Masterclass | Global Competition in a Multipolar World: The New Silk Road from Marco Polo to Xi Jinping

Join us on the 14th June for a IE Business School Masterclass on "Global Competition in a Multipolar World: The New Silk Road from Marco Polo to Xi Jinping", co-organized with Porto Business school and taught by Professor Fernando Cortiñas - Professor in both institutions. 

Where: Porto Business School, Avenida Fabril do Norte 425,  4460-314 Senhora da Hora 

Agenda: 

• 18h20: Welcome 

• 18h30: The Silk Road 

• 19h50: Cocktail  

About the topic  

The Silk Road, the world's oldest and most emblematic international trade route, has been revitalized in the 21st century through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a $1 trillion infrastructure project aimed at connecting China with the rest of the world. This "wallet-based diplomacy" is a strategic move by China to become the global leading power by 2050, surpassing the United States. The session will explore the past, present, and future of the Silk Road, including its physical communication network that linked the East and West for over 2,600 years, and the escalating rivalry between China and the United States on multiple fronts with implications for global dynamics. 

Professor Fernando Cortiñas Biography 

Fernando Cortiñas (Buenos Aires, 1962) is an Argentine-Spanish professional with more than 35 years of international work experience in leading multinationals and as a professor in leading academic institutions in Europe and America.  

He graduated with honors and various awards as a Bachelor of Business Administration and Public Accountant from the Universidad Católica Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1986), and obtained an MBA from Harvard Business School (Boston, 1992).  

His professional career has had a double journey, corporate and academic.  

At a corporate level, Fernando's career has been focused mainly on the field of marketing, sales and international business development, which led him to live in Germany, the United States and Spain, working for companies such as Deutsche Babcock, McKinsey, KSB- Itur, Televisión Española and the Telefónica group, where he held managerial and executive positions in several group companies.  

With a strong teaching vocation, at an academic level he has developed an international career spanning more than three decades, with a focus on Marketing and International Business, mainly at the IE Business School (Madrid, Spain), where in 2020 he was awarded the prize for “Best Professor in Masters Programs”.  

He is also a visiting professor at other distinguished institutions such as the University of Porto (Oporto, Portugal), Porto Business School (Oporto, Portugal), Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Santiago), and Universidad Católica Argentina (Buenos Aires).  

He has courses on Coursera, with more than 30,000 students, he practices journalism as a hobby in various written and radio media in Spain and the Americas and develops activities as a speaker and consultant for different companies.  

Polyglot (in addition to being bilingual in Spanish and English, he speaks German, Portuguese and Italian), a tireless reader and traveler, he lives between Madrid and Buenos Aires, and has visited more than a hundred countries around the world.  

Specialist in the Silk Road, he began to give conferences on the subject in 2014, and has visited almost all the countries that comprise it several times over the last eight years.  

Register now and don’t miss it!