The “Driving Functional Expertise” program offered by Evonik in cooperation with the IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland, is geared to the most junior group of Corporate Talents, the Emerging Leaders. Besides obtaining a first-class education at IMD, the participants experience real-life entrepreneurship by supporting start-up companies in consulting assignments or contribute to the Group's growth strategy by working on new business development projects from Evonik’s business lines. Moreover, this program is a platform to create a network which many of our corporate talents and executives are benefiting from for their entire career.

Although the possibility to meet in person or spend time together was missing, last year’s program itself did not lack in quality. The Emerging Leaders at Evonik were meeting and working on projects virtually over the globe and in the end had extraordinary results. That crises do not only bring challenges, but can also lead to completely new ideas, was shown in the final event. Since a regular closing ceremony was out of the question, the talents came up with the idea to have a virtual cooking night where they were cooking their favorite meal in breakout rooms with fellow participants. All recipes and photos were then collected into the “Emerging Leaders 2020 Cookbook”.