13 September 2018. Using illustrations and graphic elements, text and typographic building blocks, Academic GIFts come into their own on any smartphone or screen. The series includes topics from all departments of the University of St.Gallen. Each small piece focuses on a theme from the HSG disciplines management, finance, economics, culture, law and society. The Academic GIFts are being created in cooperation with the Zurich company Zense - Reframing Complexity and Andri Hinnen, himself a graduate (SIM-HSG) of the University of St.Gallen. The series is supported by the Vice-President's Board (Research & Faculty) at the HSG. The first three Academic GIFts are now online. They deal with hedge funds, healthy team leadership and how much self-confidence leaders need to successfully run a business.

Academic GIFts – Episode 1
Hedge Funds: how to predict their performance?
Prof. Dr. Florian Weigert is Assistant Professor at the Swiss Institute of Banking and Finance (s / bf-HSG). Together with Vikas Agarwal and Stefan Ruenzi, he examines which KPI investors can use to cleverly invest in the most successful hedge funds. Hedge funds remain a mystery to the majority of financial market participants, according to their study, and predicting future fund performance is a challenging task. In their study, they are the first to combine historical self-reported hedge fund data with disclosed equity portfolio data to define a new KPI, which they term the Return Wedge (RW). It helps predict hedge fund performance more reliably.

Academic GIFts – Episode 2
Team Boundary Management: How to protect teams against being overwhelmed
Dr. Ulrich Leicht-Deobald is a researcher at the Institute for Business Ethics (IWE-HSG). He deals with the management of new forms of work. In a study conducted in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Heike Bruch from the Institute for Leadership and Human Resource Management (IfPM-HSG) and Jakob Mainert from the COSA Institute Luxembourg, he explores the question of how teams can avoid the acceleration trap. Team boundary management refers to a team's ability to establish and maintain psychological boundaries to the outside world. Conclusion: Teams with strong team boundary management are much less likely to fall into the acceleration trap. With three strategies, they can protect themselves against becoming overwhelmed: First, they should steer clear of unimportant external information. Second, they should check the legitimacy of external tasks and, thirdly, they should stand in for each other when individual team members become overwhelmed.

Academic GIFts – Episode 3
Overconfidence: How much self-confidence does a CEO need?
Prof. Dr. Charlotta Sirén is Assistant Professor for Strategic Entrepreneurship. Together with Barbara Burkhard and Prof. Dr. Dietmar Grichnik from the Institute of Technology Management and Marc van Essen, University of South Carolina, she examined how much self-confidence leaders need in order to run their businesses successfully. They analysed 182 studies from 16 countries. Conclusion: Over-confidence in CEOs can also have a positive impact on business performance – especially when innovation is the company’s strategic priority.