Bertil Hedberg

AIESEC RECORDS
Original founding member of AIESEC in 1948

CONTRIBUTION
He was one of the leading forces in the foundation of AIESEC. This was when the organisation was so small that the work of one person had even more importance than it has today and who knows where we would have been today without Bertil Hedberg.

During the summer 1945, Mr Hedberg went on a traineeship to Helsinki, a city which badly affected by the World War 2. He realised that this kind of traineeship exchange could be done much easier than when you had to arrange everything on your own.

Mr Hedberg knew that some kind of organised traineeship exchange had been going on before World War 2 and he had also heard ideas about the foundation of something called AIESE. During a meeting with the student association presidents of the Nordic business schools, he was appointed as the Nordic representative in the agreements about this organisation.

Bertil Hedberg proposed the change of the name to AIESEC since there not only were students of economics but also business students.

POST-AIESEC SUPPORT
Bertil Hedberg has not had much contact with AIESEC since his active years and was for some strange reason not even invited to the 50th anniversary during IC´98 in Stockholm. When the Stockholm School of Economics celebrated its 90th anniversary, a man came in to the AIESEC office and introduced himself as Bertil Hedberg. He worked with AIESEC thereafter, and gave talks on AIESEC history which gave inspiration to the members then.

ORGANISATIONAL CONTRIBUTION
After finishing his studies, Mr Hedberg worked with trade negotiations in the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs and lived abroad in The Netherlands and in Indonesia.

When he returned to Sweden, he started working for the Swedish company, Perstorp. At Perstorp, he worked with technology transfer and in this field he later started his own company, Hedberg International.