This year’s edition of the International Conference “Management, Leadership and Innovation towards a Better Changing World” (MLIBCW), organized by the Romanian-American University (RAU) on the 2nd and the 3rd of November 2017 – in partnership with International Air Transport Association (IATA) Eastern Europe, Romanian Airport Services and VARNA University of Management (Bulgaria) and sponsored by Gray Line Romania, Romanian Airport Services, Students Experience, Afri-Cola, DoubleTree by Hilton and BLK – gathered both international professionals from academia and specialists from the business environment.
The distinguished Keynote Speakers – Aykut Korkmaz (Athenee Palace Hilton Bucuresti), Maya Ivanova (Varna University of Management), Antonio Tassone (Lufthansa), Ismail Albaidhani (United Nations), Razvan Pirjol (Bucharest Tourism Board), Robert Komartin (Amadeus) and Alexandru Bogdan (TheMiNE.io) – delivered talks of real interest, keeping the audience engaged, confirming experience and expertise, the discussions and debates being lively and challenging within the context of approaching significant issues such as: the future trends in hospitality and the innovative strategies of airline companies, the importance of continuous human resources training in order to adapt to a changing world, the impact of the technological development (with a main focus on the future trends in the travel industry but also the use of bitcoins and blockchain technology), interculturality, marketing strategies in the 21st century or internationalization of higher education.
Dedicated to bachelor and master students, as well as high school pupils – who attended the interactive workshops “Tour guide vs. Travel Blogger” and “Yesterday’s Boss, Tomorrow’s Leader” moderated by Raluca Muresan (Trip to Romania) and Madalin Mancila (Concediu.com) – the second day of the conference captured participants’ interest across all event lifespan.
The MLIBCW Conference is continuing to build on the progress made through capitalization of scientific research results achieved in the tourism and related areas, stimulating technological development and innovation efforts for the applicability of scientific research results, and strengthening the collaboration between the academic research environment and the economic environment by promoting interdisciplinary research. This year’s MLIBCW Conference reinforced its key message, challenging participants to come up with great contributions.
We appreciate that there is now clear evidence of the current heavy competition and the increasing disruptors’ pressure on the relevant market (the existing business models being disrupted by digitization), which has made it necessary for incumbents to focus more on services marketing, on distribution and merchandising, on shopping experience, on customer and brand experience, while enabling the Digital Supply Chain by using new technologies at different points of their value chain, and not anyway but in new, different ways.
