About Us

CEU Business School Initiative for Regulatory Innovation (CEU IRI) is a research center that aims to assess the current state, as well as to explore directions for continuous improvement, of economic regulation in countries characterized by relatively young structures of modern governance. Bringing together business leaders of regulated enterprises, reform-oriented regulatory officials, and academics distinguished by their deep understanding of a policy and political context of their respective countries, the aim of IRI is to become a unique transnational research network that will significantly strengthen a link between CEU and some of the leading business and public organizations.

The current geographic focus of our research is on Central Europe. Our findings, however, are relevant for countries well beyond that region. After all, Central Europe epitomizes in many ways governance challenges faced (or soon-to-be-faced) by many nations around the globe. Central Europeans have generally managed to establish functioning democracies and the rule of law. In that, they successfully completed a journey from broken to workable governance. What lies ahead, however,  is an arguably more unpredictable task  –  advancing from workable to outstanding, or truly value-creating, government. 

While academics and practitioners know a lot about the former segment of that journey, they offer scarcely any models for an accelerated progression on the latter one. Indeed, it is unlikely that simple reliance on ‘Western standards’ will guarantee the success here. Nations aspiring to perfect their state structures need to look for innovative ways of achieving this goal. IRI’s mission is to be the ‘clearing house’ for such innovation.

While we engage in our research with an open mind and willingness to listen, we structure our research design around a few preliminary hypotheses. Most importantly, our approach will consist of looking at regulatory policies and institutions through a prism of value creation. Remote as it may be from the reality of many Central European countries, the idea of a Value-Creating Government serves as a useful benchmark, both for exploratory and for prescriptive analysis. In addition, such analysis allows us to draw on the unique managerial expertise of our Faculty Colleagues, whom we intend to engage closely at various stages of our research. 

To make our initial exploratory research design as clear as possible, we have identified seven essential capabilities that regulatory institutions need to acquire in order to be able to add value to the society they are supposed to serve. These capabilities, alongside the corresponding real-life situations and problems, are listed in the figure below.