""The Role of Stakeholder Collaboration in Business School Survival: The Case of ESCP Europe, the Oldest Business School in the World (1819-2019)"

In 2019-2020 ESCP Europe celebrates its 200th anniversary as the world’s oldest business school with 50.000 alumni located in over 100 countries. Started in October 1819 by two silk businessmen, the school initially vowed to endow France and Europe with an elite of businessmen capable of straightening the continental economy after the Napoleonic wars. To achieve this goal, the school was supported by industrial circles and some of the most important French industrialists. During the 1820s, the school underwent changes of management because its directors died rapidly, and they did not have time to appoint a successor. The latter had great difficulties to run the school, which was about to close its doors in 1830. During this foundational era, the school survival depended a lot on the lives of its directors. When the school became a family business in 1830 its legal status was changed to involve its stakeholders in its management. In 1869, the school was purchased by the Paris Chamber Chamber of Commerce.
In recent literature, several works have investigated how, at the present time, business schools are confronted with their numerous stakeholders’ expectations: to ensure the participation of teachers-researchers, to ensure the control of public authorities, to ensure their reactivity in front of the expectations of companies, to adjust their strategies in order to face competitors (Engwall, Kipping, & Üsdiken, 2016; Frost, Hattke, & Reihlen, 2016). However little scholarship exists on how business schools’ stakeholders have collaborated in the long term to ensure the evolution of those educational institutions. This is not an insignificant question because business schools need to know how to ensure that their stakeholders collaborate to sustain their development. Our paper argues then that the ways business schools’ stakeholders have collaborated in the past allowed their survival and influenced their training.