Professor Bernd Hallier is the “designer” of the European Retail Academy (ERA, www.european-retail-academy.org), a virtual platform that brings more transparency about retail-research and retail-education and promotes the international transfer of know-how between business and universities. Since 1985 Managing Director of EHI Retail Institute (www.ehi.org) based in KÖLN, GERMANY (responsible especially for the business units ORGAINVENT, FOODPLUS and ERA) Dr. Hallier – an outstanding personality well understood and supported by his distinguished wife, Ingeborg and daughter, Marie-Cristin in his passion for transparency of the market and trends discovery, for promotion of the benchmarking in retail education and for one of the most internationalized markets, the Art market – is also the Chairman of the Advisory Board of EuroShop (world’s largest capital goods show in the retail sector) and Member of the Board of AIDA Brussels (Dr. Hallier was in Bucharest in 1998 on the occasion of the International Congress of AIDA and, in 2006 on the occasion of The 2006 International Conference on Commerce …organised by the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest ).