New Centre of Excellence for Competitiveness Management

NEWTON University is building a Centre of Excellence for Competitiveness Management to support leaders in identifying, creating, and sustaining their company’s strategic advantage.

Competitiveness management includes analysing global and local trends and their impact on specific business models, turning ideas into profitable products, and building organisational resilience against external shocks.

According to research by McKinsey & Company (2023), only organisations that manage to ‘institutionalise innovation’ will survive and grow. By acquiring these competencies, leaders learn how to prevent their companies from stagnating and how to raise new managerial stars directly from practice.

The issue of competitiveness has been foregrounded in recent months by the difficulties many firms face in capturing value from AI investments. PwC reports that around 75% of AI’s economic gains are being captured by roughly 20% of companies. For many, the costly investments in emerging technologies are yet to yield substantial benefits in terms of growth or productivity.

The new Centre of Excellence serves as a hub where top academics meet with senior managers, investors, and talented students from the Business Leadership programme. In practice, this means:

1. The End of Loneliness at the Top: Leaders no longer have to face their decisions alone. The Centre offers a safe platform for sharing experiences (peer-to-peer mentoring) and solving complex challenges.
2. Knowledge Transfer: Insights from market and competitiveness research flow immediately into corporate practice.
3. An Incubator for Innovation: An environment that systematically generates sustainable growth by linking data, strategy, and execution.

Education in competitiveness management and the establishment of centres where this knowledge is concentrated is designed for everyone who wants to actively shape tomorrow’s business, going beyond just reacting to what others have invented.

Anna Plechata Krausova, Chancellor of NEWTON University, says:

“What represented a ground-breaking innovation yesterday is the common standard today and may be obsolete tomorrow. In such a dynamic environment, simply being ‘better than the competition’ is no longer enough. We must systematically manage our competitive advantage, anticipate trends, and build ecosystems that foster sustainable growth. This is exactly what Competitiveness Management is about. And it is also the main reason why NEWTON University is not just creating another study module, but building a fully-fledged Centre of Excellence.”

Acting as a hub for connection, the new centre supports NEWTON’s commitment to offering management education with practical relevance. The centre forms a bridge between student experience, academic theory and research, and insight from professionals outside the higher education sector.

It builds on a foundation of experiential learning shared across the university’s programmes, fostering innovative thinking and personal growth through hands-on projects, case studies, and internships that complement in-class teaching with real-world learning experiences.