GSK Biologicals Chair in Strategic Sourcing and Procurement

The GSK Biologicals Chair in strategic sourcing and procurement was founded in 2011 as a joint collaboration between GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals, the leading vaccine division in the GSK Group and Louvain School of Management, the leading management school in Belgium. The foundation of the chair underlines the criticality of strategic sourcing and procurement expertise in today‘s competitive landscape. The overall aim of the chair is to foster research and education in the strategic sourcing and procurement domain fostering the profession to continue its transformation into a value creating and strategic profession. Therefore the chair establishes a unique international think tank addressing always the latest research topics in strategic sourcing and procurement.

This think tank provides a unique knowledge exchange opportunities for practitioners and researchers. Its research is guided by theoretical rigor and practice relevance at the same time. Moreover, the chair devotes itself to bringing the education in strategic sourcing and procurement onto the Belgian education landscape combined with a strong expertise in Executive Education. With beginning of 2012 the chair offers a Master specialization open to Masters in Business Engineering and Masters in Management students to educate and develop leading executives with expertise in the strategic sourcing and procurement domain.

“Innovation is key in healthcare and GSK is a leader today thanks to 2 main factors. Our workforce is passionate, committed and proud of its contribution to healthcare throughout the world. Developing vaccines with unique qualities, challenging more diseases, improving the efficacy of current vaccines, inventing new ways of achieving our goals so that vaccines are made available as quickly and as widely as possible and daring to take radically different path from the competition are principles which made us into a leading player. We are sure that this Chair in Sourcing and Procurement will reinforce our talent development thanks to its objective to access to highly qualified graduates with a unique university training in sourcing and procurement from LSM, access to state of the art methods and tools in sourcing and procurement through workshops and conferences, access to relevant research for implementation in firms and access to a unique international network.

The second factor is partnership. Scientific, academic and economic partnership underpinning the activities of GSK Biologicals. The quality and range of its vaccines are the fruit of an approach that is based on the sharing of information and expertise, both internal as external.

We are more than delighted to be involved in the GSK Biologicals Chair in Procurement and Sourcing and we are convinced the expertise, the unique learning model as well as the programme the Chair offer will constitute a network of ideas on the managerial challenges in the health industry.”

Christophe Weber, President Designate GSK Biologicals