Enriching the World Through Education

Having started 37 years ago, DEİK’s journey continues without a pause through its “business diplomacy” activities aiming to increase investment and trade between countries, under its seminal vision, led by the President of the Republic of Türkiye, with the support and coordination of the Ministry of Trade.

I would like to mention certain significant events as an example of our recent activities, in addition to meetings with delegations from different countries, meetings with Ambassadors, Consuls General, and Commercial Counselors, which are now prevalent occasions.

At the EU-Türkiye High-Level Business Dialogue Meeting held in Istanbul, which was attended by Mehmet Muş, Minister of Trade of the Republic of Türkiye, and Olivér Várhelyi, European Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement, hosted by TOBB (The Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Türkiye) and the Association of European Chambers of Commerce and Industry (EUROCHAMBERS), we expressed our views on issues such as the changes and effects caused by Covid-19 and the Russia-Ukraine war in the world, the need for further mutual cooperation that has arisen as a result of such issues, visa problems between Türkiye and the EU and the modernization of the Customs Union.

We evaluated cooperation opportunities with the Minister of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic in Ankara on the occasion of the 1st JETCO meeting, and at the roundtable meeting at our DEİK headquarters together with the guest Minister and accompanying businesspeople the next day.

As an indicator of the importance we attach to the diversification of energy resources in our country, we came together with Fatih Dönmez, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources of the Republic of Türkiye, and the German Federal Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Action at the 4th Turkish-German Energy Forum in Berlin and the week before that, we met with our Minister of Energy and Natural Resources and the Minister of Energy of the Republic of Azerbaijan Republic at the 2nd Türkiye-Azerbaijan Energy Forum in Istanbul.

In September, we held our 12th DEİK/TAIK Türkiye Investment Conference Roundtable in New York with the presence of our President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, our Ministers, Ambassadors, and valuable business world representatives. Within the scope of the conference, we held our Turkish Technology & Entrepreneurship Investment Panel at Meta under the moderation of our Business Council Chairperson Mr. Erdem and we returned to our country with significant outputs.

Before our US program, we carried out intense business diplomacy traffic in Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia as part of the official visits of the President of our Republic. We are rapidly maintaining our business diplomacy activities through countless events.

Being aware of the fact that we are going through a period in which concepts constantly changing, as well as the intensity of such a pace, we make great efforts to adapt our business world to this change. Ideas put forward as “right” until a short time ago are undergoing rapid change, and what we considered wrong yesterday may be “right” today. We need to understand well that what is presented as right may not be right for every country and event, or for all times.

I am not sure if Covid-19 was artificial or by nature, but in this process, the concepts that became more meaningful in our lives were supply chain and digitalization, and the definition of green transformation has changed following the Ukraine war. On the other hand, at the point we have reached today, the concept of logistics expressed by distance and proximity has now begun to be referred to as “accessibility”. Now we lean on glocalization, instead of globalization or localization. We realized that the supply chain is more significant than we thought it was. During the pandemic, we have seen that those who do not disrupt the supply chain like Türkiye are on the winning side. We also started to talk more about secure trade, namely “Friend-Shoring, apart from free trade. We were discussing resource diversity, yet we used to work with large suppliers for economies of scale from a competitive point of view. A significant semantic shift is taking place in the meaning of green deal or green economy.

And of course, education is also evolving in a different direction. From now on, we are in a process where we will work more on education models suitable for the needs of this period, rather than returning to the old normal ones and using the previous methods.

It is well-known how vital information and networking are in today’s world. As DEİK, I would like to state that we are always ready to use our infrastructure of 151 Business Councils spread all over the world for university-industry cooperation.

Mandela, one of the leaders of freedom, said, “Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.” We will keep maintaining our activities with the aim of changing the world by making it better through education together with DEİK and our Higher Education Business Council (EEIK).

 In this issue of our Business Diplomacy journal, where we discussed the subject of “Education in Türkiye” in detail, we made our cover interview with Prof. Dr. İrfan Gündüz, Chairperson of DEİK Higher Education Business Council, and in the evaluations with valuable businesspeople and scholars, we included opinions on significant issues such as education and artificial intelligence technologies, independent learning, and developments in healthcare education following the pandemic process.

Enjoy your reading, and stay safe.

Nail OLPAK

President of DEİK