Vision and general principles
We aim high. Our vision as well as the general and specific principles are helping us reach our education and research goals.
As a leading business university we set global standards for research and teaching by promoting integrative thought, responsible action and an entrepreneurial spirit of innovation in business and society.
We offer talented and committed students a carefully calibrated range of courses at all degree levels from initial training to further education that satisfy the highest international standards and are recognised worldwide.
We challenge and encourage our students through educational excellence in an inspiring campus environment, transparent course structures and efficient administrative processes. Through the constant and innovative further development of our study programmes, we respond attentively to the developments and needs of both science as well as the global labour market.
We train our students to become entrepreneurs whose actions are informed by social responsibility, whose integrated thinking enables them to solve complex practical and academic problems in a structured manner and to communicate the results well, and who are able to harness social and cultural orientation skills.
The working environment we provide at the University of St.Gallen (HSG) ensures that academics who are committed to undertaking scholarship and who are interested in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches find here a great place for research and reflection that, thanks to our unfettered commitment to academic freedom, enables them to conduct research at the highest level of excellence.
We encourage our employees’ innovative entrepreneurial spirit through structuring our schools, institutes and study programmes in a way that helps in maintaining University’s interests and facilitates the achievement of its objectives. In the interest of achieving these objectives, we support initiatives by researchers, teachers and students.
Our integration of economic, legal, social and cultural perspectives, as well as international affairs allows us to conduct research that makes significant contribution to solving current and future economic and social issues. Through this research, we are globally perceived as an opinion leader in our analyses of selected issues.
We are committed to a culture of trust and cooperation between the students, academic staff, and the HSG administration based on mutual respect, flat hierarchies and a willingness to communicate in a non-bureaucratic manner. At the same time, we preserve a size that permits us to create our own clear profile, to pursue a sensible internal division of labour, and to enhance our position on the international academic market, while still allowing for personal encounters and simple structures.
We convey to our students the basic values of living and working collaboratively on the HSG campus by encouraging their extracurricular engagement alongside their education, and foster life-long ties between our graduates and the university with the active involvement of our alumni.
We pursue an active inclusion policy backed by the entire university when dealing with diversity. For this purpose, we ensure full equality of all members of the university regardless of their gender, religious and sexual orientation, social and ethnic origin, or their health needs and restrictions, with a focus on problem-solving approaches.
As a consequence of the global presence of our research, and the fact that we systematically enable both students and academic staff to gather study and research experience in foreign countries, the HSG makes its mark worldwide as a university that is highly attractive for students, teachers and researchers alike on an international scale.
We understand HSG’s cultivation and reinforcement of its roots in the city and the canton to be a central feature of our university’s identity. We therefore strengthen the region by increasing its international visibility and at the same time make ourselves available locally as a scientific and cultural resource. In this way, we safeguard St.Gallen as an educational location in the long term and contribute to the creation of economic and social value in the region.
As a state university, we are careful to create a secure financial framework that safeguards the development of our teaching and research quality. For this reason, besides our traditional cultivation of a sense of entrepreneurship, we develop financing models on the basis of which we can further open up and expand the range of our academic activities and strategic scope for development. In all this, we are fully aware of the special responsibility that, as a public institution, we bear for how we meet these challenges.