Ljubljana is waiting to welcome the participants to the 30th EIBA Annual Conference. The fact that Slovenia became a new member of the European Union on May 1, 2004, makes the venue of EIBA’s 30th conference even more attractive. I am convinced that you will find Ljubljana an exciting historic city. It dates back to Roman times when it was known as Emona. As the conference falls within the Christmas season, the city will be nicely decorated and emanate a festive atmosphere. It is not all that unlikely that there will be a snow decoration. All in all, the EIBA Conference should provide you with an enjoyable occasion for productive meetings with former friends from the EIBA family and allow you to make new friendships and connections.

I am confident that you will enjoy your stay in Ljubljana and benefit a great deal from the academic part of the conference. We have put a lot of effort in designing a program that will be colored by the historic event of the enlargement of the EU and during which the challenges to new and old members, states and particularly firms will be discussed in more detail. The title: “Enlarged EU. Challenges to International Business and Management” should therefore be very appropriate. In planning the conference we aimed to maintain EIBA's traditional blend of social and academic activities and to combine them with the challenges of this particular event. The theme as well as the location attracted quite a high number of participants, as at the beginning of November already 250 had registered. We are looking forward to a pleasant and intellectually rewarding experience.

The theme of this year's conference offers a special opportunity to discuss the challenges of adjusting to the EU enlargement for companies and governments. The two plenary sessions are dedicated to this major theme. The Prime Minister of the Republic of Slovenia has promised to attend and open the first plenary session, entitled "Enhancing Competitiveness of the Enlarged EU”. He will present his assessment of the implications and challenges of Slovenian membership in the EU.

We are also privileged to inform you that Slovene EU Commissioner, Dr. Janez Potočnik, a colleague at our university and chief negotiator for Slovenia’s membership - now responsible for enlargement and proposed to become the Commissioner for Science and Technology in the new EU Commission – will also join us for the first plenary. As Science and Technology are crucial elements in strengthening competitiveness of firms and the ways in which they may respond to the challenges of enlarged EU, his intervention should be of special interest to the EIBA community. There is no need to introduce two other members of these plenary sessions. The two Johns - Dunning and Stopford - as they have been called - will present their views about these new challenges from a more institutional perspective (Dunning) and a more enterprise oriented - bottom-up approach (Stopford).

The second plenary, the EIBA Fellows session, is entirely dedicated to the business approach, addressing highly challenging issues such as “Can we build up global companies in Europe” at this point of time. We are very happy that the vice president of Nokia, Mikko Kosonen, is joining us to share his hands-on experiences together with Stojan Petrič, president of Kolektor, a very successful Slovene company, which was initially a foreign investment, but which became a successful, totally Slovene owned multinational firm about a year ago. Professors John Cantwell, John H. Dunning, Seev Hirsch and Reijo Luostarinen will, in lively interactions with the practitioners, enlighten us on this matter from a more academic point of view.

Many interesting papers are going to be presented in parallel and working sessions. We have received 230 papers for reviewing. Thanks to the very efficient track chairs and the enthusiasm of many reviewers we have been able to select 82 competitive papers, 105 workshop papers and 43 papers that will be presented during the poster session. We regret that some papers had to be rejected altogether due to some shortcomings in the analysis. Nevertheless these authors were invited to join us in order to be able to benefit from the conference and submit improved versions to the next one.

Thanks to the efforts of a large number of reviewers and particularly the track chairs, we were able to finalize the review process almost as planned. Therefore we would like to extend our sincere thanks to all reviewers, and particularly to the track chairs: Tamir Agmon, Jože P. Damijan, Philippe Gugler, Marko Jaklič, Rolf Jungnickel, Jorma Larimo, Maja Makovec, Lars Oxelheim, Marina Papanastassiou, Matija Rojec, Arnold Schuh and Alain Verbeke for their expertise and hard work. Without them this conference would not have been feasible.

The annual conference is also an opportunity to celebrate and initiate discussions on some specific topics. This year we are going to have quite a number of special events and awards. Some of the new awards cannot yet be disclosed and should be kept secret until the Gala dinner.

Special mention can already be made of panels commemorating particular events or contributions of great importance to the IB area. They range from celebrating 30 years of EIBA and of the first UN report of the group of eminent persons on multinationals, the 25 years of the influential Rugman’s book on multinationals, and Danny Van Den Bulcke’s contribution to International Business and EIBA at the time of his becoming emeritus professor. Participants such as John Cantwell, Yves Doz, John Dunning, Juan J. Durán, Robert Grosse, John Hagedoorn, Jean Francois Hennart, Jorma Larimo, Rajneesh Narula, Alan Rugman, Tagi Sagafi-Nejad, Karl Sauvant, Vitor C. Simões, John Stopford, Danny Van Den Bulcke and Udo Zander and many others, will make these events intellectually very exciting.

I hope that you will find the EIBA 2004 Conference both an enjoyable as well as an intellectually stimulating experience. As in previous years we will host publishers who will exhibit international business books and journals. This year as many as 9 publishers are going to join us to supply us with new and relevant reading materials.

I am looking forward to seeing you in Ljubljana on 5 December 2004. And don’t forget to use this opportunity to check out the conference tourist program that will allow you either before or after the conference to discover your host country. Slovenia is quite an interesting country where you can visit many interesting sites in a relatively short time. Tourist information is available on the web http://guests.fdv.uni-lj.si/eiba/.

Dr. Marjan Svetličič
EIBA President 2003-2004