is already offering joint degrees with MIPT, MISIS’ Mining Institute, Kuban and Stavropol Agricultural universities, the University of Physical Education), tapping into the vast and largely untapped potential of MGIMO’s applied linguistic schools, as well as upgrading its IT infrastructure.

Anton Stepanenko, BCG partner and leader of MGIMO strategy development team, spoke about some crucial ingredients of the strategy concept in the making. “Together with MGIMO, we launched the process of elaborating a new development plan for the next five years. For us, this is cooperation in the proper sense of the term, because we, at BCG, believe that only the work of the entire team will allow for the necessary transformations. At the outset of the project, we conducted our own investigation to figure out where MGIMO's unique niche lies. We are seeking to set an even higher bar for an already solid University," Stepanenko said. He also noted that the strategy identifies the key areas of “the leap forward”  bolstering the unique competence formula of a typical MGIMO graduate  that of an "organizer-communicator”; a phased revision of BA and MA curricula with a more pronounced focus on professions to gain in demand in the future; rebalancing the research program towards some of the most cited areas of scientific inquiry worldwide; as well as conceiving of and putting in place a coherent integrated online learning and management support system.

"One of the objectives of crafting a new strategy is to put together the huge amount of diverse changes that we began to effect six or seven years ago. We need to understand where we are competitive not only in Russia, but also in the international market. For MGIMO — these are not sheer words. We have long been vying with foreign universities for the best students," added Dr Malgin. He also stressed that since the early 1990s, the University has undergone an impressive expansion in both thematic scope and scale — from 2,500 the number of students has increased to some 10,000. In conclusion, Artem Malgin pointed out that the development of the strategy also involves designing a conceptually new financial model reflecting the realities of a modern University operating under the circumstances of the digital era.

— See the MGIMO web-site for russian version