European Retail Academy

The European Retail Academy (ERA) has as its scope to act as a virtual platform and as an initiator of workshops/seminars/conferences to bring more transparency about retail-research and retail-education at universities or universities of applied sciences. Further on ERA acts as a catalyst for sponsors who would like to contribute to reach a high level of trade (retail/wholesale)-education

ERA promotes the international transfer of know-how between business on the one side and universities at the other side. Among these are:

• survey about trade-cathedras and their academic degrees
• the exchange of research-results
• joint research
• the exchange of professors and students between universities as well as with business companies
• to assist the Bologna-process
• to promote benchmarking in retail education
• to work in interdisciplinary academic groups as a retail-competence-center
• to help to establish a cosmopolitan world
• the transparency about Trade Fairs and Trade Congresses
• supporting journalists specialized in retail/wholesale

ERA’s origin is Europe: it is uniting East and West - never the less ERA aims to be a bridge to other continents and their retail/wholesale - experts too. Insofar ERA is very happy that in the beginning of 2009 it has even 37 members outside of Europe.

Trying innovative steps ERA started from August 2005 onwards to add to its mission as a traditional retail research unit additionally a homepage ‘AgriBusinessForum (ABF)’. For retail industry as the demand side for the academic human resources global food sourcing becomes more and more important in terms of food security/quality programs/good agricultural practice. The ABF link among the sponsors of the ERA-homepage aims towards more interdisciplinary discussions “from stable to table” involving the agribusiness into retail and vice versa.

In July 2006 again the mission of ERA was enlarged by another two links: Urban Revitalisation and Forum Art Business. Especially the EU-project “Vital Cities” as well as the International Conference of Comparative Studies in Harbin/China shows that there is a great demand to bring in academics with town-planners, retailers etc.Therefore the link “Urban Revitalization” was established.”Forum Art Business” could be seen in close relation with this: Vital Cities are always attractive for art. The quality and quantity of art business are belonging to the benchmarking of cities.

In summer 2008 a special link for “Environmental Retail Management” was developed to underline the importance of the environment in decisions of retail management. An “environmental flow chart” is monitoring, benchmarking and clustering the activities of the total supply chain.

In autumn 2008 the first intercultural student workshop started on board of the Tall Ship “Kruzenshtern” sailing from Kaliningrad/Russia to Bremerhaven/Germany with participants from the Czech Republic, Germany and Russia.

In January 2009 the link “Call for Papers” was launched to stimulate the multinational exchange of ideas and speakers in the field of international research.