Dr. Christine Demen Meier brings over 20 years of entrepreneurship experience in hospitality, including the creation, implementation and management of new hotel and restaurant concepts. As Managing Director, Dr Demen Meier is based in Les Roches Switzerland and oversees the branch campuses in Spain and China. In this exclusive interaction with Deepshikha Singh, Managing Editor, Higher Education Review magazine, Dr Christine Demen Meier highlights on his journey from being a professor to an entrepreneur and how millenials should approach entrepreneurship.

• You hold more than 20 years of experience in the Hospitality Industry as well as F&B Sector. Tell us about your journey so far.

In 1968, my parents built a small hotel and I discovered this universe while I was still in a high school. Immediately I knew that this would be the area in which I wanted to work. My diploma in hotel management obtained à l’EcoleHotelière de Lausanne, I started an entrepreneurial career in F&B by buying a first restaurant in Geneva. 6 years later we had 5 restaurants with different concepts from a typical Swiss restaurant to a dietetic restaurant through a large brasserie. We also bought a small hotel with 50 rooms during this period and renovated it. The second part of my career was mainly in catering and was focused on the creation and management of an establishment offering upscale catering and accommodation. This 20-year period allowed me to acquire many skills and to test some of my ideas. During this period, I was very involved in the employers' association of catering in Switzerland (GastroSuisse) to encourage innovation in the management of catering and to share my experiences. I also had the opportunity to carry out several consulting mandates for hotel and restaurant projects abroad. It was after having identified that I had to consolidate the relevance of my recommendations that I decided to carry out my doctoral thesis to deepen certain theories and methods of analysis. This is why I decided that the subject of my thesis would be the sustainability strategies of independent catering in Switzerland. This resumption of my studies naturally led me to teaching.

Women entrepreneurs in the hotel and catering industry are not legion, but there are more and more of them; they are clearly moving towards sustainable businesses and they want to give meaning to their activities.

As part of my teaching at the Ecole Hotelière de Lausanne for almost 20 years, my entrepreneurial spirit pushed me to create a department around three research chairs in food & beverage. I got funding from companies active in sectors related to catering such as mass distribution and multinationals in the food industry. Once these 4-year projects closed, I participated for the Glion hotel school in the creation of entrepreneurial programs and also agreed to develop an institute around the food ecosystem for the Applied Science University of Fribourg. Following the development of these projects, I was appointed to the board of Innosuisse (the Swiss innovation agency) as a specialist in the service industry from among the 21 members selected. To conclude to keep the contact with the hospitality industry I am member of the governing board of an Hotel of 65 rooms on the shores of Geneva lake.

• While starting your professional journey as a women entrepreneur, what were the major challenges encountered by you?  Which women leader has been your motivation through your journey?

When I started my life as an entrepreneur, it was not the fact that I was a woman that caused me problems but the fact that I wasonly 21 years old and practically no experience in management. I had to demonstrate my skills to my 40 collaborators, all older than me and very professional. I did not have a model in my first steps as an entrepreneur but on the other hand I had a mentor who was in fact one of my collaborators and who gave himself the mission to transmit to me all his experience of the restauration. In my second life, my academic life, I had two models the first was a woman who was in fact the President of the foundation board of the Ecole Hotelière de Lausanne and the second was my thesis director, a humanist and expert in an incredible number of domains. Now it's my turn to play the role of mentor.

• How do you evaluate the current landscape of hospitality and F&B sector across the world? What changes in the hospitality world are most evident in the recent period?

The current landscape of the hospitality industry is not a homogeneous industry either for accommodation or catering. It is a very fragmented industry even if some big players seem to dominate the markets. The concepts and brands are varied and very different from each other. But to be successful they must respond to the major trends in our society.

These trends can be summarized in a few major areas

- Time: lack of time, flexible schedules

- SPEED: immediately, no patience

- LOCAL: search for authenticity, short circuits, seasonal products

- HEALTH: prevention, youth, nutrition, organic, sports

- THE ENVIRONMENT: awareness of environmental protection and the impact of human activities on the climate, corporate social responsibility

- DIGITIZATION: connectivity, applications to make life easier, access to all information, booking and online shopping

- search for shared and or personalisation experience

We are also seeing the emergence of independent and new companies that offer solutions to allow players in the hospitality industry to understand the needs of their customers, respond to them and continue to adapt and develop new ones, products and concepts.

• Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the hospitality industry has been severely impacted. How do you think the industry will roll back to normal once the pandemic ends? 

The pandemic has changed the world. Many businesses had to slow down or temporarily closed their businesses due to the pandemic, especially in the hospitality industry. This situation can be viewed as a crisis, or an opportunity for the hospitality industry.

Leisure tourism with a focus on proximity and local destinations is the first to resume and with it all the different forms of travel, accommodation and catering. On the other hand, business tourism should take longer to return to its pre-Coronavirus level. The solutions that had to be implemented by companies or organizations to avoid travel and allow trade between countries will probably be retained in the period after the virus or at least partially, which will slow the recovery of business tourism.

Here too, the players present on this market will have to reinvent themselves and offer solutions that meet the new expectations of this sector. Most of the time these service providers are in big cities and will nevertheless remain at the center of a large market in number and offering prospects.

• How has the course of hospitality education varied through all these years? What changes you would like to witness in the curriculums of hospitality and food service education industry? 

Hospitality education has followed a very great evolution during the last 20 years. When I started teaching it was about imparting knowledge in very formal lessons and we were measuring knowledge learned and memorized. Then new methods of 'learning' appeared and teaching by the method of inverted classes or by subjects took more and more place in the courses. Currently, innovation being at the centre of our teaching, our methods integrate many interactive forms which complement each other. We evaluate skills and no more knowledges.

With the outbreak of COVID-19 causing many educational institutions worldwide to close temporarily, many educational institutions including Les Roches had to turn to distance learning. Digital textbooks accessible 24/7, content accessible via online platforms, videoconferences, and online assessments are among the solutions implemented to cope with the current situation. To keep a very tailor-made and personalized approach, online Q&A sessions for small groups exchanges have also been implemented several times a day to ensure students from all different time zone can participate.

• The hospitality industry has always been booming and there has been a constant demand for highly qualified industry professionals. However, do you think in a post-Covid world we will witness a fall in this trend?  

Digitalization has been foreseen as a trend shaping the world but now it has become a necessity with the COVID-19 crisis being a catalyzer of the digital transformation in the hospitality world.

Digitalization is one of the most significant trends in Hospitality education. To provide our students with the best tailormade experience, we make sure to embrace the best of both, the ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ worlds.

Innovation being at the centre of our teaching, our methods integrates many interactive forms which complement each other; skill based learning is the top priority now.

• How do you encourage your students to be a part of hospitality and F&B sector? Can you share the success stories of some of your students? 

We encourage entrepreneurship and innovation in all our courses and in our Innovation Hub. It is an ecosystem bringing together all stakeholders in the world of hospitality: solution providers, established companies and start-ups, academic institutions, local and international hoteliers, users, technology companies, entrepreneurs and hoteliers, students. Our students are involved in workshops, projects, product tests and more.

• How much scope do women entrepreneurs have in hospitality sector? What is your message to the women leaders across the world that are trying to succeed in this male-dominated industry? 

Women entrepreneurs in the hotel and catering industry are not legion, but there are more and more of them. They are clearly moving towards sustainable businesses and they want to give meaning to their activities. This is also why many do not seek growth at all costs but rather sustainability and demonstrate an important social responsibility. They also tend to create businesses that are more traditional than men and very rarely focused on technology.

My advice would be to explore the use of technology to increase the sustainability of their businesses for the benefit of society and foster smart growth.

• How do you envisage the future of hospitality education? What major innovations can we expect to see in the fields of creation, implementation and management of new hotel and restaurant concepts?

Technology is rising in popularity in the education world, especially Artificial Intelligence (AI). According to Statista (2020), AI will undergo a massive growth in market value, going from 22.59 billion USD this year to 118.6 billion in 2025. This technology enables educators to analyze the performance of students to provide them with a tailored academic program in terms of content, pace and level of mastery. In the education system, it can also be used to ensure the integrity of the assessments. Artificial Intelligence is also currently used in hospitality industry through conversational interfaces such as chatbots, messaging platforms, and virtual assistants.

Among others, Virtual Reality (VR) is a technology that has the potential to transform education massively in the future. It has proven itself as an impressive learning tool that can make teaching fun and engaging. Instead of teaching students the history of ancient Rome from a textbook, they can just put on the VR headset and experience Rome for themselves. For instance, at the brain and behaviour laboratory of the University of Geneva, researchers have the possibility to use an immersive virtual reality system to investigate complex behaviours in realistic scenes. The system is able to manipulate visual, auditory, and olfactory sensations while tracking the eyes, head, and body movements of the participant. Controlled by researchers, this tool can give a user a full immersion to a virtual world.

• Personally, what has been your take away from this Pandemic?

The importance of relationships between people. The identification of the essential elements of life. But above all the importance of technology in our lives and its positive but unfortunately also dark sides not to be underestimated. Innovation and technology must be controlled by democratic authorities in order to preserve everyone's free will.