The intention is to increase our understanding of current problems and how best to navigate our way into the future. Research on firm organization and its historical evolution, on how markets develop, on strategic choices and on historical successes and failures, all contribute to our store of experiences. It thus increases the flexibility and preparedness among currently active CEOs, middle managers, economic journalists and other actors.

EHFF has created an effective organization for the development of business and financial history research, offering a world-class research environment. The organization is an important node in a domestic and international network of scholars and research institutes that, utilizing a cross-disciplinary approach, studies the business environment in an ever changing world, the transformation of the economy and the role of the individual and the firm in these developments.

Our work is also intended to improve the quality of instruction, especially within economics oriented degree programs. We believe it to be important that economists currently being trained to face an unknown future come to understand that it is not possible to act simply on the basis of theoretical arguments and models that might be obsolete tomorrow.

Like business history, economic history is an inductive, empirical field of knowledge that analyses the real world and its evolution, first by describing it, then by discovering repetitive phenomena and finally by extracting parallelisms and patterns. But it is not a theoretical. Indeed, perhaps its most important task is to test various economic theories and thereby contribute to the development of new theoretical conceptions of reality.