Thursday March 18 was Academic Day during CoreNet Global’s first ever Corporate Real Estate Week.
To start it off, CoreNet Global announced the formation of the CoreNet Global Learning Foundation. The foundation will serve the profession through professional development, content, research, conferences and networking groups. As a charitable organization, it is dedicated to supporting and encouraging educational activities, innovative research and future talent development, to advance and elevate corporate real estate profession.
And, by now it seems like tradition, but it wasn’t that long ago that CoreNet Global launched the Academic Challenge, a global competition among university teams, in which students create solutions to real world corporate real estate challenges.
Launched in 2015 with the goal of attracting new talent and raising awareness of corporate real estate as a profession, this was the 10th Academic Challenge competition. Since it began, the Academic Challenge has involved more than 2,000 students at 300 universities in 74 countries.
This year’s teams were from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, New York University, University of Denver and the University of Washington.
The teams were challenged by their fictional company’s CEO to create strategies that align the global real estate portfolio with the renewed focus on the corporate commitment to save, protect, and restore the natural environment by better managing the resources consumed in the company’s operations while navigating in a post-pandemic environment.
The teams were charged to develop a proactive strategy that identifies the aspects of the company’s global real estate portfolio which contribute to climate change and prepare strategies to mitigate and replace them.
The winning team, from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, presented a ten-year timeline to set up a green score and internal carbon market and reach the net positive category by 2030.