News

EADA Economics professor and director of EADA’s R&D+I area, Martin Rahe, who unfortunately passed away at the beginning of this year, received the topmost recognition for his longstanding professional career devoted to promoting research in the field of business and international economic development. The Society for Global Business and Economic Development (SGBED), made up of an international network of universities and business schools, of which Rahe was a cofounder, has set up the Martin Rahe Scholarship to award best papers in this field, the presentations of research results at SGBED conferences.

The first Martin Rahe Scholarship was handed out this July in an event held in the Italian city of Ancona and organised by Università Politecnica delle Marche. The awarded  paper is entitled “An evaluation of the effects of consumers’ cultural values  on self-congruence: the case of Apple in the Chinese market”, a research study carried out by Longfei Li, Claudio De Mattos and Nitin Sanghavi from Manchester Business School. The next scholarship will be handed out in 2016 in New York, given that the SGBED is a biennial event.

From left to right, Professor Nitin Sanghavi, from Manchester Business School, the Martin Rahe Scholarship winner, Dr. Ramon Noguera, EADA head of studies, and Professor Chinnapa Jayachandran, from Montclair State University, member of the EADA Research Advisory Board and president of SGBED.

Continuing Martin Rahe’s legacy

Dr. Ramon Noguera, EADA’s head of studies, travelled to Ancona, following the legacy left behind by Rahe in the SGBED and consolidating cooperation between the two institutions with a view to advancing research in the field of business. As Noguera pointed out, “the challenge on the one hand involves recognising excellence in research and on the other helping the SGBED to find the best papers that can benefit not only universities and business schools but society as a whole”. To this we need to add yet another objective: “Giving visibility to EADA’s commitment to the generation of cutting edge knowledge, a basic cornerstone of our business which supports the quality of our training programmes”.

In this respect, Dr. Ramon Noguera paid tribute to “Martin Rahe’s excellent work in improving EADA’s positioning in the research field”. Noguera had the opportunity to get to know Rahe in his last years, “a period in which he helped me to set down guidelines in this field which were at the same time ambitious and consistent with EADA’s idiosyncrasy and tradition”. He described the deceased professor as “a very Germanic man, in the best sense of the word, because he was a persevering struggler, committed to quality, internationalisation and a job well done, and with little patience when it came to lack of results” And “with an exemplary sense of humour” he added.