The SEV Center of Excellence in Creative Leadership (SEV CECL) was established in July 2018 at Alba Graduate Business School thanks to the founding donation of SEV (The Hellenic Federation of Enterprises).

Through its world-class research and stimulating dissemination, the SEV CECL aspires to be a force of excellence that will spread the values and practices of creative leadership in the Greek society and the rest of the world.

Its mission is to advance the generation and dissemination of cutting-edge knowledge about creative forms of leading in the third and fourth decades of the 21st century.   

The SEV Center of Excellence holds an annual series of stimulating discussions with distinguished researchers and scholars in order to disseminate to students, executives, and the larger society cutting-edge and management-relevant knowledge about creativity and leadership. 

Starting 2022, the theme of the Center is evolving with an orientation towards creative leadership as it is now expressed in the context of Digital Transformation and innovation.

Establishing at Alba a Centre of Excellence about the interplay between creativity and leadership stemmed from three main factors:

The growth and prosperity of business organizations and the larger society in Greece in the next two decades require the masterful transformation of mindsets, practices, and structures towards more creative and flexible ways of thinking, learning, working, and collaborating. Creative forms of leadership can play an immensely positive role towards this direction.

The interactive effects of globalization, the network economy, and artificial intelligence will continue to make older, low-creativity forms of executive jobs obsolete. In the next two decades, the intersection of creativity and leadership is likely to define the core work and the core professional identity of our students and alumni.

Since 1992, when it was founded through the joint initiative of SEV and the Hellenic Management Association, Alba’s mission has been “to educate visionary leaders of tomorrow who will act as agents of change and help shape the future business world by pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge related to the management of business organizations, while making that knowledge relevant to practitioners. Generating and disseminating knowledge represent our twin objectives.”
A quarter-of-a-century later, we can best serve our ever-inspirational mission by focusing a substantial part of our research, teaching, and executive development on the interplay between creativity and leadership and its transformative impact on the work and the world of the future.

Since 2009 and during an extremely adverse decade for the education, the economy, and the society in Greece, Alba adapted boldly and proactively by creating springboards of research and teaching excellence in the areas of creativity and leadership.

This effort has resulted in a rich stream of research activities, academic courses, and executive development programs that today permeate the identity and operations of the School. Our work in this area has received international recognition of the highest caliber.

The SEV Center of Excellence supports the efforts of resident Alba faculty and visiting fellows in performing world-class basic research in the areas of creativity and leadership. Our basic research output comprises books, journal articles, and conference presentations.

In 2019-2020 the Center’s applied research focused on the theme of Best Practices of Creative Leadership in Greek Organizations.

Creative leadership plays a pivotal role in the creation and evolution of adaptive organizations. The purpose of the Center’s 2019-2020 applied research cycle was to identify the best practices of creative leadership in Greece. The qualitative research was conducted between November 2019 and April 2020 in a sample of 20 companies. Building upon the extant international organizational literature, the study examined in details the skills, competencies, and processes related to three distinct contexts of creative leadership: Facilitative, Directive, and Integrative. Consistent with the Center’s mission of spreading the values and practices of creative leadership in Greece, the final report summarizes the main research findings about the manifestation of the three different expressions of creative leadership among Greek organizations. The final research report can be accessed here .                          

In 2020-2021 the Center’s applied research examined the theme of Creative Tradition as a Source of Competitiveness and Innovation.

Starting 2022, the theme of the Center is evolving with an orientation towards creative leadership as it is now expressed in the context of Digital Transformation and innovation.

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