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RSM on its way to impact and engagement

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Societal expectations of the role and purpose of business schools have changed as understanding of the world’s greatest problems has grown. The world faces hugely challenging times in which complex and inextricable ‘wicked problems’ – including hunger, food security, poverty, inequality, climate change and sustainability – are being addressed with a sense of urgency.

But in acknowledging, understanding and working towards the alleviation of such monumental problems, it must also be understood that their very scale and complexity prevents any single societal entity from achieving meaningful success. Rather, it is only with collaboration between organisations and across sectors, and with common intent and a powerful sense of purpose that real impact becomes achievable and sustainable.

Collaboration between society’s infrastructural pillars – government, business and civil society – is not just essential for solving these wicked problems; it is also critical for identifying and defining the goals we set ourselves for the betterment of all. For real change to be made, we must work together.

RSM’s approach to making impact and creating engagement is considering it a process: we refer to the process of engagement and we defined pathways for producing impact. For this reason, RSM’s strategy, which positions the school as a force for positive change in the world, stresses three activity areas: impactful knowledge, transformative education and purposeful engagement, and values long-term effectiveness over short-term gains.

€471 million

In 2019, RSM had an estimated financial impact of €471 million in the Randstad region.

270

RSM alumni work in 270 senior and leadership positions in 158 local companies with 500+ employees.

Transformative education, purposeful engagement and impactful knowledge represent the three pillars of how RSM can help business achieve meaningful and systemic change for societal transitions and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Wilfred Mijnhardt, policy director RSM

Our impact strategy is about creating meaningful societal impact

At RSM, we believe that in order to contribute to resolving societal challenges, our activities should lead to meaningful, lasting and positive change.

  • Contribute to understanding and supporting to the societal challenges defined by the UN’s Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs).

    We have embraced the SDGs as a set of goals for RSM because they focus on positive impact and are widely recognised and used in other organisations, making co-ordination and collaboration effective and efficient.

  • Support national and regional economic development.

    As a Dutch business school that is partly funded by the state, RSM has an obligation to return value to the Netherlands and the Randstad region. We believe that economic development goes beyond just stimulating economic growth; it also denotes innovation, inclusive prosperity and well-being.

  • Advance the understanding of science and the value that science adds.

    We are a scientific institution so academic research is our foundation. We encourage the acceptance of scientific methods for business and management and societal life in general.

Our theory of change

We achieve our impact ambitions through three pathways:

  1. Thought leadership in our areas of expertise. Faculty, staff and students of RSM have expertise across the full range of topics related to business and management. They also have a mindset for science-based positive change. By communicating to and working with external stakeholders, RSM members provide thought leadership that can inspire people and provide the scientific basis for, and influence managerial decision-making in, the pursuit of the SDGs and of economic development. Rather than just reaching out to peers, RSM academics involve other stakeholders to collaborate to first find mutually interesting research topics, and then determining relevant research questions at the start of the project. Our research centres are good examples. Their centre of gravity can be inside RSM or external to it. The point is that a community is created – consisting of academics as well as non-academics – around a certain topic or field of knowledge. Together they create knowledge and disseminate it, and from there develops an informed narrative.
  2. Transformative education leads to the formation of human capital needed in today’s labour market. Our programmes help our students to find employment and to grow into positions of leadership in the Randstad, the Netherlands and abroad. The competencies and attitudes of RSM graduates enable and motivate them to support the implementation of the SDGs. We bring the world to our students by guest lecturers, who talk about the latest developments and thinking in their organisation, sector, or in their particular area of expertise. Students get involved in consultancy projects and observational projects in which they truly participate in the real world. Through our post-experience programmes, we support continuous workforce development and inspire and motivate participants to serve as a force for good. Through our I WILL initiative, which supports our impact for over a decade, we provide a platform for students, staff and external stakeholders to make a statement about, and a personal commitment to, a vision of the world they would like to see. We invite and encourage collaboration with people and organisations to co-create programmes that are tailor-made for our students on campus as well as for a much wider audience of students online who follow our free open online courses from wherever they are in the world. We develop programmes, courses and materials that we co-build with others. Our part-time PhD programme has grown substantially since it began in 2015. Working executives develop new knowledge from research as they develop their academic skills while researching their own business activity or industry.
  3. Purposeful engagement leads to innovation, transformation and entrepreneurship. RSM stimulates innovation, change and entrepreneurship, all of which can be used to implement the SDGs, strengthen the economy and create trust in science. We are an international business school with an alumni community that reaches all over the world, which means we have global opportunities to further fulfill our potential for engagement and impact. Anything involving RSM and the outside world naturally includes our alumni. Alumni are a very specific and special audience when it comes to engagement. They are closely connected to the school and so invariably have an interest in what we do and what we’re striving to achieve. They are a natural first point of contact for engagement. Throughout its 53 years of existence, RSM has grown an alumni community that has grown to more than 50,000-strong in 2024 and is active worldwide. As well as absorbing their new knowledge and skills at RSM and taking it out into the world with them, they are using it to spread the ethos of positive change wherever they work.

The results of the first Business School Impact System (BSIS) Impact assessment exercise conducted by EFMB Global gave us insights, for the first time, about our impact and embeddedness in the Randstad region of the Netherlands. The report shows that in 2019 the financial impact of RSM in this local ecosystem amounted to €471 million, and some 270 RSM alumni occupy senior leadership positions with close to 160 local companies employing more than 500 people. Our recent AACSB reaccreditation further leveraged our impact narrative by describing key the activities we do to create change.

The BSIS Impact Report has been a clear step towards a sense of self-awareness in which the School understands and builds on the significant impact it has regionally. 

Engaging with stakeholders and creating impact is nothing new, of course. The rich history of the School began in 1970 with support and funding from multinationals including ABN AMRO, Shell and Unilever with the purpose of providing the Netherlands with a new kind of business manager, trained to both analyse problems and develop practical solutions to them. This positive, solutions-based approach has always been integral to the RSM spirit.

Just over half a century later, our challenge now is to manage the transition towards becoming a fully impact-led institution, to ensure the knowledge we create and the relationships we build genuinely and measurably make a positive difference.

Read on to find out about our journey. These pages will guide you through our pathways, showing inspiring cases that demonstrate how RSM achieves making impact by initiatives that contribute to alleviating today’s societal challenges.